African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

The biggest fault with African Founders is the length. It tries to cover a vast swath of history and goes on for a very long time. It does a great job of putting together details of what it does cover and brings out the diversity of the early African populations.

Most Africans that ended up in North America were brought as servants or slaves. Some were brought directly from Africa. Others came from other places (such as the Carribean islands) They were influenced by their original homelands as well as the society where they arrived in.

The background of the colony had a significant influence in the experience of the new inhabitants. The Spaniards relied on a medieval slave code that treated slaves more as temporary state. Some of the religious English frowned on slavery. Others went through hoops to validate Africans as an inferior race that needed to have a master. The Dutch were capitalists and anything, including a slave's freedom is up for negotiation. Georgia was originally a utopia that shunned slavery before the residents chose to bring it in. The French had their own unique culture and were not very much in to racial separation. Some colonies had plantations from an early day and brought in many slaves.

There had been many free blacks in North America. Some had always been free. Others purchased their freedom, while some simply escaped to settle on their own. (Hard to access islands tend to be a good place for the latter.) African American was an old term original to define blacks that supported the American Revolution.

When living as slaves, the Africans blended their homeland norms with those of their society. There were African Christian churches. Families tended to be together within the limits of the slavery system. Different languages were developed that merged African and English grammatical constructs. Slavehood often came down the mother's line.

Today it seems baffling that the concept of race was developed to enforce a perpetual slavery of those people from Africa. This book does not attempt to explore why that happened. It does attempt to provide a detailed study of the culture that arose from the (mostly forced) early African immigrants.