New Arrivals.

The South encompassed distinct regions determined by the climate, soil, and types of crop that could be grown and exported. Heightening these differences in the Revolutionary era was the huge influx of African-born slaves after mid century. In many regions these new arrivals were received in various ways by both whites and native-born blacks, or Creoles.

The Chesapeake.

In the mid 1700s the largest slaveholding region was the Chesapeake, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where tobacco was a valuable cash crop. Slaves worked in gangs on tobacco plantations under white overseers. In many counties of Virginia, blacks outnumbered whites and statewide were only slightly in the minority. In 1776 more than one-half of the blacks in America lived in Maryland and Virginia. The slave population in the Chesapeake grew rapidly in the 1760s and 1770s, fueled by imports, but more important, by...