Based on the author's thesis, Harvard, 1972.

Originally published: New York : Knopf, c1974.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-346) and index.

Prologue: small beginnings -- Part One: African workers in the Carolina Lowlands. The colony of a colony -- Black labor - white rice -- "The sovereign ray of health" -- Part Two: The changing frontier. Black pioneers -- "More like a negro country" -- Gullah speech: the roots of Black English -- Part Three: Rising tensions. Growing initiative among blacks -- Mounting anxiety among whites -- Runaways: slaves who stole themselves -- Part Four: A colony in conflict. Patterns of white control -- Patterns of black resistance -- The Stono rebellion and its consequences.

African slaves, if taken together, were the largest single group of non-English-speaking migrants to enter the North American colonies in the pre-Revolutionary era. . . . And yet . . . most Americans would find it hard to conceive that the population of one of the thirteen original colonies was well over half black at the time the nation’s independence was declared. This groundbreaking study of two cultures in early America is easily the most thorough and the most penetrating case study yet written of the Afro-American population during the slave period . . . Fascinating and instructive.