Douglas B. Chambers

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, masters and slaves in mainland North America knew that there were several kinds of Africans, and by implication that there also were several African-derived kinds of so-called Negroes. The differential patterns of the transatlantic slave trade meant that Africans of different ethnic backgrounds predominated in particular times and places. Because the slave trade was less random than heretofore thought, and because groups of enslaved Africans were taken in distinct waves to the Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the Lower Mississippi Valley, the ethnic backgrounds of the slaves were important in the development of three distinctive, African-derived, creole slave societies in these three regions.

[WP #96014]