Clare asked in class about the legal status of children born to apprenticed black servants after the 1780 emancipation law was passed in Pennsylvania. The text of the law itself (which you can read online here–though “s” is often rendered “f” because of the typescript conventions of the time) doesn’t specifically address such cases, but my sense is that because of the “registration” article of the law (see Section 5) and the general presumption of freedom that the act is creating, children born to the people described in Section 4 would not have been bound for the same period. If you’re interested in pursuing this question further, the definitive work on emancipation in Pennsylvania is Gary Nash’s Forging Freedom, which is available in the library.
Elizabeth asked about the percentages of slaveholders who belonged to the different tiers of the pyramid that I drew on the board. Here is a partial answer provided by Peter Kolchin’s excellent one-volume survey of American slavery:
There were far fewer economies of scale associated with cotton than with sugar and rice; like tobacco, cotton could be profitably grown on small as well as on large holdings. Cotton plantations were on average somewhat larger than those for tobacco, but the dominance of cotton in the deep South, like that of tobacco in the upper South, meant that most antebellum slaves would not live on huge Caribbean-style estates. In 1860, only 2.7 percent of Southern slaveholders owned 50 or more slaves, and only one-quarter of the slaves lived on such holdings. Very large plantations were a rarity: a mere 0.1 percent of slave owners held estates of 200 or more slaves, and such estates contained only 2.4 percent of the slaves. By contrast, in Jamaica on the eve of emancipation, one-third of the slaves lived on holdings of 200 or more and three-quarters lived on holdings of at least 50 (pp. 100-101).
In other words, the tip of the pyramid was very, very small.