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which allowed for a great deal of flexibility as work was adapted to the abilities of the individual slave. Forest McDonald comments in regard to this "task system":

Normally these [tasks] were light enough so that a worker could complete them in three or four hours. His time was his own when his task was done, and it was not uncommon for slaves, in their free time, to work the acres that were uniformly allotted to them by their masters and thereby to accumulate personal property. It was more common for slaves to double up on their work — to do two or even three tasks in a day — and then to take several days off, during which they might travel many miles by horse or boat to visit friends, family, or lovers on other plantations.

The Stability of the Slave Family

On average, only one slave holder out of every twenty-two sold a slave in any given year, and roughly one third of these were estates of deceased persons. With the trading that did occur, some of the families of slaves were broken up. The question is how widespread was this?

Data contained in the sales records in New Orleans , by far the largest market in the interregional trade, sharply contradict the popular view that the destruction of slave marriages was at least a frequent, if not a universal, consequence of the slave trade.

These records, which cover thousands of transactions during the years from 1804 to 1862, indicate that about 2% of the marriages of slaves involved in the westward trek were destroyed in the process of migration. Nor is it by any means clear that the destabilizing effects of the westward migration on marriages was significantly greater among blacks than it was among whites.

There is no reason to believe that the age and sex structure of interstate sales at New Orleans were markedly different from those of other south-central cities. Moreover, New Orleans , more than any other city, dominated the interregional slave trade, receiving annually about one third of the slaves sold between states.

The Myth of Slave Breeding

The thesis that systematic breeding of slaves for sale in the market accounted for a major share of the net income or profit of slave holders, is often espoused. This thesis involves two interrelated concepts. First, it is assumed that the slave owners interfered in the normal sexual habits of slaves to maximize female fertility through such devices as mating women with especially potent men. Second, it is assumed that this raising of slaves occurred with sale as the main motive.

Unfortunately for the thesis, the many thousands of hours of research by professional historians into plantation records have failed to produce a single authenticated case of the "stud" plantations alleged in abolitionist literature. Nor was the sale of slaves all that profitable. The sweet potato crop brought more income to slave owners than the interregional sale of their bondsmen.