Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

by Cassandra Pybus

Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword

During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives.

This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia.

Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Historical, Australia, American History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Cassandra Pybus is ARC Professorial Fellow in the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of many books including Community of Thieves and The Devil and James McAuley, winner of the 2000 Adelaide Festival Award for non-fiction.

Reviews

[Kathy Dobronyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched book that is a great resource for my historical fiction--"Echoes of War." Most people are familiar with 19th century American slavery before the war that was waged from 1861-65, but they do not know that slavery in the 18th century was less restrictive. Many of the punitive slave laws were enacted by the slave-owning Founding Fathers who fought to ensure freedom for white men while denying it to the black men and women in the new United States.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for History class.

[Joel Pinckney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book by Cassandra Pybus tells a largely untold story of the American Revolution--how did it affect slaves and free people of color, and what did the years after the war hold for them? The scope of this book is sweeping, so much so that it gets in the way of clarity at times. The book was hard to follow at certain points due to how much Pybus tries to cover and how many historical figures she includes. However, the story is well told and thoroughly researched, and I would recommend this book. The epilogue's concluding words provide a fitting summation: "The most profound paradox was that in fleeing the Founding Fathers, whose rhetoric of liberty denied their aspirations, these runaways carried to the far corners of the globe the animating principles of the revolution that had so emphatically excluded them" (205).

3.5/5.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow wow wow. Pybus traces runaway black slaves, most of whose identities she has recovered from the anonymity of history, in their quest for freedom, from American plantations in the 1770s to the Loyalist British lines and then beyond, as they spread across the remaining British colonies. Brilliant cultural history of African Americans - really, transnational Africans - drawing from newly transcribed primary sources. Pybus is an eloquent and poetic writer, and this book is a masterful example of a thesis-driven narrative history.

[L.P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a history buff, and even I found this book excruciating... The narrative was terrible, and the ending non-existent... if I didn't have to write a report on it I would have quit reading after the first chapter.