My first thoughts were that I'd already noticed some cultural similarities (and important differences--modern "black ghetto culture" is orders of magnitude wealthier than the old backwoods white South and Central USA), but that the language seemed only sort-of related. But I know little about dialects.
My second thoughts were wishing he'd given some numbers for the achievement statements he'd made, but realizing that they probably aren't there.
I don't have the years needed to answer the question: At the time of the Civil War, what was the African ethnic background of blacks in the various parts of the country (and territories)? Fischer's African Founders notes that some people wanted Igbo slaves and others wouldn't have them. That sort of preference would make for initial regional differences in ethnicity. If there was a founders' effect in slave culture, or if the descendents of those slaves stayed in the same region, you'd expect some differences from region to region.
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The lower-class English whites in general were the slave overseers, and those dialects were the first picked up by the slaves. The forms of "to be" in Pirate-Talk - Where y' be goin', lad? - were from around Bristol, not Scots-Irish, and those went in African-American-Vernacular English.
But that was highly regional. That was plantation ownership with many Africans in one community. The more typical ownership of a slave or two wouldn't have shown that. There was also a Portuguese/English/West African dialect from the coastal islands off Africa where slaves awaiting sale and shipment were quartered. That had more influence in the Caribbean and Brazil than in the US, but that had influence as well.
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