Fischer won the Pulitzer Prize in History for Washington’s Crossing, a masterly account of the early turning point of the American Revolution, a work that showed his talent for military and narrative history. But probably his greatest work, and one whose method is reflected in African Founders, is Albion’s Seed (1989), a study of cultural transmission that traces the populating of British North America through the cultural persistence of four geographically and linguistically distinct “folkways” brought by immigrants from the British Isles. With this book, Fischer revived the long disdained “germ theory” of earlier American historiography. He demonstrated how persistent these imported cultural traits have been, and how much of the cultural diversity of early America, and to some extent of today’s America, can be explained by these diverse antecedents.
Fischer is thus an exponent of the enduring power of culture and tradition in human life—the core assumption of the germ theory (“germ” here meaning “seed” in the term’s original acceptation). Contrary to the famous “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner, Fischer does not regard the frontier environment as the principal factor that shaped American distinctiveness. In addition, he insists that the American character, though recognizable and distinctive, was far from homogeneous. It was different in different places, responsive to an emerging culture of liberty as an American constant, but not at all the same in coastal New England as in tidewater Virginia. American distinctiveness exhibited the same variety as did the peoples and cultures that came to constitute it.
Fischer’s project in African Founders is similar to that in Albion’s Seed: He assiduously traces the diverse origins of enslaved Africans to their native regions and explores all the ways in which their heritages (“germs,” so to speak) combined with the emerging realities of European cultures on American soil. Instead of relying too much on amorphous terms such as “African American,” Fischer gives us a high degree of specificity with regard to African cultural geography—although it is harder to trace patterns in this book than in Albion’s Seed, and he often has to proceed inferentially, due to the scarcity of documentary evidence.
Fischer identifies four distinct regions—the Senegambia, the Guinea coast (modern Ghana, Nigeria, and the Côte d’Ivoire), the Congo-Angola, and east Africa and Mozambique—from which came the 400,000 Africans who endured the North American slave trade. Each of these groups became established in one of seven distinct regions: New England, the Hudson River Valley, the Delaware Valley, the Chesapeake, the South Atlantic Coast, Louisiana, and the West. In each of these regions, the African cultures exerted influence on the culture of their captors, producing a steady stream of examples, large and small, supporting the assertion of the book’s subtitle that “enslaved people expanded American ideals.”
