MARYLAND  SLAVE  POPULATION	51

variety of personal relationships despite their bondage and the limitations
imposed by the demographic characteristics of the slave population.57

The rise of an assimilated native-born slave population combined with
the growing concentration of labor on the estates of large planters to
make a greater variety of jobs available to blacks within the plantation
system. By the 17205 many planters could afford to divert slaves from
field work to domestic service, and many plantations were large enough
to require the services of supervisory personnel and full-time craftsmen.
At the same time, fewer planters owned indentured servants who could
compete with blacks for the better positions. Furthermore, the gradual
diversification of the Chesapeake economy, particularly the beginnings of
local industry and the growth of small urban centers, created more non-
farm jobs. As a result, more and more slaves were able to escape the
routine drudgery of tobacco and move from field work to more reward-
ing and challenging (and often more unsettling) jobs as domestics,
artisans, industrial workers, and overseers.58

Counts based on occupational designations in inventories understate
the proportion of artisans in the population because of the occasional
failure of appraisers to record a skilled slave's achievement. Neverthe-
less, inventories provide a useful guide to changes in the jobs held by
blacks. Before 1710 only 4 of the 525 adult male slaves who appear in
inventories in the four counties were described as craftsmen; from 1711
to 1725 only 3 of 283 men in Charles and Prince George's estates were
artisans. In the late 17205—roughly a generation after the heavy migra-
tion at the turn of the century—the number of skilled slaves rose sharply:
between 1726 and 1730, 13 of the 213 men (6 percent) in Charles and
Prince George's inventories were skilled workmen. Seven were carpen-
ters, two were coopers, one was a blacksmith, one a "tradesman," and
two, perhaps representing an elite among black artisans, were skilled in
both cooperage and carpentry.59

A tax list that survives for Prince George's County in 1733 provides
some insight into the proportion of blacks who had attained supervisory
positions. Seventy-nine quarters occupied by slaves appear; on thirty-
seven no taxable-age white is listed. Ten of the thirty-seven quarters

sr On the increased competence of acculturated slaves see Mullin, Flight and
Rebellion, passim.

58 For the often unsettling impact of job mobility see ibid., 72-82, 98-103.

59 Charles County Inventories, 1717-1735, 290, 291; Prince George's County
Inventories, TB#i, 1720-1729, 6, 34, 68, 79, 81, 129, 317, 340. See also Jones, Present
State of Virginia, ed. Morton, 76.