Black Majority

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.

In this first book to focus so directly upon the earliest Negro inhabitants of the deep South, Peter Wood brilliantly lays t...