34	WILLIAM   AND   MARY   QUARTERLY

even higher before 1650. As late as 1704 the ratio among white adults in
the four-county region was 1.807, higher than that of slaves listed in in-
ventories between 1701 and i7io.12 However, whites had a distinct ad-
vantage: they could move about in order to establish as normal a family
life as the sexual imbalance in the population permitted. A young white
man could also leave the region in search of a wife, thereby bringing
the sex ratio among those who remained closer to one. The emigration
of young men sharply lowered the sex ratio among whites in the four
counties during the first decade of the eighteenth century, from 1.807 m
1704 to 1.348 in I7io.13 Except for a few runaways, emigration was not
an option open to blacks. Nor could a black move about freely within
the region in order to establish a family. The restricted freedom of slaves
aggravated the sexual imbalance revealed in the aggregate data.

Few planters owned large gangs of slaves in the seventeenth century.
Only fifteen of the three hundred slaveowners who left inventories in the
four counties between 1658 and 1710 held more than twenty slaves, and
only thirty-eight owned more than ten. Nearly half owned only one or
two. The slaves on many of the larger plantations, furthermore, were
divided into small groups and set to work on outlying plantations or
quarters. As a result, many slaves lived on plantations with only a few
other blacks, a fact with long-term implications for race relations, the
process of assimilation, and the survival of African cultural patterns in
the New World. More than one-half of the slaves lived on plantations with
ten or fewer blacks, nearly one-third on estates with five or fewer. The
pattern of dispersed ownership described in Table II severely restricted
the chances for social contact among blacks, making isolation and loneli-
ness a prominent fact of life for Africans in the Chesapeake colonies.14

12 Md. Arch., XXV, 256. For sex ratios among white immigrants in the I7th
century see Herbert Moller, "Sex Composition and Correlated Culture Patterns of
Colonial America," WMQ, 3d Ser., II (1945), 113-153, and Craven, White, Red, and
\, 26-27.

13 The emigration can be inferred from the census returns of 1704, 1710, and
1712 in Md. Arch., XXV, 256, 258-259. See also John Seymour to the Board of Trade,
June 23, 1708, C.O. 5/7i6/pt. Ill, and Edward Lloyd to the Board of Trade,
Nov. 4, 1710, C.O. 7i7/pt. II, P.R.O. Transcripts, Lib. Cong.

14 Because decedents are older and therefore probably wealthier than the liv-
ing population, Table II may overstate the concentration of slave ownership. Any
adjustment would only strengthen my argument. On the relationship of age and
wealth see Alice Hanson Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the American Middle
Colonies, 1774," Economic Development and Cultural Change, XVIII (1970), 86-
97, and Russell R. Menard et al., "Opportunity and Inequality: The Distribution
of Wealth on the Lower Western Shore of Maryland, 1638-1705," Maryland
Historical Magazine, LXIX (1974), 176-178.