nevertheless risen.[13] In 1754 George Washington paid L52 for a man and nearly as much for a woman; in 1764 he bought a lot at L57 a head; in 1768 he bought two mulattoes at L50 and L61.15_s_ respectively, a negro for L66.10_s_, another at public vendue for L72, and a girl for L49.10_s_.  Finally in 1772 he bought five males, one of whom cost L50, another L65, a third L75, and the remaining two L90 each;[14] and in the same year he was offered L80 for a slave named Will Shagg whom his overseer described as an incorrigible runaway.[15]

[Footnote 12:  P.A.  Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, II, 88-92.]

[Footnote 13:  North Carolina Colonial Records, I, 693.]

[Footnote 14:  W.C.  Ford, George Washington (Paris and New York, 1900), I, 125-127; Washington as an Employer and Importer of Labor (Brooklyn, 1889).]

[Footnote 15:  S.M.  Hamilton, ed., Letters to Washington.  IV, 127.]

Scattered items which might be cited from still other colonies make the evidence conclusive that there was a general and substantially continuous rise throughout colonial times.  The advances which occurred in the principal British West India islands and in Virginia, indeed, were a consequence of advances elsewhere, for by the middle of the eighteenth century all of these colonies were already passing the zenith of their prosperity, whereas South Carolina, Georgia, San Domingo and Brazil, as well as minor new British tropical settlements, were in course of rapid plantation expansion.  Prices in the several communities tended of course to be equalized partly by a slender intercolonial slave trade but mainly by the Guineamen’s practice of carrying their wares to the highest of the many competing markets.

The war for American independence, bringing hard times, depressed all property values, those of slaves included.  But the return of peace brought prompt inflation in response to exaggerated anticipations of prosperity to follow.  Wade Hampton, for example, wrote to his brother from Jacksonborough in the South Carolina lowlands, January 30, 1782:  “All attempts to purchase negroes have been fruitless, owing to the flattering state of our affairs in this quarter."[16] The sequel was sharply disappointing.  The indigo industry was virtually dead, and rice prices, like those of tobacco, did not maintain their expected levels.  The financial experience was described in 1786 by Henry Pendleton, a judge on the South Carolina bench, in words which doubtless would have been similarly justified in various other states:  “No sooner had we recovered and restored the country to peace and order than a rage for running into debt became epidemical....  A happy speculation was almost every man’s object and pursuit....  What a load of debt was in a short time contracted in the purchase of British superfluities, and of lands and slaves for which no price was too high if credit