The ex-slave soldiers betrayed by Britain

Submitted by Anon on 7 April, 2007 - 11:20

Jill Mountford reviews Rough Crossing: Britain, Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

This book should carry, alongside the blurb and excerpts from reviews, a health warning: this book will affect your breathing and heart rate. Rough Crossing is a rousing account of the struggle waged by black Americans in their fight for freedom in the 18th century. Schama is a conservative, whose serious books include one rubbishing the French revolution. Here, though, he tells a great story vividly, full of interesting facts hardly otherwise mentioned in history. He illustrates and illuminates the horrors, irony, hypocrisy and contradictions surrounding the slaves emancipation.

Of the Southern slave owners, Schama writes “Theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilised to protect slavery. A revolution for liberty that excluded black people in the vilest of ways.”

Schama probes the grey areas of history. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners, both uncomfortable about the morality of slavery. Even though they were revolutionaries neither was able to consider liberty and equality for black people at the birth of American democracy.

Equally it was out of “military opportunism” that Lord Dunmore, the beleaguered last royal governor of Virginia (and owner of slaves) offered rebel-owned slaves their freedom in return for them fighting on the side of British tyranny in the War of Independence (this offer did not extend to loyalist-owned slaves!) Soon after his announcement Dunmore was able to organise 300 volunteers into a unit he called the Ethiopian Regiment. These men wore uniforms bearing the motto “Liberty to Slaves.”

Between 80,000 to 100,000 black people fled the South and their bondage during the war. 30,000 fled Virginia alone. So great was the escape from slavery that it threatened to collapse the social order, It was, Schama points out, this threat that drove masses of whites to take up arms against the British, and not patriotic idealism. And so desperate were the slaves that they would dive into the ocean at the sight of a passing ship bearing a Union Jack flag, in order to swim towards it. Many runaway slaves were caught by their masters, and were savagely beaten and returned to bondage. Of those who reached British protection many died of smallpox and other diseases.

After the war thousands of black loyalists were trapped in New York living in fear their former owners would reclaim them. Boston King, a former slave, wrote in his memoir “Peace was restored between America and Great Britain which diffused universal joy among all parties except us, who had escaped slavery and taken refuge with the English army; for a report prevailed at New York that all slaves…were to be delivered up to their masters, altho’ some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumour filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters… seizing upon slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.”

In 1783, the British command in New York issued 3,000 certificates of freedom to former slaves enabling them to leave America for the harsh landscape of Nova Scotia (then a British colony) “or wherever else he/she may think proper.” Some ex-slaves took the crossing to London and were faced with the freedom to starve on the streets; others took the crossing Nova Scotia and exercised their freedom to till unfertile ground in a cruel landscape (fewer than half got any land at all).

It was a group of Abolitionists in Britain led by Granville Sharp (whom Schama describes as a “tireless public nuisance”) along with John Clarkson (Brother of Thomas Clarkson) who helped create Freetown on the west coast of Sierra Leone in Africa.

Sharp had become a fervent anti-slavery campaigner more than a decade earlier when he witnessed the pain and injury inflicted upon Jonathan Strong, a slave in London. Strong had been viciously beaten with a pistol by David Lisle, who had bought him from Barbados to London. Sharp argued through the courts that Strong was in England and was no longer a slave. After three years of battling, the courts ruled in favour of Strong. Sharp convinced the courts that “as soon as any slave sets foot upon English territory, he becomes free.”

Sharp and others in the anti-slavery campaign organised the “Anti-Saccharine” Campaign — a boycott of West Indian sugar. They gave out leaflets that depicted the atrociously inhuman conditions of slave ships. They had medallions made depicting a black man manacled bearing the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother.” These were the radicals amongst the abolitionists.

Fifteen ships left the shores of Nova Scotia carrying more than a thousand ex-slaves including a blind woman of 104, who had been captured into slavery from Sierra Leone as a young child and whose dying wish was to “lay her bones in her native country.”

On arrival in Sierra Leone the settlers, black and white, were ravaged by disease and faced a hostile indigenous people. To add to their woes, the free black people were given very limited freedoms in Freetown. The ex-slaves organised and demanded democracy and rights. John Clarkson took it upon himself to fight the white bureaucrats, saying he was ‘happy to redress their grievances and ready to defend them with my life.” After many struggles and battles the black population made some gains.

By October 1792 Freetown was no longer an idea. “it was a place… a place quite unlike any other in the Atlantic world; it was a community of free black British African-Americans.” It was, in fact, the first place in the world where women had the vote — black women. (Compare this to the hostile views to universal suffrage held by the likes of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst 110 years later; and note it was a further 73 years before slavery was abolished in America).

As beautifully written as parts of this book are, as stirring and inspiring as many of the fights for freedom are there can be no beautifully written or stirring happy ending. Freetown ends up the first British colony in Africa — and just another imperial outpost. The “democratic experiment” lasted only 18 months. Despite this the reader is left in no doubt about the potential of the oppressed to fight for freedom against their oppressors. This is one of those books that should be part of the national curriculum.

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