14 The number of Africans in Virginia was reckoned at 500 in 1649 by an anonymous pamphleteer, 2,000 in 1671 by Sir William Berkeley, and 3,000 in 1681 by Thomas Culpeper. Philip Bruce estimated that there were 6,000 blacks in Virginia by 1700. Wesley Frank Craven put the number in that year at “somewhat larger but not greatly in excess of six thousand.” Edmund Morgan guessed that the total number of blacks was between 1,000 and 3,000 in 1674 and between 6,000 and 10,000 in 1700—with the lower estimates being more likely. The Historical Statistics of the United States are grossly inaccurate on this issue. See Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, II, 108; Craven, White, Red and Black, 98-103; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 423.

15 The black population changed as follows in the four colonies:

 

New England

New York

Chesapeake

Maryland

Virginia

1640

195

232

160

10

150

1680

470

1,200

5,438

1,438

4,000

Source: Russell R. Menard, “Population, Economy and Society in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” MDHM 79 (1984), 71-92.

16 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 16.