Customer Reviews

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

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First of all, I want to establish that Simon Schama is a terrific writer, keenly observant and generous with the telling details. And he has a lot of details in this marvelously researched book.

ROUGH CROSSINGS deals with a topic that I don't remember running across in any history class I've taken (and I have an M.A. in the subject.) During the Revolutionary War, black slaves fought for freedom... their OWN freedom from their colonial masters, and they did so on the side of the English.

The fact that slaves' colonial masters were in many cases the Founding Fathers of the U.S. makes this book utterly fascinating. The Brits encouraged and used escaped slaves for all facets of warfare, even forming a unit called the Ethiopian Regiment. (Kidnapped West Africans fighting for their liberty by supporting a monarch against a budding republic based on human rights?! Go figure.)

And since the slaves were fighting for a losing cause, many of them ended up stranded afterwards in Nova Scotia. The Brits eventually shipped many of them back to West Africa to found Sierra Leone. (Ironically, this was located in a spot where the slave trade had been long established.)

Although Sierra Leone seemed like a brilliant idea, Schama eloquently explains why the experiment didn't even last a generation. (One of George Washington's slaves helped found the government and ended up a rebel against it.) In telling this tragic tale, Schama (an Englishman, BTW) provides us with a small glimpse of what-might-have-been. And though it may take another century for Sierra Leone to stabilize and flourish, perhaps it's a glimpse of what-will-someday-be.

For those readers who enjoyed last year's best seller, David McCullough's "1776," the present volume by Simon Schama will show the events of that same period in a whole new light. Once you thought you had the definitive story, a book such as this comes along and turns the story upside down. In this book, Schama writes of the promise of freedom offered by the British Monarchy to the American slaves who were willing to serve on the side of the crown. The offer of course was not entirely altruistic; King George had much to gain from depriving the ungrateful colonists of their workforce. But for the slaves this was an offer they couldn't refuse, and they were willing to risk life and limb to cross over to the British side.

Much has been said about the Founding Fathers and the fact that they were slaveholders; Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin had all anguished over the morality of it. Yet not only did they retain their slaves, they acquiesced to the southern slaveholding states to allow it in order to get the constitution ratified. This poisoned the republic from the beginning and festered until it erupted with the Civil War many years later. It was one of the tragic ironies of the American Revolution; for all their high-minded ideals of independence and freedom, they could not let go of the institution of slavery which had given them their prosperity.

Schama's wonderfully written account of this little-mentioned struggle is very engaging and sorrowful. Those slaves who found themselves under British rule after 1787 were shipped either to Nova Scotia, the Carribean, or London, where they encountered new hardships and a sense of betrayal. To a great extent the British, having lost their struggle to control the colonists, were looking for places to unload their new subjects. In this sordid affair, Schama finds some heroic characters. One of these characters was Thomas Peter, who was one of the ex-slaves shipped off to the barren and chilly Nova Scotia, where the land they had been promised was virtually uninhabitable. In 1971, Peters went to London representing 202 families to plead with the British government to ship them back to Africa. As Schama tells it, Peters was the first genuine African-American political leader.

The other unsung heroes were the abolitionists Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, both of whom relentlessly challenged the institution of slavery through the courts. There was also John Clarkson, Thomas's younger brother and Royal Navy captain, who was responsible for resettling thousands of ex-slaves from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone.

The promised land of Sierra Leone turned out initially to be another tragedy. Not only were their high expectations of freedom not met, they encountered lingering slavery, disease, and death. Yet with the persistence of the ex-slaves and the abolitionists, Freetown became by the end of the 1790's a thriving community. Schama has done a magnificent job of telling the story of this struggle and giving a voice to those who ultimately made it succeed.

There appears to be two kinds of political history: that which is hidden from us completely by the special interests, and that which can be dug up and exposed when it is "safe". Rough Crossings by Simon Shama is of the latter, and will stir up a storm of indignation when it is published in the USA in 2006.

Starting even before the Revolutionary War, so-called American Patriots and our founding fathers exhibited the same kind of special interest/self interest that schoolchildren today are taught is beneath public service. Patrick (Give me liberty or give me death!) Henry could not for the life of him understand why he should free his own slaves. Thomas Jefferson's first declaration of independence in 1775 cited the British government's rumored incitement of Negroes to rise up for their freedom as one of the prime movers of the colonies to break free of the tyranny of England.

He was proven right in that tens of thousands of slaves ran away to fight on the British side, against the colonists. The "Patriots" killed every runaway they could find before they got to the English ships. (The same was to occur in 1812, when the British and the Americans clashed again)

The British, who of course taught the Americans everything they knew about slavery in the first place, had only recently begun to abhor it. Using the courts, English activists were able to obtain the freedom of people who were being captured in England to be shipped off to sugar plantations. The British public, caught up in this humanitarian, headline-making campaign, was offended by the tyranny of the Americans, just as the Americans were offended by the tyranny of the British in things like taxation. The result was armed conflict.

Word of successes in English courts gave hope to the American slaves, and the southern slaveholders clearly only joined the revolution to protect slavery, as they would again in the Civil War 90 years later. Meanwhile, Jefferson had a change of heart and included much more humanitarian wording in the next draft of the declaration of independence. It was edited out to avoid offending the new southern allies the Patriots had acquired.

During the war, Patriot General Sumter took to awarding slaves to soldiers for voluntary service, and sometimes also in lieu of pay. No sooner had the war ended, than black soldiers were rounded up and sent back to their owners, or auctioned off. It was actually a top priority of the Americans. Henry Laurens, a man who skimmed 10% on slave sales in the colonies, managed to insert a clause in the peace treaty that Negroes and other American property would not be carried away in the British withdrawal. the Land of Liberty made no pretence of equality.

There follows great diversions - to new settlements in Sierra Leone and in Nova Scotia, with possibly the most important development of North America's first black political leader, Thomas Peters, fifty years before Frederick Douglass. Peters worked tirelessly on both sides of the Atlantic to obtain the rights promised by the Crown.

In the early 1800s, failing to get an acutal law abolishing slavery through the House of Commons, MPs apparently agreed with testimony such as the Lord Mayor of London's, who claimed ending slavery would end the market for rotten codfish. This was apparently a delicacy shipped to the Caribbean, to be forced down the throats of slaves, who were force fed with iron bits and clamps holding their mouths open.

The struggle has obviously continued - to this day - but the book is a well documented adventure of it in the present tense, complete with Perfect Storms that make Hurricane Katrina look like a spring shower, and brutality only non-fiction could get away with.

The myths we create about our past to edify our young and swell our national pride are nearly always noble and simple. History is much messier, often complicating our myths with inconvenient facts that ruin their simplicity and muddy their nobility. Simon Schama's book `Rough Crossings' is a case in point. It is the story of the slaves of the American patriots who were not included in the liberty that their masters fought for, or in the stirring phrases of the Declaration of Independence - slaves whose only path to liberty was to take up arms and fight alongside the British against their masters, and against the cause of a liberty that would keep them in bondage. It is a most interesting and disturbing story that neither begins nor ends with the American Revolution.

`Rough Crossings' actually contains three interlocking stories. It tells the story of Granville Sharp and Britain's abolitionist movement, both before and after the Revolution. It relates the history of the slaves seeking their freedom by fighting for Britain in the Revolution, and finally, follows the fate of those freed slaves after the Revolution, first to Nova Scotia and London, and later to a colony in Sierra Leone. While the details of the three tales often widely diverge, each is necessary to explain the others, and work together as a greater whole. And while the action of the slaves in the Revolution serves as a catalyst for the story, it receives less attention than does the story of the work toward abolition in Britain or the post war fate of the slaves freed by their service for Britain.

I found `Rough Crossings to be fascinating but uneven. At times it was a gripping, page-turning read, but it could abruptly shift into a numbing morass of plodding detail. Schama would often drop the thread of one story, move on to another matter, and not return to pick up the dropped thread for many, many pages, creating a disjointed reading experience. He was at his best when writing about such intriguing characters as Granville Sharp, the gentleman musician who made the abolition of slavery in Britain his life's work; Lieutenant John Clarkson, the young navel officer who became the determined protector of the rights of the freed slaves and the governor of their colony in Sierra Leone; or Thomas Peters, freed slave and sergeant in the British Black Pioneers who became a impassioned advocate for his people. It is these and other fascinating characters into whom Schama breaths such life that are the heart of his book, and the best argument for reading it. `Rough Crossing' is history as important as it is neglected. I recommend it both to illuminate the dark, neglected aspects of the history of the American Revolution, and as an intriguing history of British abolition.

Theo Logos

Even though I had believed that I knew at least a bit about all aspects of the American Revolution, this book caught me by surprise. I had never known anything about the British and their freedom offer to the slaves of American rebels. This exciting story spends a bit of time on the war itself and the rush to liberty of multitudes of blacks, but the bulk of it is taken up with what happened to the freed slaves when the war was over. There we see that the British government wasn't very much different from the American one, in that it professed its belief in liberty for all, but in practice the ex-slaves were considered second-class citizens, if even that. They were unceremoniuosly dumped into squalor in Nova Scotia, and only the efforts of a few brave Englishmen allowed many of them to be transported to Sierra Leone, there to found a free black society. Even there the people were subjected to being demeaned by the whites who controlled the area. This is a sad morality tale, and it shows up the hypocracy of both the American and British systems of government. This should be required reading for everyone.

Schama has done a service to us all through this book, which provides a look at how people in the 18th century interpreted the phrase "all men are created equal." The British by and large were far more willing to include blacks in that category than the people of the United States. Slaves who escaped and fought for the British were promised their freedom. Not every promise was kept, but many were. After the war, Schama takes us along with the freed slaves as they are shuttled to Nova Scotia and eventually Sierra Leone, as they demanded and fought for the freedom due to them by virtue of their service in the British army. The text is very well written and footnoted; the author understands that well-told history is told in (true) stories. The book's only miscue is Schama's subtle mocking of the religious fervor of the freed slaves and abolitionists. Highly recommended.

Amazing, amazing, amazing. This is one of the best audiobooks I purchased recently. In the last several years, the academic establishment has completely rewritten our view of the American revolution. First, Hochschild wrote "Bury the Chains." Next, Blumrosen penned "Slave Nation." Today: "Rough Crossings." Although different books, these volumes establish that abolitionists in England were starting to seriously involve the Courts in limiting "that accursed thing - slavery" on British soil, and that the Africans in bondage were learning of English attitudes. Slave insurrections were in the air. After Bunker Hill, the British encouraged slaves to fight against their masters...this was intolerable to many Southerners so they joined with the Northern patriots to split from England. Only in this way could the South guarantee the protection of slavery on American soil. The hypothesis is not as wild as it sounds and is ably discussed in all three books. My favorite is Simon Schama's magisterial analysis...because he is such a good storyteller. He is also a terrific narrator who reads with profound conviction about the efforts of blacks and sympathetic whites to end the intolerable institution of African bondage. True, the British promised Blacks their freedom; in response the American patriots promised to enslave more Blacks as property bonuses to soldiers after victory. Put in another way, the American revolution looks entirely different depending on the color of the "patriot." We learn that even Patrick Henry had a slave...so much for talk about liberty and death. "Rough Crossings" is a story of real villains and real heroes. We are lucky to have such a wonderful researcher and narrator offer us these engaging perspectives. I recommend this book without reservation.

This was an excellent scholarly piece. It was instrumental in my discussion for my politics of revolutionary thought course. It is an excellent spring board to challenge students to find out more about the roles of African Americans during the American Revolutionary War.

I, too, have an MA in American History, and I was never given reason to think about each of two questions raised by this important book. Firstly and fundamentally, what was the timetable by which the British military were expected to leave the former colonies, and, second, what "property" could they take with them, especially as "property" had a very particular meaning here in the new nation?
Was the Revolution in large part fought to maintain slavery? That surely bears on the problematic nature of our Constitution.
The wonderfully gifted writer and historian (would that they were always the same thing!)poses these vital questions. And we are fortunate that the near simultaneous publication of David B. Davis' Inhuman Bondage complements this fine effort. So, as one reviewer suggests, it is in some ways an overwritten period, but Schama and Davis add something new and exciting to the dialogue. My thanks.

If you've ever read the phrase in the Declaration of Independence---"He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us..."--and wondered what he meant, this book will answer that question. This is a chapter of history that your high school and college history texts skipped over.

First you should know that Simon Schama is English. That's important. No American-born history professor could write this book. American universities are the bedrock of political correctness when it comes to question of race, and this book is politically incorrect. Schama is currently a professor of history at Columbia. We'll see how long that lasts.

What Jefferson apparently meant when he wrote those words in the Declaration is that before the real start of the American Revolution in 1776, the British had promised Southern slaves freedom, armed them, and incited them to revolt and murder their masters. I'll bet your history texts never mentioned that little fact?

It sort of explains why the Southern States, which hadn't fought at Lexington and Concord, nor been subjected to the Courts of Admiralty with their seizures of property and trial without the benefit of juries, suddenly became such advocates for Revolution in 1776. British courts had sent the message that getting to England, and English law, meant freedom for runaway slaves. If British law became Colonial law, slaves thought they would be set free.

This book explores some absolutely new territory. The information is so fresh and novel, that you'll find yourself wondering "why haven't I heard this before?" Blacks running away and joining to fight with the British against the Patriots in droves (80,000 by some counts), slave insurrections, and black troops plundering Long Island and New Jersey--could this all really have happened?

In its review, The New York Times complained that Schama didn't discuss blacks who fought with the Patriots. When you read this you realize that blacks who fought for freedom from Britian were in the minority. Some free blacks may have fought in Massachusetts but in the South, fighting with the Patriots was not in the slave's own best interests.

It's clear that blacks were with the British, cheering for them against the Patriots, because they had no interest in seeing their masters free from British law---a law that they were convinced would set them free.

Having said that the book is novel and fresh, I also feel an obligation to point out that it has some weaknesses. Because Schama is British, he makes lengthy segways into British history. Popular American historians like David McCullough can get away with making lengthy segways into American history because the segways are directed to his principal audience---Americans. Schama's segways, for example into the legal cases of runaway slaves in Britain in 1772 and 1773, are probably more interesting to his English readers than to Americans. Call me provincial---I plead guilty. Maybe its the fracophile in me. It's why I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 (and because I fear "star inflation" in Amazon's scoring system).

Overall, I say buy it. If you want to be shaken from your comfortable beliefs about the American Revolution, this book will do it. Skip the parts about English history---its not sacreligious to do so---and you'll find lots of new information here.