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This was quite untrue. Though there were protests against it, newspapers carried advertisements like this one of 1761, offering for sale 'a healthy negro girl aged about 15 years, speaks English, works at her needle, washes well, does household work and has had the smallpox'. The legal position was ambiguous. Buying and selling slaves was ruled by the courts to be valid, but it was not legal to forcibly detain slaves in order to sell them abroad.
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It has been estimated that, by 1764, there were some 20,000 black servants in London. Those who were, in fact, slaves soon realised that their white fellow servants were being paid as employees and started to ask for the same terms. If this was refused, they could disappear into the anonymous city where their masters would be unlikely to find them. The London Chronicle reported in February 1764 that 'among the sundry fashionable routs [assemblies] or clubs that are held in town that of the Blacks or negro servants is not the least.'
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