African Founders

How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom

David Hackett Fischer

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982145118
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States. African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new, distinctly American culture.Drawing on decades of research, some of it in western Africa, Fischer recreates the diverse regional life that shaped the early American republic. He shows that there were varieties of slavery in America and varieties of new American culture, from Puritan New England to Dutch New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, cavalier Virginia, coastal Carolina, and Louisiana and Texas.This landmark work of history will transform our understanding of America's origins.

PART ONE NORTHERN REGIONS

Chapter 1 NEW ENGLAND

Puritan Purposes, Akan Ethics, American Values

New-England is originally a plantation of Religion, not a plantation of Trade.

—John Higginson, The Cause of God and His People in New-England, 1663¹

Akan ethics and theology can stand as equals with any equivalent conceptions in European culture.

—C. A. Ackah, Akan Ethics, 1988²

IN THE YEAR 1717 or thereabout, a child was born on the Gold Coast of Africa. His parents called him Kofi, an Akan day name that commemorated the day on which he was born. English speakers translated it as Friday’s Child.³ Kofi was an Asante slave. At the age of ten he was sold at least three times, first to a Fante trader, then to an agent of the British Royal African Company, and once more to a Yankee captain who carried him across the sea to Newport in Rhode Island.⁴

In New England, Kofi became the property of Ebenezer Slocum, perhaps as part of a wedding dowry. In 1742, Ebenezer sold him yet again for 150 pounds to his nephew John Slocum, a Quaker who had scruples about slavery and allowed Kofi to buy his liberty. The young freedman took the name of his benefactor and called himself Coffe Slocum. He married Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag Indian, and learned to read and write alongside their children. Slowly he made his way as a farmer and carpenter on the southern coast of Massachusetts.

It was a hard struggle. For many years he toiled on desolate Cuttyhunk Island, twelve miles at sea. Then he moved his family to Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps to be near Ruth’s Indian kin. They moved again to the mainland town of Dartmouth with its large Quaker community. There he flourished in whaling and trade and became a man of property. In 1766, he bought a handsome farm of 116 acres and paid for it with 650 Spanish silver dollars. Yankee neighbors called him Mister Coffe Slocum. The title pleased him and he used it with pride, as he also did his Akan day name.⁵

We can follow the progress of Coffe Slocum in his own words because he kept a journal and saved his exercise books. They survive in manuscript at the New Bedford Library, and are truly a national treasure. Coffe Slocum’s writings are striking for their consciousness of right and wrong. He lived by a complex ethic of getting and keeping, of giving to others, and “doing good to all.” That combination ran through many passages in his writing: “Daarmouth, Chechiemark, Cullhonk, Nossnour, and Romykes and Care Dare Ere Fear Give We Heare are… good Do good all Do good to all… Give Give Give… Good Do Good at all times I lern read AbcdABBBDDJAATM Coffe Slocum Mister.”⁶

To study these passages is to discover that Coffe Slocum brought together several moral traditions in his thinking. Some of them derived from Puritan and Quaker beliefs that Max Weber collectively called the Protestant ethic. These were ethics of serving God in one’s calling by getting and keeping, and doing well in the world. Another part of Puritan and Quaker ethics (which Weber largely missed) was about giving to others, and “doing good to all.” Coffe Slocum engaged all of these ideas in his thinking.⁷

At the same time, he also engaged Fante and Asante ethics of right conduct that he had learned as an African child. Today, in Ghana’s modern universities, a large literature has developed on “Akan Ethics,” which have deep roots in West Africa and are increasingly studied by moral philosophers through the world.⁸

Protestant and Akan ethical and religious beliefs differed in important ways. In revealed religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, ethical systems are perceived as a product of divine revelation, in the form of sacred texts. Akan moral beliefs had another foundation. They centered on an idea of ethics as derived from the needs and customs of a people and were reinforced by the gods rather than dictated by them. Kwame Gyekye observes that “rather than regarding African ethics as religious, it would be more correct to regard African religions as ethical.”⁹

In some ways, Puritan-Quaker and Fante-Asante ethics were similar. Both centered on the importance of ethical action in the world. Some of Coffe Slocum’s phrases are similar to an Akan “country prayer” recorded by Anglican missionary Thomas Thompson at Cape Coast, circa 1750: “Yancumpong m’iphih meh, mah men yeh bribbe ummouh. May the Creator preserve me and grant I may do no evil.”¹⁰

In both cultures, these ethical imperatives were a philosophy of doing, and they applied to individual and collective acts. An Akan proverb taught that “when virtue founds a town, the town thrives and abides.” Three Akan proverbs were: “to possess virtue is better than gold,” and “virtue comes from character,” and “character comes from actions.”¹¹

These ideas sought to link ethics of being and doing within individual lives, and to apply them in active engagement with others in the world. They were designed for use. Both sets of ethical traditions, Fante-Asante and Puritan-Quaker, centered on a moral and material integration of “doing well” and “doing good.”

The moral passages in Coffe Slocum’s journals were not examples of static African “survivals,” or of rote borrowing from Puritan and Quaker beliefs. They were something new in the world—another ethic that emerged when African and European traditions met in the mind of a very bright and able Akan-speaking freedman in eighteenth-century New England.

Coffe Slocum himself lived these ethical ideas. He put them to work in his own life, taught them to his many children, and passed them on to some of his twenty-two grandchildren. His descendants were taught to do well and do good in the same acts. They also learned a dual ethic of getting and keeping, and giving to others.

In the process, Coffe Slocum’s descendants enlarged the ethical traditions of their African heritage. They also expanded Puritan and Quaker beliefs by combining them, and by putting them to work for people of different origins in New England. They took pride in their African roots, New England associations, and also their American Indian ancestry. All those connections broadened the reach of their ethical beliefs.

The result was a mixed identity that inspired Coffe Slocum’s children and grandchildren to invent another naming tradition. His sons converted their father’s Akan day name into their family surname. Coffe Slocum’s sons called themselves John Cuffe and Paul Cuffe. Other children and grandchildren did the same thing in New England.¹²

As Coffe Slocum’s family grew into an extended Cuffe clan, they followed his example in other ways. Together they constructed an interlocking network of thriving enterprises in southeastern Massachusetts. Several sons acquired large farms in Dartmouth and neighboring towns. His daughter Ruth Cuffe and granddaughter Naomi Cuffe and their husbands ran a successful store in New Bedford. His son Paul owned a flourishing shipyard in Westport, building coastal sloops and schooners, a full-rigged ship of 268 tons, and the beautiful brig Traveller, which was his pride and joy. Paul Cuffe sailed them himself, and he began to build a fortune from trading ventures, in partnership with his brothers and sisters and leading Quaker and Puritan merchants. They tended to capitalize voyages separately to spread the risk, and traded actively along the coast of the United States.

Captain Paul Cuffe and his beloved brig Traveller, 1812

In 1811, Paul Cuffe’s brig Traveller carried a cargo to Britain and caused a sensation. The London Times ran a piece on her arrival, and observed that she was “perhaps the first vessel that ever reached Europe, entirely owned and navigated by negroes.” Similar reports appeared in the gazettes of Dublin and Edinburgh.¹³

None of this came easily. Several of Paul Cuffe’s early vessels were plundered by pirates and seized by “refugees” on the south coast of New England. In one encounter, he was lucky to escape with his life. During the War of Independence he was captured at sea by the Royal Navy and barely survived his stay in a British prison. In southern Maryland, after the war, slaveholders were shocked when Paul Cuffe’s trading vessel arrived with an African American owner, captain, and crew—a dangerous moment they all survived.

Other troubles followed in New England. The Cuffe family was helped by many upright Puritans and well-meaning Quakers, but hindered by Yankee racists who resented their success. The Cuffes responded by working for the rights of Africans and others in New England. Paul Cuffe himself has been called a “one-man civil rights movement” in the new American republic.¹⁴

At the same time, he also became a world figure, a leader in an international movement to end the Atlantic slave trade, and a founder of the new African nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia as part of an effort to end slavery through the world. He actively supported the colonization movement, the antislavery struggle, and the rights of free African Americans in the United States, all at the same time, with no sense of conflict or contradiction.¹⁵

In the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, American descendants of Kofi Slocum multiplied throughout the United States. The twelfth generation runs a family website and organizes family reunions. They continue to enlarge an African, Indian, Puritan, and Quaker heritage into a broad American ethos, which they also helped to create and expand.¹⁶

AFRICAN SLAVES AND THE NEW ENGLAND WAY

Even as Cuffe Slocum’s extended family cherished their African roots, they also worked within an Anglo-American regional tradition. It was called the New England Way as early as the seventeenth century. In our time it still preserves a strong regional identity and a creative presence in the American republic.

The New England Way is a dynamic tradition—always in motion, never at rest. It grew in large measure from the interplay of many population movements. Most important was the Puritan Great Migration of about twenty thousand people who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629–40). The dynamics that scientists in several fields variously call the founder effect were strong in New England.

Another immigrant group were the Mayflower Pilgrims who arrived in 1620. Their progeny founded Plymouth and its surrounding towns, which are still perceived as a special place called the Old Colony in Massachusetts. Other groups of radical Puritans, Seekers, Quakers, Separatists, and free spirits settled in southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Providence Plantations. More conservative Puritans founded the colonies of Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Saybrook in Connecticut. Others, both Puritans and refugees from Puritanism, moved northeast to New Hampshire, Maine, Nova Scotia, and northwest to Vermont.

After 1789, control of American immigration gradually passed from state and local leaders to the federal government, and an increasing diversity of other ethnic groups settled in New England. Four francophone flows came from the north: Quebeçois habitants, Acadien farmers, Breton fishermen, and roaming coureurs de bois (bush rangers). Each of these groups spoke its own patois, and preserved distant roots in different regions of Canada and France.¹⁷

New England later attracted large numbers of Catholic Irish, Italians, Jews, Armenians, and others. Each of these many ethnic groups cherished its own heritage. At the same time, they also became New Englanders. They lived in Yankee houses, grew accustomed to town meetings, began to talk like Yankees, and learned to play by Yankee rules.

After English Puritans and American Indians, the first of these many ethnic groups to increase and multiply in New England were African slaves. On the expanding periphery of the western world, an abundance of what Frederick Jackson Turner loosely called free land led to an insatiable demand for unfree labor. The results included servitud...