 The thing that as a historian that strikes me about these documents is first how mundane they are, how banal they are, how similar they are to the kinds of the book of receipts that you could pick up today, but then to realize that the people that are kind of in this kind of elegant handwriting that are signing their names to this receipt are engaged in the sale of humans. This particular receipt from Baltimore dated in 1851 warrants in defense against the claims of all persons whatsoever and likewise warrants sound and healthy and slaves for life. So it's almost identical but it adds the little phrase and slaves for life that none of the others do and so you ask yourself well what might account for that little bit of fine print, that little legal boilerplate being added to this receipt. People keep records of property in a way that they don't keep of people and they lay these records stay around with us for a long time. You often will hear that well the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves really because it only was under effect for those areas that weren't under the control of the Union Army. But what it did do was take this huge amount of capital that was invested in slaves and wiped it out. It just erased billions of dollars of capital and it's one of the reasons that New York City was such a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment because the banks and the trading houses in New York City were very invested economically.