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Also by Simon Schama:

The Story of the Jews, October 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Story of the Jews, March 2014
Hardcover
The American Future: A History, May 2009
Hardcover
The Power of Art, November 2006
Hardcover
Rough Crossings, May 2006
Hardcover

Rough Crossings
Simon Schama

Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

Ecco
May 2006
496 pages
ISBN: 006053916X
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

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