Slaves Fought For England, Liberty

Those Americans who seek refuge from the moral compromises of contemporary politics in the idyllic past of the Founding Fathers—the devoted friends of liberty and the oppressed—might want to dream about a different era.

Simon Schama’s latest book, “Rough Crossings,” offers compelling support to the argument that for a significant portion of North Americans—namely the tens of thousands of African slaves in the British Colonies at the time—it was the British, not the American colonists, who offered a surer shot at freedom.

In the book, Schama traces the path of “Black Loyalists,” slaves in Revolutionary America promised their freedom by the British in return for their military service against the incipient Continental Army of incensed patriots.

From plantations in the South, to refuge in British-held Nova Scotia after the war, and finally over to the newly-created territory of Sierra Leone on the African coast, these slaves had navigated not only a formidable distance, but also the tangled web of race politics in the 18th-century Atlantic world.

Schama, university professor of history and art history at Columbia University, is a veritable superstar of popular academic writing. His sweeping history of the French Revolution, “Citizens,” published in 1989, first established his reputation as a canonical modern historian. His three-volume “History of Britain” cemented his prestige.

Although generally held in high esteem, Schama—former Mellon professor of the social sciences and Kenan professor of the humanities at Harvard until 1993—has intermittently come under fire for some of his more esoteric projects. The fallout from his bizarre 1991 speculative murder history, “Dead Certainties,” may have kept some readers away from his 1995 interdisciplinary masterpiece, “Landscape and Memory.”

His quirks, while notable, are not without precedent; Schama belongs to a school of British-educated historians (specifically those who studied under the legendary John Harold Plumb at Cambridge) who place a refreshing emphasis on literary style—whether it be Linda Colley’s riveting yet sprawling “Captives,” or David Cannadine’s controversial study of the British Empire, “Ornamentalism.”

“Rough Crossings” is Schama’s first book since the third volume of “Britain” came out in 2002, and it’s a return to form of the highest order. Instead of resting on his laurels and keeping to well-worn historiographical ruts, Schama seems to be using his fame to push a far more idiosyncratic project.

The narrative is well-constructed, delighting in the chance to place the standard account of the unfolding war in soft focus. As the fate of the slaves in the southern colonies assumes primary importance, usual keystones of American Revolutionary War histories, such as the Boston Tea Party and the battles at Lexington and Concord, assume the same air of hazy reportage as they would have to the beleaguered British governors.

The greatest fault of the book stems not from its focus, which adds a fascinating dimension to this period of American history, but the tone with which Schama presents his discoveries. The glee with which he points out the hypocrisy of slave-owning “Sons of Liberty” seems a tad excessive; none of this is particularly new to the American historical narrative.

When describing even the admittedly racist South, Schama uses phrases like “theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery,” taking revisionism beyond corrective steering, into an opposite view of the standard heroic American myth. Of course the reality is more complex—a fact that Schama fairly acknowledges throughout the book—but several of his contentions aim for catchphrase status at the expense of historical fairness.

Hopefully the forthcoming British Broadcasting Corporation series tie-in with the book will lean more toward the reasoned analysis of the bulk of the book, emphasizing the motivations and ambiguities of all the actors in this transatlantic epic, rather than rely on the cheap “Americans are hypocrites” shot.

Schama participated in a similar crossover television show for “Britain,” and is currently presenting for a BBC series entitled “The Power of Art.” If reviews of these shows are any indication, Schama looks poised to remain a so-called “Superdon,” in the illustrious company of Harvard’s own Tisch Professor of History Niall Ferguson, for quite some time.

—Reviewer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.

Rough Crossings
By Simon Schama
Ecco
Out Now