Of human bondage: Simon Schama wants you to scrap mythologies, forget the movies and instead think of history as a grand story of human connectedness.

One Independence Day several years ago, George Will, the dean of American columnists, was giddy as a Virginia farm boy with fireworks and matches. "We who think the American Revolution was mankind's finest moment, and that the British have not yet apologized enough for the Stamp Act," Will wrote, "this week received a delight."

Will's bonbon was the new Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot, the blood-and-glory tale of sneering English officers and earthy Americans who traded plows for muskets. The Patriot, wrote Will, "is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire."

It's all such stirring, familiar stuff. The Minute Men, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Declaration of Independence, Washington crossing the Delaware, Betsy Ross stitching the flag that would become the very beacon of liberty: These images are enshrined and hallowed in the American consciousness. And not only there. The glorious American Revolution of George Will's imagining has been exported with such success by American dream merchants like Mel Gibson that for much of the world it is part of the cultural foundation. Nowhere is this truer than Canada. With the descendants of Loyalists using "Benedict Arnold" as a synonym for "traitor" -- an etymological curiosity with which Belinda Stronach has some familiarity -- it is undeniable that their mythology is ours.

This is what makes Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution not only an important and valuable book, but a dizzying, disturbing, delightful read. "Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved blacks turns its meaning upside down," Schama writes with considerable understatement.

To read Rough Crossings is to feel the sensation of gravity reversed and to watch, while belted safely into an armchair, as the familiar things of our world plummet into the sky.

At a table in a farmhouse on the Hudson River sits General George Washington, the towering victor, father of the republic and tribune of liberty. Across from him is Sir Guy Carleton, the aristocratic mouthpiece of a defeated tyrant. It is May 1783 and the two men, so unlike, have come to settle the details of the British withdrawal from New York City. The talks sour quickly. Carleton is obstinate. Washington is filled with righteous anger. A high principle is at stake, Washington insists, but Carleton won't budge.

The two men argue over the fate of several thousand black men, women and children huddled in New York, terrified, physically shaking as they await word. Please Lord, they pray, let us sail with the British. Don't let them hand us over to the whips and chains of George Washington.

All are escaped slaves -- thieves in the eyes of the Americans, guilty of stealing themselves -- who bolted to the promise of liberty under good King George III. Among them may have been Washington's own escaped slave, Henry Washington, who would later arrive in Nova Scotia. Most of the famous figures of the war suffered such losses. Thirty slaves escaped from Thomas Jefferson. Ralph Peters, the slave of Patrick Henry, took to heart the famous declaration of his master -- "give me liberty or give me death!" -- and "ran away at the earliest opportunity to the British lines," writes Schama. Francis Marion -- the South Carolina planter on whom Mel Gibson's heroic character in The Patriot is based -- not only lost a slave, he may well have met his lost property in battle after the absconder joined a company of British dragoons.

In all, 80,000 to 100,000 blacks fled bondage during the war. In Virginia alone, 30,000 ran. Blacks were so desperate to get to the redcoats, they would plunge into the ocean and swim frantically toward passing ships flying the Union Jack. The scale of escapes was so massive, particularly in the South, it threatened to collapse the social order -- and that threat, not Patriot idealism, is what finally drove masses of whites to take up arms against the British. In the South, Schama writes, "the vaunted war for liberty was, from the spring of 1775 to the late summer of 1776, a war for the perpetuation of servitude." George Will take note: This was hardly "mankind's finest moment."

The deluge began in November 1775. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, had lost control of his charge and in a bid to raise loyal troops he issued a proclamation promising liberty for any indentured servant or slave who would serve His Majesty. Any whose owners were Patriots, that is. The slaves of Loyalists were out of luck.
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In the hands of a lesser writer, this book could have gone very badly wrong. Politically correct hectoring -- the Founding Fathers had slaves! -- is one danger. A spirit of Brit revenge on boastful Yanks is another. But Simon Schama is incapable of being so crude. A Brit transplanted to the United States and professor of art history at Columbia University, Schama's writing merges academic rigour with storytelling artistry to produce books that are intelligent and accessible. In Britain, he is an icon -- the historian as rock star. In 2003, he signed a contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three books and two television documentaries for the princely sum of three million pounds.

Rough Crossings -- released this year in Britain, next spring in North America -- is the first of Schama's deliveries under his new contract and its as if he tried to fulfill its terms in one go. His canvass is massive. The American Revolution, the early British abolition movement, the utopian quest to build a society of freed slaves in Sierra Leone: Each of these could be a book in its own right. Particularly moving for Canadian readers is Schama's look at the exodus of black Loyalists to Nova Scotia after the United States gained its independence. They are scorned, shunted onto marginal scraps of land and, in the worst cases, left so destitute they enter into indentured servitude that resembled the slavery they had left behind. Hope dissolved like melting snow.

In 1792, almost 1,200 former slaves boarded ships in Halifax harbour to make the last of the "rough crossings." In Sierra Leone, they would form a new society of equals foreshadowing the future before it, too, succumbed to the worst human impulses. The sight of the fleet striking sail and leaving Canadian shores, writes Schama, was "a spectacle to make the heart leap and one that deserves remembering in the annals of African-American history." Those on board include British Freedom and Henry Washington.

This is history as synthesis. It is American and British history. It is also African and Canadian. It is the history of blacks and whites. It is social, political and military history. By drawing it all together, Schama dissolves the mental borders of the modern reader, scraps the mythologies that fill our minds, and replaces it all with a grand story of human connectedness.

It is this quality that makes Rough Crossings the superior book to Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, released this year to much acclaim in the United States. Bury the Chains is a conscientious look at the British abolition movement, which Hochschild cleverly cast as the first human rights movement, but the book's single focus fails to provide the many perspectives and find the unexpected connections that make Rough Crossings such startling reading. Hochschild's workmanlike prose is also no match for Schama's elegant writing, particularly Schama's mastery of the droll aside: When a young American idealist is killed in a meaningless skirmish with redcoats, Schama notes he was mourned even by the British "who knew a gallant fool when they saw one."

National boundaries and mythologies inflict a terrible cost in human memory and Schama is poignant about what they have done to African-American history. The first schools for free black children were built by Loyalists in Canada, Schama notes. "Some of the earliest free Baptist and Methodist churches were created in and near Shelburne, Nova Scotia." And the "first identifiable African-American political leader" was Sergeant Thomas Peters, a man almost completely unknown in the United States simply because of "the inconvenient fact that Peters happened to fight for the Wrong Side."

Although Schama doesn't mention it, the same losses have been inflicted on Canadian memory. Consider Sir Guy Carleton. He was with Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham. He commanded the forces that repelled the U.S. invasion of 1775/1776. He was twice Governor General of Canada and he created the compromise policy that secured French Quebec within the British empire and created a model for British colonial governments around the world. By any measure, he is a great figure in Canadian history that deserves a place in Canadian consciousness. But the modern mental divide between "British" and "Canadian" has him on the wrong side and so the Canadian reader is startled to discover that a man who stared down the legendary George Washington has a connection or two with this country.

We know the young Washington chopped down the cherry tree. We know Paul Revere shouted "the British are coming!" We know the Boston Tea Party was a protest against tyranny. We know that Benedict Arnold was a traitor. We know all these things even though the first two are legends, the third is the cover story of smugglers upset at tea being sold at prices lower than they could match, and the last is entirely a matter of perspective. We know all these things and yet we do not know that a key figure in Canadian history defended the humanity of black people at a time when respectable opinion saw them as little more than common chattels.

Whether any book, even one by Simon Schama, could do much to change the collective consciousness is doubtful. But in a world where memory is ruled by mythologies and movies, the reader must be grateful for a chance to have the Hollywood detritus swept aside and replaced by a richer, more thoughtful, more human depiction of the past.
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This was a new sentiment. Only a little more than a decade before, Britain had witnessed the birth of the anti-slavery movement and its mad dream of one day abolishing an institution that had existed since the dawn of time. Led by Granville Sharp, the Clarkson brothers and a cast of visionaries and eccentrics Dickens couldn't have invented -- all wonderfully sketched by Schama -- the abolitionists successfully purged slavery from "the free air of England" at the time America's Founding Fathers were demanding liberty for some. By 1790, abolition was a major political issue. In 1807, the slave trade was banned. And on Aug. 1, 1834, all slaves throughout the British empire were freed -- 36 years before the fire and destruction of the Civil War did the same for those toiling on American plantations.

Blacks surely knew British motivations were mixed but most decided their interests lay with the redcoats and they declared their loyalties by running from their masters, by taking up arms for the King, and even by changing names. Schama opens Rough Crossings with a former slave "scratching a living from the stingy soil of Preston, a few miles northeast of Halifax, N.S." As Malcolm X would do almost two centuries later, this man had tossed aside the name forced upon him and taken one of his own choosing. He called himself British Freedom.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this book could have gone very badly wrong. Politically correct hectoring -- the Founding Fathers had slaves! -- is one danger. A spirit of Brit revenge on boastful Yanks is another. But Simon Schama is incapable of being so crude. A Brit transplanted to the United States and professor of art history at Columbia University, Schama's writing merges academic rigour with storytelling artistry to produce books that are intelligent and accessible. In Britain, he is an icon -- the historian as rock star. In 2003, he signed a contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three books and two television documentaries for the princely sum of #3 million.

Rough Crossings -- released this year in Britain, next spring in North America -- is the first of Schama's deliveries under his new contract and it's as if he tried to fulfil its terms in one go. His canvas is massive. The American Revolution, the early British abolition movement, the utopian quest to build a society of freed slaves in Sierra Leone: Each of these could be a book in its own right. Particularly moving for Canadian readers is Schama's look at the exodus of black Loyalists to Nova Scotia after the United States gained its independence. They are scorned, shunted onto marginal scraps of land and, in the worst cases, left so destitute they enter into indentured servitude that resembles the slavery they had left behind. Hope dissolves like melting snow.

In 1792, almost 1,200 former slaves boarded ships in Halifax harbour to make the last of the "rough crossings." In Sierra Leone, they would form a new society of equals foreshadowing the future before it, too, succumbed to the worst human impulses. The sight of the fleet striking sail and leaving Canadian shores, writes Schama, was "a spectacle to make the heart leap and one that deserves remembering in the annals of African-American history." Those on board include British Freedom and Henry Washington.

This is history as synthesis. It is American and British history. It is also African and Canadian. It is the history of blacks and whites. It is social, political and military history. By drawing it all together, Schama dissolves the mental borders of the modern reader, scraps the mythologies that fill our minds, and replaces it all with a grand story of human connectedness.

It is this quality that makes Rough Crossings the superior book to Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, released this year to much acclaim in the United States. Bury the Chains is a conscientious look at the British abolition movement, which Hochschild cleverly cast as the first human rights movement, but the book's single focus fails to provide the many perspectives and find the unexpected connections that make Rough Crossings such startling reading. Hochschild's workmanlike prose is also no match for Schama's elegant writing, particularly Schama's mastery of the droll aside: When a young American idealist is killed in a meaningless skirmish with redcoats, Schama notes he was mourned even by the British "who knew a gallant fool when they saw one."

National boundaries and mythologies inflict a terrible cost in human memory and Schama is poignant about what they have done to African-American history. The first schools for free black children were built by Loyalists in Canada, Schama notes. "Some of the earliest free Baptist and Methodist churches were created in and near Shelburne, Nova Scotia." And the "first identifiable African-American political leader" was Sgt. Thomas Peters, a man almost completely unknown in the United States simply because of "the inconvenient fact that Peters happened to fight for the Wrong Side."

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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