Enslaved Child Trafficking Within Late-Colonial Virginia: Certification of Enslaved Children in Augusta County, 1743-1774

Throughout the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Virginia law mandated the registration of newly imported enslaved children. Enslavers presented children to panels of magistrates who officially certified child names and ages. In Virginia, enslaved children became taxable at age sixteen, so the certification process established an official date for adding imported children to tax rolls known as tithable lists. Between 1743 and 1774, ninety enslavers in Augusta County certified 118 enslaved children. Analyses of Augusta County child registration data were reported initially in The Road to Black Ned’s Forge: A Story of Race, Sex, and Trade on the Colonial American Frontier (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2014). Subsequent investigation finds that enslaved children registered in Augusta County were statistically distinctive from contemporary children registered in the counties of Piedmont Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge. The ratio of boys to girls was much higher in Augusta County, a statistically significant difference which appears to be evidence of Virginia’s internal (domestic) slave trade during the late colonial period.