The most familiar images of Southern slavery relate to the fully
fledged mature institution of the last generation before the
Civil War. A certain timeless, changeless, static quality has
attached itself to those images. But slavery had not always been like
that; the peculiar institution had its own peculiar history. The slave
South was not a fixed point but a changing historical process. The two
centuries from 1619 to the 1820s shaped the character of both
Southern slavery and the black American experience.

Differences of time and place etched a variegated pattern into the
history of slavery during the colonial period, as Ira Berlin in particular
has emphasized. ¹ The decades on either side of 1700 mark a crucial
turning point between the first long phase of slow and uncertain
evolution during the seventeenth century and the firm consolidation
and rapid expansion of slavery in the eighteenth century. Geograph-
ically, there were three distinct areas where slavery took shape (and,
in two of them, took root) in the British North American colonies.
First in time, numbers, and importance was the Chesapeake Bay
region of Virginia and Maryland, where tobacco was the main staple
crop. Second, from the 1670s onward, were the coastal settlements of
the Carolinas (especially South Carolina), and later of Georgia, where
heavy concentrations of slave labor were used in the cultivation of
subtropical crops such as rice and indigo. Third, it must not be
forgotten that slaves were far from unknown in some of the Northern
colonies. There the slave population was much more scattered, but at
their eighteenth-century peak in New York, slaves and free blacks
numbered up to 15 percent of the total population.

There is nothing clear-cut about the beginnings of slavery on the

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