Page 101 - American Stories, A History of the United States

3.1 Read the Document James Oglethorpe, The Stono rebellion (1739)

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

slave auCTions this public notice announces a slave auction to be held at the charles town wharf (1769).

In the New England and Middle Colonies, and even in Virginia, African
Americans made up a smaller percentage of the population: 40 percent in Virginia,
8 percent in Pennsylvania, and 3 percent in Massachusetts. In such environments, con-
tact between blacks and whites was more frequent than in South Carolina and Georgia.
These population patterns profoundly affected northern and Chesapeake blacks, for
while they escaped the physical drudgery of rice cultivation, they found it more dif-
ficult to preserve an independent African identity. In northern cities, slaves working as
domestics and living in their masters’ houses saw other blacks but had little opportu-
nity to develop creole languages or reaffirm a common African past.
The process of establishing African American traditions involved reshaping
African and European customs into something that was neither African nor European.
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