Afterword: Rough crossings to new beginnings

The proposed ‘Freedom Tower’, the centrepiece of the rebuilding plan for New York’s World Trade Centre site, is to rise from the ashes of Ground Zero to a height of 1776 feet, an architectural tribute to the year the United States declared its independence as a nation. In Rough Crossings, a dramatic history of the American War of Independence, Simon Schama shows how the meaning of this war gets turned upside down if viewed through the eyes of black slaves.¹ These slaves, lured by the promises of freedom made by the British, fled their American rebel masters in order to rally under the flag of King George. From their perspective, a much-vaunted war for liberty on behalf of whites was a war for the perpetuation of their slavery. Following Judge Mansfield’s decision of 1772 in favour of the slave James Somersett, Britain appeared to represent the possibility of abolition; American independence offered only the certainty of on-going slavery. Nor were loyalist blacks the only ones to see the paradox of the American Revolution. As Samuel Johnson famously pointed out: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’

In 1792, just under 1200 black loyalists sailed to Sierra Leone, West Africa, under the command of John Clarkson, brother to the abolitionist campaigner Thomas Clarkson. It is the purpose of these articles to look afresh at the settlement there, to see what more can be said about the meaning and significance of Sierra Leone and the loyalists and other blacks who settled there. As has been remarked, these settlers were not of British descent. Who were they, then? Some were native-born Africans, kidnapped and taken as slaves to America. Others were African-American. But how they were regarded, and how they regarded themselves, involves more complex issues, dealing with their history and their determination to achieve self-governance and racial equality during a revolutionary age. Once they had arrived safely in Sierra Leone, William Wilberforce was keen to call them ‘Africans’, a much more dignified term (he argued) than ‘Blacks’ or ‘Negroes’. As a group they identified themselves in their letters and petitions as the ‘Americans’ or ‘the settlers’, or ‘we the Black people that came from Nova Scotia to this place’. At one point, however, when wrangling with the Sierra Leone Company’s directors, they called themselves ‘free British subjects’.² Their situation was full of contradictions and for the most part fraught with difficulties.

These loyalist blacks are at the heart of Schama’s revisionist history, a history which questions the founding principles of the United States. Thus, when it comes to determining which nation owns the bragging rights to freedom, it is not surprising that Rough Crossings favours the British, loyalist side. But Schama also shows how Britain’s offer of freedom was a cloak for military opportunism, a plan to rip out the economic rug from beneath its enemies. Also, as it transpired, liberty for loyalist blacks did not amount to much. For many, freedom meant starving in the freezing forests of Nova Scotia or on the streets of London. It was indeed a rough crossing from one national affiliation to another. Nor did the hypocrisy of Britain’s offer go unremarked. Benjamin Franklin could only scoff at a country which prided itself on setting free a single slave whilst leading the world in the slave trade. Suspicion and scorn would later spread to perceptions of the Sierra Leone venture. With its estuary, deep channels, and well-populated adjacent territories, Sierra Leone had long been a centre for British and other European slave traders. After his initial enthusiasm for Granville Sharp’s ‘Province of Freedom’, Ottobah Cugoano, an ex-slave living in Britain, began to question the motives of a Government which simultaneously sanctioned slavery and sponsored an attempt to abolish it. He asked:

‘Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? . . . can it be readily conceived that government would establish a free colony for them nearly on the spot, while it supports its forts and garrisons, to ensnare, merchandize, and...