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.The unsettled conditions that made the low-country vulnerable to external enemiesstrengthened the slave s hand in other ways.Confronted by an overbearing master or aparticularly onerous assignment, many blacks took to the woods.Truancy was an easy Diversity and unity in early North America 88alternative in the thinly settled, heavily forested low-country.Forest dangers generallysent truant slaves back to their owners, but the possibility of another flight inducedslaveholders to accept them with few questions asked.Some bondsmen, however, tookadvantage of these circumstances to escape permanently.Maroon colonies existedthroughout the lowland swamps and into the backcountry.e Maroons lived a hard life,perhaps more difficult than slaves, and few blacks chose to join these outlaw bands.Butthe ease of escape and the existence of a maroon alternative made masters chary aboutabusing their slaves.16The transplanted African s intimate knowledge of the subtropical lowlandenvironment especially when compared to the Englishman s dense ignorancemagnified white dependence on blacks and enlarged black opportunities within the slaveregime.Since the geography, climate, and topography of the low-country more closelyresembled the West African than the English countryside, African not Europeantechnology and agronomy often guided lowland development.From the first, whitesdepended on blacks to identify useful flora and fauna and to define the appropriatemethods of production.Blacks, adapting African techniques to the circumstances of theCarolina wilderness, shaped the lowland cattle industry and played a central role in theintroduction and development of the region s leading staple.In short, transplantedEnglishmen learned as much or more from transplanted Africans as did the formerAfricans from them.17 While whites eventually appropriated this knowledge and turned itagainst black people to rivet tighter the bonds of servitude, white dependence on Africanknow-how operated during those first years to place blacks in managerial as well asmenial positions and thereby permitted blacks to gain a larger share of the fruits of thenew land than whites might otherwise allow.In such circumstances, white dominationmade itself felt, but both whites and blacks incorporated much of West African cultureinto their new way of life.If the distinction between white and black culture remained small in the low-country,so too did differences within black society.The absence of direct importation of Africanslaves prevented the emergence of African-Creole differences; and, since few blacksgained their liberty during those years, differences in status within the black communitywere almost nonexistent.The small radius of settlement and the ease of watertransportation, moreover, placed most blacks within easy reach of Charles Town.A city of several dozen rude buildings where the colonial legislature met in a tavern couldhardly have impressed slaves as radically different from their own primitive quarters.Town slaves, for their part, doubtless had first-hand familiarity with farm work as fewmasters could afford the luxury of placing their slaves in livery.18Thus, during the first years of settlement, black life in the low-country, like black lifein the North, evolved toward a unified Afro-American culture.Although their numberscombined with other circumstances to allow Carolina blacks a larger role in shaping theirculture than that enjoyed by blacks in the North, there remained striking similarities inthe early development of Afro-American life in both regions.During the last few years ofthe seventeenth century, however, changes in economy and society undermined thesecommonalities and set the development of low-country Afro-American life on adistinctive course.The discovery of exportable staples, first naval stores and then rice and indigo,transformed the low-country as surely as the sugar revolution transformed the West Time, space, and the evolution of afro-American society 89Indies.Under the pressure of the riches that staple production provided, planters banishedthe white yeomanry to the hinterland, consolidated small farms into large plantations, andcarved new plantations out of the malaria-ridden swamps.Before long, black slavesbegan pouring into the region and, sometime during the first decade of the eighteenthcentury, white numerical superiority gave way to the low-country s distinguishingdemographic characteristic: the black majority.Black numerical dominance grew rapidly during the eighteenth century.By the 1720s,blacks outnumbered whites by more than two to one in South Carolina.In the heavilysettled plantation parishes surrounding Charles Town, blacks enjoyed a three-to-onemajority.That margin grew steadily until the disruptions of the Revolutionary era, but itagain increased thereafter.Georgia, where metropolitan policies reined planter ambition,remained slaveless until mid-century
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