Recently, historians have produced several important studies concerned with the domestic slave trade that emerged in the United States after the Revolution (Michael Tadman's Speculators & Slaves, Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul, and Ralph Clayton's Cash for Blood, are the best examples). These studies have treated the origins, nature, and impact of a domestic traffic in as many as 2,000,000 African Americans during the nineteenth century. For a variety of reasons - decline of tobacco production, abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, territorial expansion to the southwest, and the emergent cotton industry most importantly - a traffic 
developed, sending black Marylanders and Virginians to the Deep South as slaves. 

For the Maryland State Archives project that I head, "Beneath the Underground: the Flight to Freedom and Antebellum Communities in Maryland" (www.mdslavery.net), the ramifications of this domestic traffic are immeasurable. More than any other compulsion beyond the fact of slavery itself, the fear of being sold south - sold to the "Georgia Men," as blacks apparently phrased it - compelled people to run. 

Yet, the impact of the domestic traffic varied over time and across the various regions of the state. Generally, as has been known by historians for some time, its impact was strongest in the Northern counties and on the Eastern Shore. What historians have studied less, however, was the general absence of an out-migration of slaves from the counties of Southern Maryland. While the traffic and its trappings (gangs of slaves moving through, slave pens for hire, etc.) were common in
Southern Maryland, most blacks being taken South had come from elsewhere in the state. 

examination of the data taken from these sources suggest that Prince George's County slaves seem most likely to have been purchased by local buyers, and to have remained after the sale within the same general locale from which they were sold - where, that is, social networks and kinfolk arguably still remained. 

Family, kin, and acquaintance represented key resources to blacks attempting to run away. A network of nearby kinfolk could be vital to success or failure. Added to this is the element of free blacks and urban blacks. While the Prince George's County free black population remained small throughout the nineteenth century, and its "urban" environments (Piscataway, Bladensburg, Upper Marlboro, and Laurel, for example) were mere hamlets by most measures, bona fide cities at nearby
Washington, Annapolis, Alexandria, Baltimore, and Frederick - if the runaway ads are to be believed - served the county blacks well in the their flight attempt. Washington, D.C. is the best example of this, as the documented cases of successful flight to Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada point to the fugitives' Washington connections as key. 

Greater collection and examination of records in this matter are forthcoming, and may alter the overall thesis. Yet, at first glance, Prince George's County's penchant for local sellers to deal with local buyers seems, ironically, to have worked against them, as it fostered a community development somewhat unique in the nineteenth century Upper South. One by-product of such a community development saw slaves on the plantations and free blacks in the cities help runaways get free. 
 

My grandma's Mason jars are now antique, 
In which she canned the produce of her farm-- 
The peaches, beets, tomatoes; but their charm 
As toys for idle children in the weeks 
Of school-less summer, that fine meek 
And Christian woman could not soon suspect: 
No Great Depression weighed upon our necks, 
Like yokes of oxen dragging plows that creak. 
Instead our days were ignorant of care; 
Our evenings passed like fireflies in flight, 
Which we would trap inside the sturdy jars 
With grass and twigs, the lid just cracked for air; 
And gaze upon their struggles in the night-- 
Their abdomens of mystic, yellow light.