| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Cassandra Pybus. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. 2006. Pp. xxii, 281. $26.95. Simon Schama. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. New York: HarperCollins. 2006. Pp. xiv, 478. $29.95.
These books about the American Revolution begin with the stories of freedom-fighting southerners named Harry Washington and British Freedom. Harry Washington? British Freedom? This Washington was a slave of the better-known George Washington for thirteen years—until 1776, when he ran away to join the British. He became an artillery corporal, went to New York when Royal Governor Lord Dunmore's forces left Virginia, and later served in Charleston before coming back to New York, the center of British operations, in 1782. After the war he was evacuated, with thousands of other white and black loyalists, to Nova Scotia, where black settlers did not meet with an especially friendly welcome from the locals. Harry Washington later left with his family for the abolitionist-sponsored African colony in Sierra Leone, where he participated in another rebellion, this one against the paternalistic Sierra Leone Company. The Company directors refused to let the objects of their charity run their own settlement. Colonies are colonies, after all.	1
Cassandra Pybus follows the black exiles of the American Revolution literally to the ends of the earth as they helped to found the Botany Bay colony as well as Sierra Leone. American readers may be most taken, though, with her unsentimental rendering of the revolution at home. Tens of thousands of slaves fled to British lines and became an important factor on the southern front. This campaign is utterly ignored by recent valentines to founding heroes like David McCullough's 1776 (2005) and David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing (2004). These books tend to stay pretty close to Boston and Philadelphia. After reading Pybus one can not help but wonder if Fischer's and McCullogh's breathless admiration for Washington and military virtues has passed muster only because of their focus on the Revolutionary War's early, northern turning points. Pybus also will have none of Fischer's contrast between a tyrannical British military machine and an American citizen army. Her British officers are gentlemen of their word. They broke the terms of the Treaty of Paris rather than return black fugitives to their owners.	2
Then Pybus moves on, going global, as it were, with the exiles. The relatively few self-liberating blacks who left the territorial United States make an inspiring story, even limited as it must be to shards that can be gleaned from the imperial archives on three continents (Pybus's detective work here is remarkable). But following her subjects so closely comes at a price. These people were special not so much because they fought for their own liberty (others did that), but because they kept the journey going so far and so long. They appeal to the cosmopolitan sensibility, perhaps more so than those forced to make the most of being African in the United States. The other black Washingtons will have to wait still longer to have their tale told this well.	. . .

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