American slaves fought for the British, hoped for liberty

"Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution"
by Simon Schama
HarperCollins, 475 pp., $29.95

Here's a fact not much noted in American history books: in the early days of the Revolutionary War, George Washington's slaves ran away and joined the British.

The slaves of James Madison and Benjamin Harrison, signers of the Declaration of Independence, fled their masters for the British lines. And slave Ralph Henry "evidently took his master Patrick Henry's theatrical pronouncement of 'give me Liberty or give me death' very much to heart, but not quite in the way its author intended, since he ran away at the earliest opportunity to the British lines," writes historian Simon Schama.

It's what one historian has called the "dirty little secret" of the Revolutionary War: that by the end of the revolution, 80,000 to 100,000 African-American slaves had escaped their masters' plantations. Many attempted to join the British side, in the hope that their chances of freedom were better with the British than the Americans. What happened next constitutes a harrowing, heroic and tragic tale, vividly told by Schama in his new book, "Rough Crossings: Britain, Slaves and the American Revolution."

A Brit who lives and works in America as a history professor at Columbia University, Schama has written several books of history and became a trans-Atlantic star of sorts in 2004 with his "History of Britain" television series, broadcast in the U.K. on the BBC and here on the History Channel.

Schama is the latest historian to unearth what earlier chroniclers of the Revolution managed not to notice — that most American blacks of that era either fled their masters or fought for the other side. It's fair to say that he's the best storyteller among them — in "Rough Crossings," "Schama writes like no one so much as Dickens," wrote an admiring New Yorker writer.

"A germ of hope"

"Rough Crossings" is peopled by outsized characters who managed to live through enough adventure and drama for three or four lives:

There's Boston King, an escaped South Carolina slave, carpenter and preacher who survived smallpox and abandonment by the British, evaded capture by the Americans, found refuge in New York and endured starvation in Nova Scotia before leaving for a new life as a teacher in Sierra Leone.

There's the Englishman Granville Sharp, a biblical scholar, musician and "tireless public nuisance" who forced the British to confront their hypocrisy in aiding and abetting the slave trade.

Schama begins his story in Britain with Sharp, who used reports of escaped slaves who were kidnapped by their masters to goad the English conscience. In 1772, a prominent judge ruled in one escaped slave's favor. The ruling said only that a slave could not be taken against his will out of England; it did not make slavery itself illegal. But it made "the idea of British freedom a germ of hope," Schama writes. The news leapt across the Atlantic like lightning, electrifying African Americans and fueling smoldering tensions between Americans — especially slave-owning ones — and the British.

Then the besieged royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that all slaves willing to bear arms for the British would be granted their freedom. Slaves deserted their masters in droves, and those who fought for Lord Dunmore wore "liberty to slaves" emblazoned on their coats.

Stories of blacks who fought on the American side have become part of the Revolutionary mythos (though many slave-soldiers hoped to trade their military service for their freedom). But blacks loyal to the British performed endless, thankless tasks on Redcoats' behalf, and some fought valiant, suicidal battles.

Smallpox raged through the British army, and many sickened blacks were abandoned by their British saviors. At war's end, General Cornwallis expelled the blacks from his camp, prompting one Hessian officer to write that "We had used them to good advantage and set them free and now, with fear and trembling they had to face the reward of their cruel masters."

Many died; many more were retaken as slaves. But some fled to the British-held stronghold of New York. Their odyssey was just beginning.

"Wind-whipped corner

of the world"

In New York, George Washington pressed the British to return the slaves to their masters. But the last commander of British forces in America bargained successfully for their liberty. Their British certificates of freedom secreted in their belongings, the black loyalists sailed with their white counterparts out of New York harbor to Nova Scotia, a "wind-whipped corner of the world" with stingy soil and snowfalls 5 feet deep.

In the flinty, frigid outpost, black loyalists competed with whites for land allotments, and fewer than half the blacks received any land at all. Many had to indenture themselves as servants to whites to survive: "It came back to the land, always, for without it, and their flour and bacon gone, what choice did they have but to indenture themselves and their wives and children for years at a time?" Schama writes. It felt a lot like ... slavery.

Meanwhile, in England, abolitionist fever was running high, stoked by the horrible case of the slave ship Zong, whose captain ordered the crew to pitch living as well as dead smallpox-infected slaves overboard. Efforts to help displaced blacks became something more audacious — a plan to start a permanent settlement of free blacks in Sierra Leone, in a spot square in the dark heart of the slavery trade. Early efforts to get the colony to stick were unsuccessful. But when the black Nova Scotian settlers heard of the colony, they once again resolved to move — for freedom and land.

A man of honor

The fate of the 1,196 black Nova Scotians who signed up for a new life in Sierra Leone settled on the shoulders of one seasoned young naval officer, Jonathan Clarkson, brother to a prominent London abolitionist, who got the job of extracting them from Nova Scotia.

In Nova Scotia, Clarkson was shocked to the core at the black loyalists' treatment and swore to finally honor Britain's pledges to them. He told the would-be settlers, he wrote later, that "they must look up to me as their friend and protector; that I should at all times be happy to redress their grievances and ready to defend them with my life." For that, he won the blacks' enduring loyalty, Schama writes: "They had been through so many shabby betrayals. He would stand by them. He would be their British freedom or die in their defense."

Clarkson negotiated with profiteers for supplies, and wrangled with whites avid to keep their indentured servants working for them ... forever. Finally, on Jan. 15, 1792, as he came down with a burning fever, 1,196 blacks on 15 ships sailed out of Nova Scotia. Onboard an ancient blind woman of 104, abducted by slavers as a child in Sierra Leone, had implored Clarkson to "take her with him so that she might 'lay her bones in her native country.' "

Home to Africa

Miraculously, every ship made it. Once they reached Sierra Leone, the settlers faced challenges worse than a January storm in the Atlantic: white British condescension and eagerness to make a profit from the enterprise. Clarkson survived his illness but constantly warred with his fellow governing directors and eventually was dismissed as the colony's leader. Some settlers mounted a good-old-fashioned Revolutionary-style rebellion against his successors — and the revolt was crushed.

But Freetown endured. By 1825, Nova Scotians constituted a core of about 10 percent of the settlement, as other freed slaves and free blacks swelled its numbers to 50,000. Later, the abolitionists' dream of a self-governing settlement was transmuted into an outpost of the British empire.

A bittersweet ending, but an amazing story. For a time, these travelers, some of whom had come full circle, from Africa to America to Nova Scotia and back, formed "a place quite unlike any other in the Atlantic world," Schama writes, "a community of free black British African-Americans."

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com