Author traces a different freedom trail

August 30, 2006|Globe Correspondent

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty, By Cassandra Pybus, Beacon, 281 pp., $26.95

This book about the American Revolution begins with the story of a freedom-fighting Virginian named Harry Washington.

Harry Washington?

This Washington was a slave of the future president George Washington for 13 years -- until 1776, when he ran away to join the British. He became an artillery corporal, went to New York when Royal Governor Lord Dunmore's forces left Virginia, and served in Charleston before coming back to New York, the center of British operations, in 1782. After the war he was evacuated, with thousands of other white and black loyalists, to Nova Scotia, where black settlers did not meet an especially friendly welcome . Harry Washington later left with his family for the abolitionist-sponsored African colony in Sierra Leone, where he participated in another rebellion, this one against the paternalistic Sierra Leone Co ., whose directors refused to let the objects of their charity run their own settlement. Colonies are colonies, after all.

Australian historian Cassandra Pybus follows the black exiles of the American Revolution literally to the ends of the earth as they help found the Botany Bay colony and Sierra Leone. American readers may be most taken, though, with her unsentimental rendering of the Revolution at home. Tens of thousands of slaves fled to British lines and became an important factor on the southern front. This campaign is ignored by recent valentines to founding heroes such as David McCullough's ``1776" and David Hackett Fischer's ``Washington's Crossing." These books stay pretty close to Boston and Philadelphia, and one can't help but wonder if their breathless admiration for Washington has something to do with their narrow focus on the early, northern turning points of the war. Pybus also would have none of Fischer's contrast between a tyrannical British military machine and an American citizen army. Her British officers are gentlemen of their word. They broke the terms of the Treaty of Paris rather than return black fugitives to their owners.

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