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Books like Rough Crossing raise a large, important, and tragically enduring question.1 It is whether the United States' historical profession to be a land of liberty should be taken seriously. Ask generations of willing immigrants—ask adherents of countless religious minorities persecuted for one reason or another in their homelands—ask entrepreneurs beyond counting, the numberless founders of voluntary faith-based organizations or the great legion of American purveyors of print—and the answer must, on balance, be a conclusive yes. But concentrate on the history of African Americans, and the answer is not nearly so obvious. Is their experience an exception that proves the rule, or is it a deadly fly poisoning a hypocritical ointment?
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution
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Simon Schama's Rough Crossings joins a gathering stream of publications that will doubtless grow larger in the approach to March 25, 2007, which marks the 200th anniversary of the final enactment of the British Parliament's "Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade."2 For a comparison germane to Schama's purposes, it is pertinent to note that the United States Congress also enacted a ban on slave trading in 1807. Yet the effect of the American action was only marginal. For decades after 1807, the British naval squadrons that were dispatched to the west coast of Africa to enforce Parliament's action regularly interdicted slave ships bound with their human cargo to North America.
This book is presented as the story of American slaves who during the American Revolution escaped from "the Sons of Liberty" in order to find refuge, manumission, and at least some support from the British "tyrants." More than the subtitle might suggest, however, it is also about the zealously persistent British reformers who championed abolition and expended great energy in pursuing that goal on three continents. In its first half the key figure is Granville Sharp (1735–1813), a Quaker-influenced evangelical whose lifelong anti-slavery advocacy began in 1765 when on the stoop of his physician-brother's surgery in London he encountered Jonathan Strong, a West Indian slave brutally beaten by his master to within an inch of his life. In the book's second half Schama's lens is John Clarkson (1764–1828), a young naval lieutenant who in 1791–1792 persuaded over 1,000 Loyal blacks, who were living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick after being rescued from their bondage in the United States, to emigrate to the west coast of Africa, where a British philanthropic company hoped to create a new life for librated slaves in Sierra Leone. Clarkson, like Sharp, was an earnest evangelical. For him, as for Sharp, there exists an abundance of published and archival source material, which Schama exploits very well.
Although the quantity of surviving sources makes it easier for Schama to depict the white philanthropists who promoted antislavery—as well as their white opponents—he nonetheless delivers a great deal of compelling reading on the freed slaves for whom the philanthropists mobilized. Their stories make up the most memorable parts of the book. Some of these accounts document levels of perseverance and integrity beside which the martyrologies and heroic deeds of the American search for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" pale by comparison.
There was, for example, Shadrack Furman of Acamac County, Virginia, who in 1781 went to work for the British after his house was destroyed by Continental forces. After supplying information to General Cornwallis, Furman was captured by Americans, given 500 lashes, beaten about the head so that he lost most of his sight, had his leg chopped almost off with an ax, and was left to die in a field. But Furman recovered and went on to serve aboard a British ship and as an agent on land in the last days of the war. To indicate that emancipation by the British was never a unmitigated blessing, it took Furman several years of scrounging in London to convince a Court of Loyalist Claims that he was, in his mutilated body, who he said he was, and to be awarded a pension of £8 per year (or about the annual wage of a young servant).
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