Boy nd. Dick Gun
[26] I assume New York Currency, in which case the pound was 20 York shillings or $2.50.
[27] 1787, January 10, George Brown and Sarah a Negress were married by Cave—it was probably the same Sarah.
[28] While this was in fact and in law a sale, the transaction was far more than a mere transfer of property: The Notary John Abraham Gray has the Notarial Act No. 74 which shows that Manuel, the negro man voluntarily engaged as servant, to Thomas Sullivan, under the usual conditions of servitude, for five years, at the end of which term, the said Manuel, if he should faithfully carry out his said engagement was to be emancipated and set at liberty according to due form of law, otherwise he was to remain the property of the said Sullivan.
A Notarial Act now in the possession of the Historical Society, Chicago, dated at Montreal, August 15, 1731, passed before the Notary Charles Benoit et St. Désiez, evidences the sale by Louis Chappeau to Sieur Pierre Guy, merchant, both of Montreal, of an Indian lad of the Patoka nation, aged about 10 or 12 years, for 200 livres paid in beaver and other skins. See Report of Canadian Archives, 1905, vol. 1, lxix.
It may be of interest to note that on pp. 476, 477 of the same report is copied a memorial (October 29, 1768) of the inhabitants and merchants of Louisiana in which they complain, inter alia, of D'Ulloa the Spanish Governor of Louisiana (1766-8) forbidding "the importation of negroes to the colony under the pretext that this competition would hurt an English merchant of Jamaica who had sent a vessel to D'Ulloa to confirm the contract for the importation of slaves. In creating this monopoly, he had robbed his new subjects of the means of procuring slaves cheaply...."