African Americans in the Colonial Era

Black slavery existed in America for over two centuries. From the middle of the 17th to the end of the 18th century the plantations and smaller farms of the Chesapeake and the Carolina and Georgia low country constituted the heart of American slavery. It was only in the last 50 years of slavery's existence that the institution moved into the lands of the Deep South and switched from emphasis on tobacco or rice production to cotton. Yet the focus of the study of American slavery has always been on the institution as it operated in the cotton South between 1820 and 1860. The aim of this book is to correct this imbalance. Relying primarily on a body of scholarship that historians have produced over the last 15 years, Professor Wright examines the experience of American blacks from their African origins through the disruptive period of the American revolution. Central to his study is the idea that much of the course of African American history in the 19th and 20th centuries was set through the long evolution of slavery and black society in the colonial period.
The first section contains an account of the African background of African Americans and the operation of the Atlantic slave trade. The second section deals with the development of slavery as a legal institution in Great Britain's North American colonies with special attention paid to each of the three distinct regions in which slavery appeared: New England, the region surrounding Chesapeake Bay and the Carolina and Georgia low country. The third section treats the long evolution of American black culture, tracing it back to its roots in colonial society. Family, religion, resistance and rebellion and daily life are discussed. Finally, the book looks at the effects and inherent hypocrisies that the revolution and its ideology brought to bear on slavery and the long-term effects of that struggle on African Americans for the next two centuries.