A well-told account of slaves' Revolutionary struggle for freedom

According to Schama, this is a backward way of looking at it, and in the enthralling (if sometimes over-the-top) ``Rough Crossings," he is determined to set things right. Schama takes us through the looking glass into a strange world of irony and contradiction, which should be the first place to start if you want to understand the American past. To a slave in Virginia or the Carolinas, a war for independence was no such thing: It was ``a war for the perpetuation of servitude." Schama isn't out to indict the slave-owning Founders for hypocrisy; rather, he wants to adjust our vision.

``Seeing the Revolutionary War though the eyes of enslaved blacks turns its meaning upside down," Schama writes; for a vast majority of slaves, ``it was the royal, rather than the republican, road that seemed to offer a surer chance of liberty." An ambiguously worded 1772 court decision in London had widely (if wrongly) been perceived on both sides of the Atlantic as ending slavery in England, and expectations ran high among Colonial slaves that their freedom was at hand. From Schama's startling, topsy-turvy perspective, King George III was not the mad despot of patriot propaganda but a beacon of freedom and hope.

Schama's pages are full of such unlikely tribunes, but also betrayals and setbacks, blood and courage, and relentless shifts of fortune as ex-slaves made a perilous odyssey from bondage into what they hoped was a promised land, first in Nova Scotia, then in Sierra Leone. If you are looking for utopian high-mindedness, ``Rough Crossings" will shock you. We get some of that -- the idealism of British abolitionists would play an important role in the resettlement of blacks after the war -- but there are few good guys in this saga. Most decisions affecting slaves were grounded in a savage pragmatism born out of military necessity. Cornwallis , the British general who surrendered at Yorktown, was no abolitionist. To focus on purity of motives, however, is to miss the point.