Of the estimated ten million men, women, and children who survived the Middle Passage, approximately 450,000 Africans disembarked on North America's shores. They thus represented only a fraction - 5 percent-- of those transported during the 350-year history of the international slave trade. Brazil and the Caribbean each received about nine times as many Africans.

The labor of enslaved Africans proved crucial in the development of South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland and contributed indirectly through commerce to the fortunes of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Though the enforced destination of Africans was primarily to plantations and farms for work in cash crop agriculture, they were also used in mining and servicing the commercial economy. They were placed in towns and port cities as domestic servants; and many urban residents performed essential commercial duties working as porters, teamsters, and craftsmen.

	Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America: Volume IV: The Border Colonies and The Southern Colonies by Elizabeth Donnan
	Voyages of the Slavers St. John & Arms of Amsterdam by Edmund B. O'Callaghan
	Hands That Picked No Cotton from Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (July 1987) by A.J. Williams-Myers
	The African Presence in the Hudson River Valley from Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (January 1988) by A.J. Williams-Myers
	Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America: Volume III: New England and the Middle Colonies by Elizabeth Donnan

In eighteenth-century America, Africans were concentrated in the agricultural lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia, especially in the Sea Islands, where they grew rice, cotton, indigo, and other crops. In Louisiana, they labored on sugarcane plantations. They were employed on tobacco farms in the tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland. The tidewater, together with the Georgia and South Carolina lowlands, accounted for at least two-thirds of the Africans brought into North America prior to the end of legal importation in 1807.