Rough Crossings
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| Author | Simon Schama |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | BBC Books |
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Publication date
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2005 |
| Media type | Print (book) |
| Pages | 445 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 61652611 |
| 326.0973/09033 22 | |
| LC Class | E269.N3 S33 2006 |
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution is a history book by Simon Schama. It was the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for general nonfiction. A 2007 "drama documentary" was based on it.
Rough Crossings gives an account of the history of thousands of slaves who escaped to fight for the British cause during the American Revolutionary War. It tells of the legal battles that established that slavery was not valid in England itself, and how the British government offered freedom to enslaved African Americans if they would fight for Britain and King George III. The book discusses the many ambiguities involved—some white Loyalists were slave-owners, some blacks were recruited for the War of Independence.
Rough Crossings then follows the subsequent fate of the Black Loyalists, many of them escaped slaves, who, after the British defeat, were sent to Nova Scotia (then still a colony within British North America), where they received a cold welcome, including suffering the first race riots on the continent. Some stayed there, but others settled in what was to become Sierra Leone. The descendants of those who settled in Freetown are part of the Sierra Leone Creole people, with strong ancestral ties with the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada.
The reviews were very favorable.
Alex Butterworth wrote in The Guardian:
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 thumbnail ... 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.... At the end of this immaculately controlled, brave and important work, only the most callous of readers could fail to shed a tear.
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