ABSTRACT
As the interest in Black history has increased, a goodly number of books on slavery and on its secondary theme have made their appearance. The numbers of slaves being sold South from that county was far less than its proportional share should have been according to Bancroft’s findings. In the 1830’s a peak of over eleven thousand slaves per year were sent to the buying states. A broad category that is used as evidence to indicate the extensiveness of the trade are the manifests lists of shipments of slaves from the Atlantic coast seaports. Given the sources that have just been described, it would be logical to assume that the historian who wanted to study the slave trade, especially the interstate features, would begin at the beginning and note the amount of sales actually consummated. To begin with, while slavery as a system of labor in Maryland was no longer profitable, the practice of renting out slaves was profitable.
