Rought Crossings [View All]

[Briar]

Rough Crossings, Simon Schama's revisionist history of slavery, will make uncomfortable reading on both sides of the Atlantic, says Alex Butterworth


Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Simon Schama


In the post-9/11 political climate, it takes some nerve for a resident alien to challenge America's very foundation myths. But like the heroes of this extraordinary story, Professor Simon Schama of Columbia University is clearly up for the fight. The planned television tie-in for Rough Crossings, the first outcome of a multi-book, cross-media deal with the BBC, has supposedly been delayed for good reasons, though it is all too easy to imagine how nervous producers might pull the funding for the lavish US co-production that this epic deserves.

Pausing in the middle of his powerfully revisionist account of the black slave experience during the American Revolution, which occupies much of the first third of the book, Schama offers an acerbic aside: 'Since Tybee Island now enjoys a happy reputation as a prime spring and summer resort ... it seems safe to assume that no one is going to go poking around the dunes looking for the remains of African-Americans.'

He is referring to the massacre of at least 200 escaped slaves that he believes was perpetrated by Creek Indians acting under the direction of American whites, but the imputation is clear: that in a deluded world of Beach Bum Festivals and Patriot Acts, no one is interested in the truth about the past.

Tough love is what Schama has to offer his adopted homeland of 20 years: a riposte to the blood and glory of David McCullough's 1776 and the vaingloriously named Freedom Tower that will rise to this symbolic number of feet on the site of the World Trade Centre. His constant use of the word 'patriot' to describe the American revolutionaries seems freighted with a contemporary distaste...

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,,1577192,00.html