This story is just one of hundreds, many eye-popping, in David Hackett Fischer’s recent book exploring how African slaves are as much founders of America as are the iconic and familiar figures of her Founding Fathers … For many years there has been a perspective on American slavery by the public that one could describe as either the Pollyanna view or the lachrymose view. Fischer shows us the story is far more complicated and, frankly, far more fascinating … Fischer’s book is an inquiry into what happened when Africans and Europeans came to North America, and the growth of race slavery collided with the ideas of freedom and liberty and rule of law. Like the ophthalmologist’s phoropter, Fischer, through prodigious research, proceeds to reveal a world that is clearer, more precise, richer, and revealing … African Founders is a Promethean work, a truly magisterial and magnificent book of cultural history that extracts from potentially arid demographic data a riveting story that, in the words of another Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Gordon S. Wood, transcends all our current historiographical debates of slavery.
