At the same time, slavery was sharply declining in the upper South."
- The Economics of Slavery
No worries, there was a ready market for selling slaves to meet the demands of the cotton and sugar cane growers. Families commonly broken up and sent in shackles to the slave markets down south.
Decline or not, the surreal situation in both South Carolina and Mississippi was that the enslaved population actually outnumbered the entire free populations in those states.
Anyhoo, any decline in Virginia slavery notwithstanding, no Black person, either escaped slave or legally free, was safe in the path of the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee when they went north into Pennsylvania in ‘63. All the Black people they could catch were sent to Virginia placed into slavery.
On Robert E. Lee’s watch.
