For too many years scholars of African American history focused on the harm done by slaveholders and by the institution of slavery, rather than on what Africans in the United States were able to accomplish despite the effects of that institution. In Myne Owne Ground, T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes contribute significantly to a recent, welcome shift from a white-centered to a black-centered inquiry into the role of African Americans in the American colonial period. Breen and Innes focus not on slaves, but on a small group of freed indentured servants in Northampton County who, according to the authors, maintained their freedom, secured property, and interacted with persons of different races and economic standing from 1620 through the 1670s. African Americans living on the Chesapeake were to some extent disadvantaged, say Breen and Innes, but this did not preclude the attainment of status roughly equal to that of certain white planters of the area. Continuously acting within black social networks, and forming economic relationships with white planters, local Native Americans, indentured servants, and white settlers outside the gentry class, the free African Americans of Northampton County held their own in the rough-hewn world of Chesapeake Bay. The authors emphasize that in this early period, when the percentage of African Americans in any given Chesapeake county was still no more than 10 percent of the population, very little was predetermined so far as racial status or race relations were concerned. By schooling themselves in the local legal process and by working prodigiously on the land, African Americans acquired property, established families, and warded off contentious white neighbors. Breen and Innes do acknowledge that political power on the Chesapeake was asymmetrically distributed among black and white residents. However, they underemphasize much evidence that customary law, only gradually embodies in statutory law, was closing in on free African Americans well before the 1670s: during the 1660s, when the proportion of African Americans in Virginia increased dramatically, Virginia tightened a law regulating interracial relations (1662) and enacted a statute prohibiting baptism from altering slave status (1667). Anthony Johnson, a leader in the community of free African Americans in the Chesapeake Bay region, sold the land he had cultivated for more than twenty years and moved north with his family around 1665, an action that the authors attribute to a search for "fresh, more productive land." But the answer to why the Johnsons left that area where they had labored so long may lie in their realization that their white neighbors were already beginning the transition from a largely white indentured labor force to reliance on a largely black slave labor force, and that the institution of slavery was threatening their descendants' chances for freedom and success in Virginia.