Letter acknowledging receipt of payment for goods shipped along with "some Ground Nuts" [peanuts], and requesting arrangments to sell, Lewis, an African-American slave from Rhode Island in South Carolina. Announcing that he was sending his slave Lewis for sale--"Lewis ... is or rather was the best Servant in this Colony. ... He understands a Garden, Horses, a Kitchen and without exception is the best waiting man I know of, and wants nothing but a Master," explaining that Lewis' "present crime" was borrowing a bottle of wine and some provisions, and instructing Mercer to "get me as much as you can for him." Malbone reports that Lewis would bring a handsome price locally, but that he wishes to avoid "the mortification of seeing him as I must often do if he was sold in this Town," even though he was "born and brought up in our family and his mother now in the house ..."
