Rough Crossings, by Simon Schama

They say history is written by the victors.  I know my view of the American Revolution is colored by my having been born, raised, and educated in the United States.  So here comes an Englishman to add a little bit of perspective to my America-centric view of history.

Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution presents a slice of history not often considered in studies of the time during and after the American Revolution.  British abolitionists were ahead of the curve, working to abolish the slave trade.  Some of that spirit was behind the British attitude toward slaves in the American colonies, but, as Schama describes, the war took precedent.  The British made an open offer to colonial slaves: fight with us, and we'll grant your freedom.  Some of these black loyalists took them up on the offer, leaving the fields and taking up arms.  As a reward for their service, they could go to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, back to England, or elsewhere.  Unfortunately, some were captured and sold back to slavery, and many ended up in servitude little different that slavery.  But others did very well.

After the war, through the efforts of some British abolitionists, one group of over a thousand settlers in Nova Scotia, many of whom were former slaves, were given the opportunity to relocate to Sierra Leone and establish a new colony.  Schama takes the reader through these events with a reporter's eye, bringing the stories alive with first-hand accounts and vivid descriptions.  We know William Wilberforce, the most famous abolitionist.  But before Wilberforce, there was Granville Sharp.  Using natural law and legal arguments, Sharp campaigned against slavery, which he said violated English common law, and published the first major British anti-slavery book.  His activism and advocacy were such that, as Schama writes, there was not a black person in the British colonies who didn't know Sharp's name.

We also meet John Clarkson, whose older brother Thomas was a major abolitionist alongside Wilberforce.  John was recruited to lead the Sierra Leone resettlement movement, and, due to his commitment to the families moving from Nova Scotia, came to be revered by them as a modern-day Moses (or Noah, considering the means of transportation).  One can scarcely imagine the feelings of these former slaves, many of whom were violently torn away from their homeland, suffered under the heavy hand of slavery in the colonies, and now would be returning to Africa as free people with the promise of land ownership and self-sufficiency.

Long before the 20th century civil rights movement, the blacks of Sierra Leone experienced unprecedented equality.  Under Clarkson's leadership, blacks and whites were granted true equality, perhaps for the first time anywhere.  Once they settled in at Sierra Leone, heads of households, including many women, voted for community leadership, "the first occasion on which African-Americans voted in any election."  Schama goes on, "It was momentous . . . that the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom."  In some ways, this band was a truer embodiment of the ideals of the American revolution than the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

If Rough Crossings has a weakness, it's the general lack of context.  I wish I could have gotten a better sense of how many slaves actually fought with the British as a proportion of slaves in the colonies, and a comparison of how the Nova Scotia/Sierra Leone former slaves fared versus former slaves who lived elsewhere.  I also wish Schama would have spent more time on the fact that almost side-by-side with Freetown a major port for the slave trade remained very active.  The hypocrisy and split personality of the British Empire on slavery during this time is astounding.

Schama's book presents a little-known slice of history of the United States and the Africans who were brought here.  His dry but compelling narrative captures the hardships of colonial life in both Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, as well as the promise and hope they held out for a new life.  Tragically, Clarkson's vision was thwarted by some of his countrymen, but Rough Crossings tells a terrific story that hints at what might have been in Africa.