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Rough Crossings
Britain the Slaves and the American Revolution
By
Simon Schama
Book Review by Kam
Williams
| Seeing the Revolutionary
War through the eyes of enslaved blacks
turns its meaning upside down. … The vaunted
war for liberty was a war for the
perpetuation of servitude. The contortions
of logic were so perverse, yet so habitual,
that George Washington could describe
[Virginia Governor] Dunsmore as ‘that arch traitor to the rights
of humanity’ for promising to free slaves whilst those
who kept them in bondage were heroes of liberty.
[Therefore] for blacks, the news that the British were
coming was a reason for hope, celebration and action.
-- Excerpted from the Introduction |
In
order to appreciate
Rough Crossings fully, you
have to be prepared to throw out virtually every
preconceived notion you are probably harboring about the
birth of this nation. The self-serving myths long
propagated about the American Revolution would have us
believe that the Founding Fathers were a brave and
idealistic freedom-loving bunch who altruistically took
up arms in the name of independence over the issue of
taxation without representation.
Truth
be told, it turns out that the Civil War wasn’t the
first to be waged over slavery on this country’s soil.
The real reason for the revolt in 1776 had more to do
with the colonists’ reluctance to abolish slavery than
with differences over the King’s tax rate.
As a
consequence, the leaders of the rebellion were all slave
owners, including such supposed heroes as George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and
Patrick Henry. But I bet you never heard of Henry
Washington, a slave of General George who escaped from
the plantation to enlist in an all black British
regiment to take up arms against old wooden choppers.
Why did Henry do so? Because England had promised
freedom outright to any slaves from rebel plantations
who agreed to fight with the Redcoats.
Thanks
to Columbia University Professor Simon Sharma, author of
Rough Crossings, we now know that Henry Washington was
not alone. Although the history books canonize Crispus
Attucks, a black man, as the first patriot to die for
the noble cause at the Boston Massacre, seems that he
had aligned himself with the wrong side, at least as far
as the interests of Africans in America were concerned.
In
fact, for every Attucks, there were probably a thousand
Henry Washingtons. While the Loyalists eagerly recruited
blacks, in 1776, Congress passed a law specifically
excluding slaves from massa’ George Washington’s
Continental Army. The author refers to this wholesale
flight of runaways as the Revolutionary War’s “dirty
little secret,” estimating that about 100,000 slaves
defected during the conflict.
Yet,
the Father of Our Country, whose virtues continue to be
extolled in hypocritical history books as a man who
could never tell a lie, is exposed, here, as an
inveterate two-face who deliberately defamed his
opposition as being against freedom when it was he and
his racist cohorts who had answered the call to arms to
preserve the institution of slavery. In sum, Rough
Crossings represents a long-overdue revision of fiction
into spellbinding factual narratives which answer lots
of long-suppressed questions about a seminal period in
American lore.
Required reading as a counterbalance to all the
patriotic claptrap we’ve been fed for generations.
* * *
* *
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American
Revolution by Simon Schama. Ecco Press Hardcover,
$29.95 496 pages, illustrated. ISBN: 0-06-053916-X
posted 23 August 2006 |
