end of the southward journey.  In a yard behind the stockade there were wagons and tents made ready for the departure.  Shipments were commonly made by the firm once every two months in a vessel for New Orleans, but the present lot was to march overland.  Whether by land or sea, the destination was Natchez, where the senior partner managed the selling end of the business.  Armfield himself was “a man of fine personal appearance, and of engaging and graceful manners”; and his firm was said to have gained the confidence of all the countryside by its honorable dealings and by its resolute efforts to discourage kidnapping.  It was said to be highly esteemed even among the negroes.[29]

[Footnote 29:  E.A.  Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States (Boston, 1836), pp. 135, 143, 150.]

Soon afterward this traveler made a short voyage on the Potomac with a trader of a much more vulgar type who was carrying about fifty slaves, mostly women with their children, to Fredericksburg and thence across the Carolinas.  Overland, the trader said, he was accustomed to cover some twenty-five miles a day, with the able-bodied slaves on foot and the children in wagons.  The former he had found could cover these marches, after the first few days, without much fatigue.  His firm, he continued, had formerly sent most of its slaves by sea, but one of the vessels carrying them had been driven to Bermuda, where all the negroes had escaped to land and obtained their freedom under the British flag.[30]

[Footnote 30:  Ibid., pp. 145-149.]

The scale of the coasting transit of slaves may be ascertained from the ship manifests made under the requirements of the congressional act of 1808 and now preserved in large numbers in the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress.  Its volume appears to have ranged commonly, between 1815 and 1860, at from two to five thousand slaves a year.  Several score of these, or perhaps a few hundred, annually were carried as body servants by their owners when making visits whether to southern cities or to New York or Philadelphia.  Of the rest about half were sent or carried without intent of sale.  Thus in 1831 James L. Pettigru and Langdon Cheves sent from Charleston to Savannah 85 and 64 slaves respectively of ages ranging from ninety and seventy years to infancy, with obvious purpose to develop newly acquired plantations in Georgia.  Most of the non-commercial shipments, however, were in lots of from one to a dozen slaves each.  The traders’ lots, on the other hand, which were commonly of considerable dimensions, may be somewhat safely distinguished by the range of the negroes’ ages, with heavy preponderance of those between ten and thirty years, and by the recurrence of shippers’ and consignees’ names.  The Chesapeake ports were the chief points of departure, and New Orleans the great port of entry.  Thus in 1819 Abner Robinson at Baltimore shipped a cargo