Book of the Month - "African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals"

Editor’s Note: Each month we want to share a book (or author) that we think is a must-read. To that end, we have enlisted a few of our friends who are wonderful writers about books, including the author of this month’s piece, John Wilson, one of the best book critics you’ll find anywhere. Here he is, writing about David Hackett Fischer’s long-awaited new volume.

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In 1989, Oxford University Press published a massive book by David Hackett Fischer entitled Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, destined to become a classic. Albion’s Seed showed how four streams of English-speaking settlers in America—Puritans; “Cavaliers” and indentured servants; Quakers; and “Borderers,” including Scotch and Northern Irish—brought with them distinctive outlooks and ways of life. Fischer described the book as the first installment in a “cultural history of the United States.” In his preface and on subsequent occasions, he referred to planned volumes that would follow. This enormously ambitious project morphed considerably over time, but from the beginning Fischer had promised a volume that would focus on the diverse and distinct cultures and folkways that enslaved Africans brought with them from their native continent: different languages, different religious practices, different skills, different senses of community. He never abandoned that plan, and now—more than thirty years after the appearance of Albion’s Seed—it has come to fruition with the publication of African Founders: How Enslaved Peoples Expanded American Freedom.

And here the demands of the present insistently assert themselves, in a way that was not the case for Albion’s Seed. Although more than 150 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation, the legacy of slavery and the scandal of ongoing discrimination against black Americans is being studied, protested, and proclaimed with greater intensity than at any point since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps even exceeding it.

I read African Founders with a sort of double-consciousness: on the one hand, absorbed and at many points exhilarated by the extraordinarily wide-ranging findings that Fischer has assembled; on the other hand, thinking about how his book will be perceived and judged (and misjudged) at this present moment. The subtitle of the new book alone will inflame many readers who misconstrue it before they’ve even bothered to read a page. So “Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom,” huh? Very inspiring. And just what we need in 2022: a feel-good narrative. Right.

In fact, Fischer doesn’t at all minimize the evil of slavery and its long aftermath, down to the present day. What he does is quite different: he opens our eyes to the many strands of African influence that the slaves brought with them and transmitted to their descendants (see for example pp. 454-55, on Michelle Obama’s roots, under the heading “A Gullah Heritage in the White House”). I can’t imagine anyone with a genuine interest in American history reading this book without profit, not to mention moments of revelation and delight.

What African Founders doesn’t offer is a continuous narrative. It’s organized by region (the brief section on Michelle Obama’s family comes from a chapter entitled “Coastal Carolina, Georgia, and Florida”) and I read it in discrete chunks, not too much at a session.

The nature of the project is suggested in the introduction, in which Fischer harks back to Herodotus and the spirit of “inquiry” that animated his pioneering work: 

In the school of Herodotus, history was not primarily a story, or an argument, or a thesis, or a polemic. In actual practice it sometimes became any or all of those things. But it tended to begin in another way, as an inquiry with a genuinely open end. It started not with answers but with questions, about events that actually happened.

This spirit animates Fischer’s entire enterprise. As he notes, “In our own twenty-first century, these ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”

African Founders is the product of decades of “inquiry,” drawing on an immense range of scholarship as well as on firsthand investigation. I’ve already talked about the book with several serious homeschooling parents, urging them to read it and adapt parts of it for their “curriculum.” I hope you’ll consider giving it a look too.

One final note. John J. Miller interviewed Fischer about African Founders recently on his podcast “The Bookmonger.” The interview is short, about eleven minutes, and I recommend it. Near the end, Miller asks Fischer how long he had been working on the book. Fischer says, “All my life,” and goes on to explain that his father was head of the Baltimore public schools at the time of the landmark Supreme Court ruling that mandated desegregation. Seeing his father committing himself to that goal, against outright resistance, foot-dragging, and more, was an experience that fundamentally shaped Fischer’s own sense of what it meant to be an American. Hence, many years later, African Founders.

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You can buy a copy of this book from our Bookshop.org page, here.