Rough Crossings Quotes

“than the republican, road that seemed to offer a surer chance of liberty. Although the history that unfolded from the entanglement between black desperation and British paternalism would often prove to be bitterly tragic, it was, nonetheless, a formative moment in the history of African-American freedom.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“In all, between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand slaves left the plantations during the war.13 The”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“He believed—and the judgement of most modern historians, such as Benjamin Quarles, Gary Nash, Sylvia Frey, Ellen Gibson Wilson and James Walker concurs—that at least thirty thousand had escaped from Virginia plantations in attempts to reach the British lines.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“During the few weeks in the spring of 1781, when Lord Cornwallis’s troops were not far from his home, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who had seen his own attempt to incorporate a paragraph attacking slavery in the Declaration of Independence stricken out by Congress, lost thirty of his own.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“American cause at Concord, Bunker Hill, Rhode Island and finally at Yorktown (where they were put in the front line—whether as a tribute to their courage or as expendable sacrifices is not clear). At the battle of Monmouth in New Jersey black troops on both sides fought each other. But until the British aggressively recruited slaves in 1775 and 1776, state assemblies, even in the North, as well as the multi-state Continental Congress, flinched from their enlistment.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“as their deliverer, to the point where they were ready to risk life and limb to reach the lines of the royal army. To”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“British Freedom’s choice of name proclaims something startling: a belief that it was the British monarchy rather than the new American republic that was more likely to deliver Africans from slavery. Although Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, had blamed “the Christian King” George III for the institution of slavery in America, blacks like British Freedom did not see the king that way at all. On the contrary, he was their enemy’s enemy and thus their friend, emancipator and guardian.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation

“strewn with boulders, and the blacks had no way, most of them, to clear and work it unless they hired themselves or their families out to the white loyalists. That meant more cooking and laundering; more waiting on table and shaving pink chins; more hammering rocks for roads and bridges. And still they were in debt, so grievously that some complained their liberty was no true liberty at all but just another kind of slavery in all but name.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution – A Moving and Extraordinary History of Escape and Emancipation