Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

Simon Schama

BBC Books

£20, pp447

In the post-9/11 political climate, it takes some nerve for a resident alien to challenge America's very foundation myths. But like the heroes of this extraordinary story, Professor Simon Schama of Columbia University is clearly up for the fight. The planned television tie-in for Rough Crossings, the first outcome of a multi-book, cross-media deal with the BBC, has supposedly been delayed for good reasons, though it is all too easy to imagine how nervous producers might pull the funding for the lavish US co-production that this epic deserves.

Pausing in the middle of his powerfully revisionist account of the black slave experience during the American Revolution, which occupies much of the first third of the book, Schama offers an acerbic aside: 'Since Tybee Island now enjoys a happy reputation as a prime spring and summer resort ... it seems safe to assume that no one is going to go poking around the dunes looking for the remains of African-Americans.'

He is referring to the massacre of at least 200 escaped slaves that he believes was perpetrated by Creek Indians acting under the direction of American whites, but the imputation is clear: that in a deluded world of Beach Bum Festivals and Patriot Acts, no one is interested in the truth about the past.

Tough love is what Schama has to offer his adopted homeland of 20 years: a riposte to the blood and glory of David McCullough's 1776 and the vaingloriously named Freedom Tower that will rise to this symbolic number of feet on the site of the World Trade Centre. His constant use of the word 'patriot' to describe the American revolutionaries seems freighted with a contemporary distaste.

For the New York of 1776 that Schama describes is under temporary British control, a safe haven for tens of thousands of fleeing blacks who see a far better hope of salvation in Britain's King George than a nascent American republic. And who, having fought for the British in uniforms bearing the insignia 'Liberty to slaves', will risk death in the water attempting to reach their army's disappearing evacuation ships rather than return to the mercy of their former masters.

For those reared on a cartoon vision of tyrannical British occupiers and wise and benevolent founding fathers, Schama's first demand is to sit up and start asking questions. But Rough Crossings is far more than a brilliant and timely piece of historical polemic and its author anything but unsubtle in his reading of white duplicity.

Much maligned as General Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, may have been, it was the mounting desperation of his military predicament rather than any humanitarianism that prompted an offer of freedom to black recruits and when disaster was unavoidable, the British had no qualms about the despicable strategy of sending out smallpox-ridden black people to infect their enemy's troops. Not that the black experience in Britain was anything to write home about.

Even before we have been transported to the bloodstained swamps of South Carolina and the mess of the American war, the gruesome reality of slavery the world over has turned up on the doorstep of Dr Granville Sharp, in Mincing Lane, London. His face pistol-whipped to pulp by his master, this 'blackbird' by the name of Jonathan Strong had first drawn Sharp to the abolitionist cause 10 years earlier, in 1765.

Sharp was an unprepossessing man with a taste for music and a Thames boat hired out for waterborne concerts, but he rose to the occasion. Through three strenuous court cases on behalf of abused, culminating in the defence of James Somerset in 1772, he fought not only for their liberation but to assert the evident truth of English common law: that no man could be held as property by another.

It was the verdict in this third case, unintended as its interpretation was, that lit the torch of British freedom to which America's slaves thronged: Sharp's pure purpose, not the cynical manipulation of it by the generals in America. And it was the dream of freedom and equality under the protection of King George that still inspired those veterans of the revolution who finally claimed their promised land in the bitterly cold, boulder-strewn Nova Scotia some years later, though it would not be the end of their journey.

The early chapters of Rough Crossings still bear traces of the television habit - the scene-setting rhetoric, a tendency to over-emphasis vivid 'moments', precise character thumbnails - but such tricks help to beat a path into what is a complex narrative. As the book weaves through London, America, Nova Scotia and Africa, though, Schama's technique relaxes, to be laid, most strikingly, at the service of the book's black characters.

The voices of those such as Thomas Peters, who left written testimony of the hardships they endured and of their determined attempts to overcome them, are quoted at length, the directness of their sometimes pidgin rawness held up as a virtue rather than a shortcoming.

But Schama also acts as empathetic spokesman for the voiceless blacks, segueing his narrating style into pastiche: as in the case of David George, a future preacher who saw his mother whipped to death, and whose early search for worldly redemption is told in an approximation of Old Testament chronicle. Too often merely artificial when deployed in literary fiction, here Schama's evident investment in the material makes such artful throwing of perspective into a moral virtue.

Nothing, it seems, is beyond him. Battles, storms, lynch mobs, the vile cargo holds of slave ships, courtroom intrigues, the ravages of smallpox: all are brought dramatically alive, but always with purpose. For it is as a counterpoint to the brilliant moral light at the heart of Rough Crossings that these scenes of darkness are so powerful.

In the figure of James Clarkson, around whom the second half of the book is structured, Schama's humane wisdom seems to find a soulmate across the ages. The younger brother of an abolitionist, while still in his mid-twenties, Clarkson is transformed by circumstances into the Moses of the great black exodus from Nova Scotia to an African homeland in the early months of 1792. From the moment he instructs those enrolled for the crossing to kidnap their indentured wives and apprenticed sons rather than risk them being taken back to America and re-enslaved, he becomes, too, a potent symbol of independent thought.

Steadfastly true to his judgment in the face of almost universal opposition, once established in Sierra Leone, Clarkson was to prove that rarest of creatures: a benign dictator. For the brief moment of his administration, during an age of idealistic upheaval in America and France, the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, lived up to its name in what must count as the most astonishing revolution of all. Its early history is a catalogue of wondrous novelty: the first time a white was whipped in legitimate sanction by a black, the first time blacks were allowed to vote, the first time women (of any colour) had the franchise.

By some mystery of the writing, the reader of this Utopian tale becomes truly colour-blind, an achievement, indeed, for a story shaped by racial difference and extreme prejudice, perceiving only character in all its moral shades. When the vicious inadequacy of Clarkson's successors leads to tragedy, the effect is so much the greater for it.

Writing of the heart-tugging speeches of the abolitionists, Schama affects embarrassment. Probably, though, it is the disguised disdain of a master of sentiment, for he understands only too well the effort and intelligence needed to evince meaningful emotion.

At the end of this immaculately controlled, brave and important work, only the most callous of readers could fail to shed a tear.