Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

“The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. . . . Schama’s gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience.”—Daily Telegraph

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America’s birth.

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

“A master storyteller.” - Newsweek

"Nations need luck in their historians, as with everything else, and in Simon Schama, Britain—not to mention America, where he lives and works—has hit the jackpot. With dash and cunning, Mr Schama follows his leading characters into the shadow that falls across his story...If it is true that history is not the past—merely what we have now instead of the past—then we must tip our caps to Mr. Schama for reminding us of the grotesque events whose scars still sting today, more than a century afterwards." - The Economist

“If there’s a better living writer of history than Simon Schama, I’d sure like to know who it is.” - Cleveland Plain Dealer

“. . .plenty of gorgeous writing from this most elegant of stylists.” - Christian Science Monitor

“Schama tells this complex story through a series of richly drawn, idiosyncratic individuals, from musical bureaucrats to rebellious slaves.” - San Diego Union-Tribune

“Schama captures the remarkable drama of these 18th century Africans, whose lives included such pain and tragedy. For those looking for something more acerbic than yet another hagiography about the Founding Fathers, Schama offers an impressive and challenging alternative.” - USA Today

"Brilliantly re-creates the histories of runaway slaves in and after the American revolution." - Sunday Times (London)

“A lively and accessible book.” - Newsday

“British historian Schama . . . [breathes] life into both the big geopolitical picture and the individual horrors of the economic system in which human beings were ‘sold, like groceries, by the pound.’” - Entertainment Weekly

” Schama is back at his best -and historians don’t come much better than that. - Sunday Times (London)