Colonial masters distinguished Africa-born from acculturated artisan slaves as a practical matter

Evidence

In South Carolina, Blacks made up 60 percent of the colony’s population in the eighteenth century. In Virginia, the comparable figure was 40 percent. They were used as laborers on the tobacco farms, and, later, on the cotton plantations, but they also worked “in mines, saltand rope-works; and they trained as shipwrights, blacksmiths, and as various kinds of woodworkers, including carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, and sawyers.” Those who were imported directly from Africa were termed “outlandish” to distinguish them from what their masters called the “new negroes” of the fields and the supposed deracinated, acculturated artisan slaves with whom they were more “comfortable.” As Gerald Mullin has demonstrated, these distinctions were for the colonists practical considerations: In sample runs of the South Carolina Gazette in the early 1750s and 1771 there was clear evidence of tribal cooperation in advertisements for the return of four “new Gambia men”; three Angolans, “all short fellows”; six other Angolans … — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 597