Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/101

 for slaves were so much greater that he would have to return to Rappahannock with his mission unfulfilled if he persisted in his demands. For the negroes to be purchased, payment was to be made in part in certain bills of exchange drawn in favor of Fitzhugh by local debtors, these bills being turned over to the agent when he started upon his journey.

It is a fact of interest that the value of negroes advanced rather than declined as their number in the Colony increased. In 1640, when the black population of Virginia probably did not exceed one hundred and fifty persons, a male African adult commanded about twenty-seven hundred pounds of tobacco, and a female about twenty-five hundred; this amounted to an average price of about eighteen pounds sterling a head, rating that commodity at a penny and a half a pound. Three years later, two negro women and one negro child were assigned in York by Henry Brooke to Nicholas Brooke, a merchant of London, in return for fifty-five hundred pounds of tobacco. The executors of William Pryor in 1647 sold to Captain Chisman of York County four negro men, two negro women, and two negro children for one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, an average value of eighteen pounds. In 1659, a young negro woman in the same county was held at thirty. Ten years after this, it was declared, in a report drawn up by the Committee for Foreign Plantations, that the average price which the newly imported African slaves commanded in Virginia was twenty pounds sterling a head. In 1671, an old