Simon Schama - Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

Britain, the Slaves and the
American Revolution

for LISA JARDINE ,
my idea of an historian

Henry Washington, escaped slave of George Washinton, freed by British, later settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Granville Sharp, leading British abolitionist and instigator of first black settlement in Sierra Leone

William Sharp, brother of Granville, surgeon to King George III and to London poor

William Murray, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, responsible for seminal rulings on legal status of slaves in Great Britain

Jonathan Strong, Thomas Lewis, James Somerset: escaped slaves in London, victims of abduction and subjects of court cases brought by Granville Sharp

Henry Laurens, South Carolina Patriot, merchant, delegate to and president of the Continental Congress

John Laurens (son of Henry), aide-de-camp to George Washington, abolitionist officer in Continental army

Anthony Benezet, Quaker American in Philadelphia, correspondent with Granville Sharp

Thomas Jeremiah, free African-American in Charleston, hanged for alleged conspiracy to raise slave insurrection

John Murray, Lord Dunmore, last British governor of Virginia, responsible for 1775 proclamation offering freedom to slaves of Patriots in return for military service with the Royal Army

Lord William Campbell, last British governor of South Carolina

Thomas Peters, sergeant in the British Black Pioneers, settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Moses Wilkinson, blind Methodist preacher in Birchtown, Nova Scotia

Mary Perth, escaped slave from Virginia, freed by British, settler in Sierra Leone

John Kizell, son of Sherbro chief, escaped slave, loyalist soldier in American volunteers, North Carolina, settler in Sierra Leone

James Moncrief, British officer in siege of Savannah commanding black loyalist soliders and sappers

General Sir Henry Clinton, British commander-in-chief in America, patron and protector of British Black Pioneers

David George, African-American Baptist minister, escaped slave, free settler with his wife Phyllis, in Novia Scotia and Sierra Leone

General Lord Charles Cornwallis, British military commander in America

Boston King, and his wife Violet, escaped slaves, loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Colonel Tye, former slave in Monmouth County New Jersy, loyalist partisan leader

Stephen Blucke, free African-American, settler in Nova Scotia

Murphy Steele, sergeant in the Black Pioneers, friend of Thomas Peters

Olaudah Equiano aka Gustavus Vassa, London abolitionist, author of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano the African (1789)

Sir Charles Middleton, MP, abolitionist and Comptroller of the Royal Navy

James Ramsay, British naval surgeon turned clergyman and abolitionist

Thomas Clarkson, leading British abolitionist

Sir Guy Carleton, last commander-in-chief of British force in America, later Governor of Canada

Brigadier Samuel Birch, commandant of British garrison in New York, signatory of passport, certificate confirming freedom of black loyalists

Benjamin Whitecuffe, Long Island black farmer, loyalist spy for the British

William Wilberforce, member of Parliament for Hull and parliamentary leader of campaign to abolish the slave trade

Jonas Hanway, British reformer and philanthropist

Henry Smeathman, British scientist and eccentric, original proposer of Sierra Leone as site for black settlement

Thomas Boulden Thompson, commander of fleet carrying first settlers to Sierra Leone

Alexander Falconbridge, former slave-ship surgeon, agent in Africa for St Georges Bay (later the Sierra Leone) Company

Anna Maria Falconbridge, Alexanders wife, author of A Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone in the years 17913

King Tom, Temne chief in Sierra Leone

The Naimbana, paramount chief in Robana, Sierra Leone

King Jimmy, Temne chief in Sierra Leone, destroyer of Granville Town Sir John Parr, governor of Nova Scotia

Lieutenant John Clarkson, British naval officer, subsequently abolitionist and governor of second black settlement in Sierra Leone

Michael Wallace, entrepenuer, landowner and council member in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Benjamin Marston, Harvard-educated ex-merchant, surveyor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia

Henry Thornton, evangelical banker and abolitionist, first chairman of the Sierra Leone Company

Lawrence Hartshorne, Quaker merchant, Clarksons friend in Nova Scotia

Dr. Charles Taylor, surgeon appointed by the Sierra Leone Company to accompany the black fleet to Africa

Cato Perkins, black Methodist preacher, settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Stephen Skinner, New Jersey loyalist and Shelburne settler

Captain Jonathan Coffin, master of the Lucretia , John Clarksons flagship

Isaac Dubois, American loyalist, Carolinan cotton planter, settler in Sierra Leone, friend of Clarkson

Isaac Anderson, free black carpenter from Charleston, settler in Sierra Leone, militant campaigner for black rights

Nathaniel Wansey, leader, with Isaac Anderson, of revolt against goverment of Sierra Leone

William Dawes, acting governor of Sierra Leone after John Clarkson

Zachary Macaulay, governor of Sierra Leone, father of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Ludlam, fourth governor of Sierra Leone

Paul Cuffe, free black, landowner, trader with Sierra Leone, Quaker and abolitionist

Frederick Douglass, escaped slave-turned-abolitionist orator

The Hutchinson Family singers: Jesse, Abby, Judson and Asa, white religious and folk singers, abolitionist fellow passengers with Douglass on SS Cambria

Captain Charles Judkins, ex-slaver turned abolitionist, master of Cunarder SS Cambria

T EN YEARS after the surrender of George IIIs army to General Washington at Yorktown, British Freedom was hanging on in North America. Along with a few hundred other soulsScipio Yearman, Phoebe Barrett, Jeremiah Piggie and Smart Feller among themhe was scratching a living from the stingy soil around Preston, a few miles northeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.1

Like most of the Preston people, British Freedom was black and had come from a warmer place. Now he was a hardscrabbler stuck in a wind-whipped corner of the world between the blue spruce forest and the sea. But he was luckier than most. British Freedom had title to forty acres, and another one and a half of what the lawyers clerks in Halifax were pleased to call a town lot.2 It didnt look like much of a town, though, just a dirt clearing with rough cabins at the centre and a few chickens strutting around and maybe a mud-caked hog or two. Some of the people who had managed to get a team of oxen to clear the land of bald grey rocks grew patches of beans and corn and cabbages, which they carted to market in Halifax along with building lumber. But even those who prosperedby Preston standardstook themselves off every so often into the wilderness to shoot some birch partridge, or tried their luck on the saltwater ponds south of the village.3

What were they doing there? Not just surviving. British Freedom and the rest of the villagers were clinging to more than a scrap of Nova Scotia; they were clinging to a promise. Some of them even had that promise printed and signed by officers of the British army on behalf of the king himself, that the bearer so-and-so was at liberty to go wherever he or she pleased and take up whatever occupation he or she chose. That meant something for people who had been slaves. And the kings word was surely a bond. In return for their loyal service in the late American war, the Black Pioneers and the rest of them were to be granted two gifts of unimaginably precious worth: their freedom and their acres. It was, they told themselves, no more than their due. They had done perilous, dirty, exhausting work. They had been spies amidst the Americans; guides through the Georgia swamps; pilots taking ships over treacherous sandbars; sappers on the ramparts of Charleston as French cannonballs took off the limbs of the men beside them. They had dug trenches; buried bodies blistered with the pox; powdered the officers wigs; and, marching smartly, drummed the regiments in and out of disaster. The women had cooked and laundered and nursed the sick; dabbed at the holes on soldiers bodies; and tried to keep their children from harm. Some of them had fought. There had been black dragoons in South Carolina; waterborne gangs of black partisans for the king on the Hudson River; bands of black guerrillas who would descend on Patriot farms in New Jersey and take whatever they could, even (if the Lord was smiling on their venture) white American prisoners.