num_pages: 478
description: “The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. . . . Schama’s gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience.”―Daily Telegraph 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 emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America’s birth.
language: English
title: Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution
titlecomplete: Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution
genres: Historical, American, Politics, American Revolution, Nonfiction, American History, American Revolutionary War, Africa, History, African American
ratings_count: 1005
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: General Nonfiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Hessell-Tiltman Prize
publisher: Ecco