First appeared in the Boston Globe
By Harvey Blume
"I'M A TOTAL OUTSIDER to American history." That's
how Simon Schama, the British born and educated historian, who has been
teaching at Columbia University since 1993, described himself to me when the
tour for his new book, "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the
American Revolution," brought him to Boston. It's true that none of
Schama's varied writings--on art (he was an art critic for The New Yorker from
1995 to 1998), art history, and British, French, and Dutch history--have homed
in on America. But that seems to have worked to Schama's advantage.
In "Rough Crossings" he approaches the story of
slavery during the Revolutionary War with fresh eyes, and restores to its
proper place a significant aspect of the tale that has been omitted from
standard accounts. In brief: Tens of thousands of slaves fled Southern
plantations during the war, making their way to British lines and taking up
arms against their old masters.
For them, Britain represented the possibility of abolition,
whereas American independence signified the certainty of ongoing slavery.
Britain encouraged blacks to think this way. For one thing, there were genuine
abolitionists in London, and many slaves, for all that their masters tried to
keep them ignorant, were aware of them. Furthermore, it gave Britain a
polemical advantage to accuse American patriots, for all their talk of freedom,
of being hypocrites, wedded to a barbaric institution.
Britain thought drawing slaves to its side would materially
weaken and thus discourage the patriot cause. As it happens, the opposite
occurred. Slave owners identified Britain with the slave rebellions already
raging in the Caribbean, which prompted them to fight all the more
wholeheartedly for American independence.
One of the virtues of Schama's book is that it portrays
blacks as agents of their own history. Aware of slave rebellions further south,
revolutionary activity around them, antislavery stirrings in London courts and
Parliament, they tried to thread their own way toward freedom.
IDEAS: What was the source of your interest in what became
"Rough Crossings"?
IDEAS:I've lived almost half my life here, and half there,
and wanted to do some sort of Anglo-American work. I remember going to the
memorial services for the British victims of 9/11--incredibly heartbreaking--in
New York. There were the two flags, and the great and good on both sides,
Rudolph Giuliani, Tony Blair. I thought: It's time to do an Anglo-American
book, and don't do it in a way that is a piece of sentimental garbage.
I always thought if I do the Anglo-American book, it would
be a book of arguments, where you find out, almost in the Jewish sense, what
links you through argument rather than through vague exchange of compliments.
So I thought, why not write about post-divorce custodial disputes: Who owns the
bragging rights to freedom? And then I found that there was in fact a slave who
had escaped, fought for Britain, and renamed himself British Freedom.
IDEAS: How well known was this material?
IDEAS:It's been known for a while, but there's a peculiar
reluctance to integrate it into the central narrative of the founding of the
nation.
IDEAS: What did you add?
IDEAS:Almost nothing.
IDEAS: You brought it into the mainstream?
IDEAS:Right. When I started writing about this, I went to
people like my Columbia colleague Eric Foner, and asked: Is this is bringing
coal to Newcastle? They said, absolutely not: Do it.
IDEAS: Why is this story not better known?
IDEAS:A lot of the problem had to do with how much had to
ride on the ability of the African-American community to demonstrate it had
fought patriotically in the Revolutionary War. Tragically, the other part of
the story was simply erased. It was a loser's story. It didn't help anybody's
cause. So it is remarkable to find people like Frederick Douglass being
absolutely aware of that history.
IDEAS: One thing I learned from the book is that there was a
sort of global black network of intelligence back before even a black historian
like W.E.B. Dubois, in "Black Reconstruction," assumed it existed,
and that the network was attuned to both London and the Caribbean.
IDEAS:You have to piece it together. It's absolutely
electrifying when you do indeed find advertisements in the Virginia Gazette by
slave owners--who have no reason to say this unless they think it's true--to
the effect that their slaves have gone over to the British in the deluded
belief that because of the Somerset case in London [a ruling against slavery in
England] they were going to be free.
We're in a kind of Ralph Ellison invisible man world here,
where blacks supposedly don't have heads and faces and ears and eyes. On the
other hand, the most sensitive thinkers--like the Adamses--knew blacks were
going to be thinking and talking and it might have consequences. It's John
Adams who says the Negroes have a remarkable way of communicating intelligence,
and that news flies from place to place.
IDEAS: Sometimes, in "Rough Crossings," it seems
you're on a bit too intimate of terms with your characters. And you seem to
know a bit too much about the weather in 1776, or how the waves looked on the
Atlantic.
IDEAS:As far as weather goes, Henry Lawrence writes about
weather to his brother John every single day.
IDEAS: Still, you do have a novelist's sort of intimacy with
what goes on.
IDEAS:That's true. I do try imaginatively to offer a thickly
vivid sense of what it was like. If you know my work, you know I'm not very
good at distance.
I'm not comparing myself, God knows, to Tolstoy, but I was
very struck by his calculated rejection of any introductory apparatus to
"War and Peace." The book famously begins with a half sentence of
dialogue, as if there's a window through which the reader could climb into
actual events. I love the possibility of actually starting in medias res, which
my discovery of the slave called British Freedom, with whom I begin the book,
allowed me to do.
I've wanted to write something that was clearly a historical
novel, but haven't had the time to do it yet. I have a story. Bad luck to tell
you about it.
IDEAS: You're English, but may have changed for good the way
Americans, black and white, tell the story of slavery.
IDEAS:It's a painful thing to take on board that in the deep
defining moment when a nation comes into being, it comes into being with this
birthmark on it.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge.
