by Simon Schama
20 Ibid., pp. 38–39.
21 Falconbridge, op. cit., p. 144.
22 Perkins and Anderson to Clarkson, 30th October 1793, in Fyfe, op. cit., Our Children, p. 40.
23 Perkins and Anderson to Clarkson, 9th November 1793, in Fyfe, op. cit., Our Children, p. 41.
24 Falconbridge, op. cit., pp. 146–48.
25 Ibid., p. 148.
26 Ibid., p. 150.
27 William Dawes had returned to England earlier that year. He would return for another stint when Macaulay took a period of leave in 1795–96, but thereafter, until he left in 1799, it was Macaulay who most decisively, and for better or worse, stamped his authority on Sierra Leone.
28 Wilson, op. cit., Loyal Blacks, p. 319.
29 Fyfe, op. cit., Our Children, p. 43.
30 Ibid., pp. 49–50, 53.
31 “Memoirs of the life of Boston King, a Black Preacher, written by himself during his residence at Kingswood-School,” Methodist Magazine, XXI (1798), p. 264.
32 Wilson, op. cit., Loyal Blacks, pp. 340–41.
33 Ibid., p. 340.
34 Ibid., pp. 329–30.
35 James W. St G. Walker, “Myth, History and Revisionism: The Black Loyalists Revisited,” Acadiensis, XXIX, no. 1 (Autumn 1999), p. 232.
36 Wilson, op. cit., Loyal Blacks, p. 393; for a full account of the rebellion see PRO CO 270/5. 37 Fyfe, op. cit., Our Children, p. 65.
ENDINGS, BEGINNINGS
1 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988), p. 313.
2 Ibid., p. 314.
3 Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (York, 1989), p. 118.
4 Rosalind Cobb Wiggins (ed.), Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters 1808–1817, (Washington, D.C., 1996), p. 119. See also Sheldon H. Harris, Paul Cuffe, Black America and the African Return (New York, 1972); Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana, Illinois, 1986); Henry Noble Sherwood, “Paul Cuffe,” Journal of Negro History, VIII (1923), pp. 153–229.
5 Wiggins, op. cit., p. 145.
6 Ibid., p. 225.
7 For the last years and death of Sharp, see Hoare, op. cit., pp. 311–21; for his American reputation, see the first American biography, Charles Stuart, A Memoir of Granville Sharp (New York, 1836). Stuart, pp. 71 ff, makes a strong contrast between the Sierra Leone enterprise on the one hand, and the work of the American Colonization Society and the Liberian venture on the other, which he characterizes as a wicked exercise in the deportation of free blacks from their own country.
8 Hoare, op. cit., pp. 275–76.
9 Ibid., p. 313.
10 Ibid., p. 315.
11 Thomas Clarkson, Interviews with the Emperor Alexander I at Paris and Aix-la-Chapelle in 1815 and 1818 (London, nd); Ellen Gibson Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure (London, 1980), pp. 169–70.
12 Wilson, op. cit., John Clarkson, pp. 159–70.
13 MacCarthy to Cuffe, 6th February 1816, Wiggins, op. cit., p. 40.
14 Stuart, op. cit., p. 75.
15 Wilson, op. cit., John Clarkson, p. 178.
16 The phrase is Thomas’s.
17 Wilson, op. cit., John Clarkson, p. 183.
18 The History of Mary Prince, Related by Herself (London, 1987), pp. 83–84.
19 Blackburn, op. cit., p. 455.
20 Wilson, op. cit., Thomas Clarkson, p. 165.
21 Ibid., p. 178, p. 255, n. 77.
22 Ibid., p. 189.
23 Philip Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, The Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York, 1950), p. 230.
24 The wonderful story of the Hutchinsons’ singing tour and their part in Douglass’s adventure on the Cambria and in Britain is narrated in J.W. Hutchinson (ed. Charles E. Mann), Story of the Hutchinsons (Tribe of Jesse) (Boston, 1896), pp. 142 ff.
25 Douglass to Garrison, 1st September 1845, Foner, op. cit., p. 115.
26 Ibid., p. 117.
27 Hutchinson, op. cit., pp. 146–47.
28 Foner, op. cit., p. 12.
29 Ibid., pp. 231–32.
30 Ibid., p. 207.
31 Ibid., p. 23.
32 Ibid., p. 171.
33 Ibid., p. 235.
Further Reading
THE BLACK LOYALISTS, SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION
Rough Crossings builds on, and is deeply indebted to, the pioneering work of a number of historians who over the past half century have transformed what was once a marginal curiosity in the history of the American Revolution and Great Britain into something approaching a paradigm shift. The fundamental works are: Sylvia R. Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Graham Russell Hodges (ed.), The Black Loyalist Directory (New York and London, 1996); and idem, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey 1613–1683 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and London, 1999); John W. Pulis (ed.), Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York and London, 1999); the classic Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1996) with a new (and important) introduction by Gary B. Nash; James St G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870 (New York, 1976) and the prolific and immensely readable work of Ellen Gibson Wilson, above all the exhaustively detailed The Loyal Blacks (New York, 1976).
THE SLAVERY QUESTION AND THE REVOLUTION
The starting point for any consideration of the painful paradoxes of slavery and the revolution is still David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of the American Revolution (Ithaca, New York, 1973). But equally essential to see how the intellectual and moral issues played out in lived history is Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003); Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, revised edition (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1989); see also Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America (London, 2005). Elizabeth A. Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York, 2001), about the epidemiology of the war, is a much larger book than its ostensible subject suggests, a tour de force of narrative and critical analysis.
THE BRITISH CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADE: SHARP AND THE CLARKSONS
There is now an abundant and constantly growing literature on this subject. For an overview of the global campaign see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York, 1988) and Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (New York and London, 1997). An important collection of essays is David Eltis and James Walvin (eds), Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa and the Americas (Madison, Wisconsin, 1981). See also Walvin’s England, Slaves and Freedom 1776–1838 (Jackson, Mississippi, 1986); idem, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1992); Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York, 2004) appeared after the present book was completed and elegantly narrates some of the same events and lives, though with more emphasis on the campaign in Britain itself. Deidre Coleman’s Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, 2005), covering some of the same ground, also appeared too late for me to take full account of it. Among relatively recent and very important contributions are David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, 1987); Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London and Portland, Oregon, 1997); J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade (Manchester and New York, 1995); David Turley, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery 1780–1860 (London and New York, 1991). Studies of individuals include Kevin Belmonte, Hero for Humanity: A Biography of William Wilberforce (Colorado, 2002), which does not quite replace John Pollock, William Wilberforce (London and New York, 1977); Folarin Shyllon, J
ames Ramsay, the Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh, 1977); Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (York, 1980).
BLACKS IN BRITAIN AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION AND AFTER
The crucial work is Stephen J. Braidwood’s Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 (Liverpool, 1994). There are now a number of excellent survey histories of the black experience in Britain, especially Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984) and James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society 1555–1945 (London, 1973); see also Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (London and New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1985). Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780–1830 (London and Portland, Oregon, 1996) is an important critical look at the sources for black history, especially its stereotypes. Cultural and literary issues are treated by David Dabydeen in Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century Art (Kingston-upon-Thames, 1985), and his anthologies of black writing, Black Writers in Britain, 1760–1890 (Edinburgh, 1991). The most recent and by far the best critical account of Olaudah Equiano’s life and writing is Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Georgia, 2005).
NOVA SCOTIA AND THE BLACKS
Apart from James St G. Walker’s crucial study, Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal, New Haven and London, 1971) devotes two richly detailed chapters to the impact of the war and the loyalist settlement, both black and white. It should be noted that there is now a lively debate about the “mythology” of black loyalism in Nova Scotia, provoked by Barry Cahill in an article in the Nova Scotian history journal Acadiensis (Autumn 1999), with an equally lively and to my mind convincing response by James Walker. For Shelburne, see Marion Robertson, King’s Bounty: A History of Early Shelburne (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1983).
SIERRA LEONE AND THE BLACK LOYALISTS
The authority is Christopher Fyfe, in particular History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), and Sierra Leone Inheritance (Oxford, 1964). His editions of both Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791–1792–1793 by Anna Maria Falconbridge (Liverpool, 2000) and Our Children Free and Happy: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s (Edinburgh, 1991) have a wealth of scholarly information and critical commentary. Ellen Wilson Gibson’s John Clarkson and the African Adventure (London, 1980) is yet another of this author’s fine narratives to which this writer is indebted.
Searchable Terms
Abernathy, Adam
Abernathy, Catherine
Abolitionists, abolition:
in America
Anglo–French rivalry and
boycott of West Indian sugar and
in England
See also Sharp
Granville in France
persistence of race prejudice and
“revolutionism” argument against
Actaeon
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treaty negotiations and
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Alert
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Alleyne, John
“Amazing Grace”
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Ordnance Office)
Boddington, Thomas
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Book of Negroes
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outbreak of hosilities and
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Bristol, Earl of
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Caesar (escaped slave)
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Campbill, William (Wilmington Patriot)
Canada
see also New Brunswick; Nova Scotia
/>
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see also West Indies; specific islands
Carleton, Sir Guy
Asgill affair and
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