essay three

Coreen Harris

HST 300

Essay Three

“And we are scatterings of Africa

On a journey to the stars

Far below we leave forever

Dreams of what we were

 ~ Johnny Clegg

Bolster’s book is riveting. Structured around the War of 1812 that encompasses the age of sail.;  it tells the tale, as Bolster argues,  of the utterly unpredictable road of the life of an African American sailor. Like every good story teller, Bolster kept his stories tightly wound.   The story of Dartmoor Prison No.4 pleas a case of African American seamen or sailors to be Americans first and creoles second.  Jeffery Bolster has a remarkable capacity to breathe life into complicated rhetoric. His surprising talent for revealing hidden traces of an international culture of those at sea and revelation of “Americanism” in the times of the African American age of sail at the Dartmoor Prison.

First,  the contextualizing and critiquing in these developments  of culture into Americanism  was read in John Thornton’s text, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1650  (1992).  In Thornton’s view Bolster, together with other colleagues such as Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofola, have dramatically enhanced African socio-cultural studies as a separate field. Their premise of the field, however, has remained conservative, in Thornton’s eyes, despite the political liberalism of some of its components. “Black sailor’s patriotism in 1814 asserted attachment to the United States  and their right to belong”(Bolster, pg. 116). It is not enough that Jeffery Bolster  asked why African American men- why they refused  to take up into the roll call of the Royal Navy upon their impressment into the Royal Navy or why Shakespearean theatre critics  had failed to  produce theatrical literary criticism in the quality of slave productions of Richard III (pg. 123). But the very nature of prison life at Dartmoor Prison No. 4   meant that there was an international community or society.   As Bolster notes, ”black sailors built a nation-within-a-nation in Dartmoor Prison”, which created a shared power between white and black prisoners.   Thornton argues the case of the creation of fraternities amongst slaves of the Kongo, which analyzed how Africans could be participants  in the broad patterns  and trends of western social and cultural developments yet create, live in, and be shaped by what many Americans see as a distinctive regime.

Second,  African Americans believed in a higher purpose  of what it was to be an American.  To express Americanism would be a society that defined itself in economic  and cultural components, and Bolster defines Americanism, which began in the age of sail for many African American sailors that had become prisoners of war. Scholars, such as Thornton, McKnight and Garofalo agree with a Marxist  perspective of slaves and escaped ones were capitalistic profit seekers as those that may have stolen other slaves to be sold or were marketplace workers in the urban cities of Latin America. In comparison, Bolster defines the issue of impressment into the Royal Navy for most prisoners of war. Yet he distinctly expressed  that many African American refused the enrollment of the muster,  but it the refusal of profit from the “[T]o assume that men like Backus, Godfrey and Potter were situating themselves as Americans simply to gain official American assistance, or to stick with white shipmates,  is to ignore their conscious decision-making”(Bolster, pg. 117).   But what is more convincing is Bolster’s argument for William Godfrey’s testimonial correspondence to the Congress of the United States of America, of the conditions of impressed seamen after 1815, which disagrees with the presumption of  Africans and creolized escaped slaves of Africa and Latin America- to be a subsequent creole culture were capitalistic profit seeking people.  “Neither have I , knowing myself to be an American as well for what reason, I do not wish to serve them.” (pg. 117).

In conclusion,  African American Americanism was defined by the cultural and economic developments that challenged those who were of the distinctive slave regime into a sailor. Through Bolster’s storytelling of the age of sail throughout the War of 1812, his book sufficiently described the African American’s reistance to slavery and impressment.  He challenges the prsumptions of Americanism as inherited ideas of slavery to shape both a world view  and response to  the intellectual and ideological assaults on slavery and its survived creole culture into a strengthened African American culture.