Africa and the American Civil War: The Geopolitics of Freedom and the Production of Commons

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized that the histories of West Africa and North America are so fundamentally intertwined that it makes more sense to speak of the two regions as parts of a common Atlantic World than to describe discrete interactions between two autonomous geopolitical entities. This common Atlantic history is especially obvious in the period of the Atlantic slave trade, when enslaved Africans formed one of the largest, though involuntary, migrant groups to North America. The decline of the trade may have reduced the direct contacts between Africa and the Americas; however, these contacts continued and, more to the point, common political and intellectual traditions continued to inform histories around the Black Atlantic.¹ Two of the most basic features of the American Civil War, the division of identifiably slave and free states and the creation of self-managing free agricultural enterprises, are, in fact, by no means unique to the USA but are rather key elements of the struggle over slavery in the African diaspora.² While the flight of slaves and their subsequent, short-lived establishment of self-managed, economically autonomous agriculture might appear to be spontaneous, natural reactions to slavery, we should resist the temptation of regarding them as such. Rather, as E.P. Thompson taught with his study of the food riot, we should understand these actions as based in traditions of political and moral thought.³ If the reactions seem natural to us, it is because we have learned from, and perhaps even participate in, these traditions.