Rough Crossings | Simon Schama | Talks at Google

Anyway, I do thank you for coming out. This is fantastic. This is really the new. I can't say if it's the new college kind of world or whether it's like. How many of you know about the Lyceum Movement? Which was a great. Yeah. Sort of Yale senior over there, obviously. Well, what do you know about the Lyceum movement? Yeah, it is a test. It's all right, I don't mind. You haven't got the mic on. The Lyceum Movement was really a classically magnificent exercise in American intellectual earnestness, but genuinely good thing. And early 19th century, run by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, later on Thoreau, who really was too shy and ornery and weird to do it. But. But what they did was kind of. It was an alternative. It grew out of the Unitarian Church a bit. It was an alternative to kind of church meetings. And it was a way to discuss in the evenings or whenever it could be done the issues of the day. And women were very important in it as well. And that high minded New England world of Lexington and Concord and Boston and Points and this is kind of, I must say, sort of, kind of like the lyceums of the 21st, whatever it is, century. Yeah. And fantastically great thing to do. Really, really wonderful. So I just want to start with a word about history in general that Josh and I are actually talking about over lunch. And I was saying that in its origins, history is really a sobering muse. It starts with Thucydides, the history of the Peloponnesian War, unless you count Herodotus, which I would count. But Herodotus is compromised, so Thucydides said, by his addiction to fable and storytelling. So if you think about kind of rock hard history that's supposed to speak to the contemporary moment, that's the history of the Peloponnesian wars. And it is, of course, the history of a catastrophe, of a military catastrophe, of a moment of dire military hubris. The expedition to Syracuse, which occupies the last great tragic quarter of the book. And everything that we learn about the debates about whether the Athenian empire could do what it liked, throw its weight around, leads you up to this terrible tragic denouement. And so for me, always the greatness and the toughness and the strength and the beauty and the wisdom of history, Western history as distinct from the histories, I shouldn't say Western, but certainly as distinct from other traditions which history is really a sort of self reinforcing mythology. Totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union or the Third Reich only wanted to write the history that validated their own self reinforcing prejudices. The greatness about same is true. Fundamentalist histories I think as well, of all kinds, Christian or Islamic or whatever. But the great virtue of Western history is that it reinforces our freedom because it's an exercise in honest self criticism. The test of really whether or not your historically informed culture is whether or not you can kind of look in the mirror of the past and take it on the chin and accept tragic truths now, just lately, yes. So where does Livius fit in? Where does Livy fit in? Livy I think is a myth maker actually. Somewhat, I'd say. But well, no, because you're talking about the Punic Wars. Yeah, well, because I think actually Hannibal nearly wins, doesn't he actually? So I think actually Latin history generally is full. Tacitus, for example, who's I think a better historian, but maybe you don't think so, is full of an amazing capacity to actually get under the skin of the people who are the enemy. The Germans in particular. So actually Tacitus puts incredible tirades against the Romans, the most famous of which they make a desolation, they call it peace into the mouth of his enemy. That's what I call, that's what I think of as the kind of pluralist, self critical feeling about Western history. It's not to say Western history doesn't also reinforce its own prejudices. Anyway, a lot of popular history, because it's very well written and important right now are as you know, the history of the Founding Fathers. And part of the popularity is I think, because even if we're disappointed in the nature of political leadership now, wherever we stand on the political spectrum, we kind of hope for more from political leadership. Maybe people always have in America than we get. At least it's possible in the generation of the Founding Fathers to think of a moment when apparently all of our leaders were wise, strong, virtuous, intelligent and victorious. So in some sense, actually the danger of that is that history becomes feel good that it is kind of about one golden, cheerful, optimistic moment. But of course the great. One of the most profound things that one instantly notices about the Founding Fathers is that they knew very well they spoke of liberty and owned slaves. And when you discover that basically that George Washington, one of George Washington's favorite slaves, Henry Washington, votes with his feet by going to the British almost as soon as he possibly can get away. In early 1776, when you find out that Patrick Henry's slave Ralph, one week after Patrick Henry gets up in the Virginia assembly, what was the House of Burgesses and says, give me liberty or give me death. And Ralph Henry says, well, I think I have liberty, thanks very much. I'm going to the British. It gives you properly sobering pause, I think. And this is an extraordinary story which has fallen really off the edge of historiographies because it's a story of double losers. The story of the British who lost, the Loyalists who lost, and of black loyalists who in some sense sort of lost doubly for reasons I'll talk about in just a minute. It's also been Balkan, which is not to say it hasn't been written before me. It most certainly has. In fact very, very good books. Sylvia Frey's Water from the Rocks, fantastic book about the Southern campaign. Ellen Gibson Wilson's written about it. Happy to give you a list of other writers. I'm just somebody who's really woven these different stories that have appeared in different books together to try and make it a bit more part of mainstream history. It is a huge story because we know that after the British issue, Lord Dunmore, the last governor of Virginia, a kind of amiable but dunderheaded late incompetent politician, come general out of pure military expediency, issues the famous Dunmore Proclamation in November 1775 offering freedom to any slaves escaping rebel plantations between 80 and 100,000 do that during the course of the war. Doesn't matter how brutal, how disgracefully the British behaved, how defeated the British were from the beginning to the end of the war. From 1775 to 1781, this extraordinary phenomenon of self liberating black migration happens despite the numbers who died of smallpox who were captured by the American patriots. It still goes on happening. So we're talking there are 400,000 African Americans enslaved African Americans at the time of the revolution. We're talking about 20% of them. So we're talking about 20% of 20% of the American population. And you know this, in other words, the first great moment of self determination by the slave community on this scale. And you know, they just happened to be going to, as it were, the wrong side, so. So no wonder they've been. It's a bit of a kind of party poop on the fourth of July. No wonder they've kind of been written out of the mainstream view of what actually happens. A much smaller number of them fight in the British army or serve in the British army as spies, sappers, ditch diggers, cooks, laundresses, musicians. But the fact is they follow the British side. Now of course African Americans also serve in the Continental army as well. We think maybe 4 to 5,000 at various moments. But initially, interestingly, in the war, there are free black volunteers in the Patriot militias at the very outset of the war. And because of the British arming slaves in the south, there's a sudden moment of fright, starting with Washington himself. And the decision is taken to weed out blacks from the continental army through 75 and 76. That decision swerves yet again in the middle of the war when the Continental army badly needed all the soldiers it could get. And I'm happy to talk about the American side of the story as well, if you want to ask me about it in questions. So this is sort of an enormous moment. A lot of the firsts that happen in the African American experience and black American experience. The first free black schools, the first free black churches, the first black ministers to baptize whites, the first votes, the first who. The first time any woman in the history of the world votes for anything are the escaped slaves, women slaves who go to the British, end up in Sierra Leone, in Freetown, and are householders and vote in the elections for eight years in local government. Sarah It's a kind of crucible in which the modern black American experience is formed. But of course, it's formed in these exiles as a result of the defeat. So in a way, if you look at it from their point of view, what's happening, everything kind of turns upside down. The war for freedom in the south becomes a war to protect slavery. The war for freedom, irrespective of the cynicism of the British, to turns into this extraordinary, strange sort of experiment in black soldiers fighting for the Crown. And here's. I just want to read you a bit from. We have some of the first fragmentary evidence, but it's very, very important. Here's one of those who are on the British side, and he becomes a Methodist preacher after the war. He's in the Black Pioneers, one of the regiments, well, mostly engineers in the war. He's called Boston King. He'd been a slave who belonged to a racehorse breeder in North Carolina, I think it was. He ends up in New York at the end of the war. In New York in 1783, there were about 3,000 slaves, freed slaves who'd been under British protection. They'd been able to marry legally. Their children were legally baptized. The children sometimes had little certificates, as said, born free behind British lines. How moving is that? They have, in effect, their first legal identity, even though they live in conditions of extreme Material distress in New York, but they have no doubt at all whose side they're on. Here's Boston king writing a few years later in his little memoir, which is a wonderful source about. This time, peace was restored between America and great Britain, which diffused universal joy among all parties except us, who had escaped slavery and taken refuge in the English army. A report prevailed at New York that all the slaves in number 2000, actually there were more like 3000 were to be delivered up to their masters, Although some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumor filled us with inexpressible anguish and to terror, especially when we saw our old masters coming from Virginia, north Carolina and other parts and seizing upon slaves in the streets of New York or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thought of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days we lost our appetite for food and sleep departed from our eyes. The English had compassion upon us in the day of our distress and issued out a proclamation importing, quote, that all slaves should be free who'd taken refuge in the British lines and claimed the sanction and privileges of the proclamations respecting the security and protection of negroes. In consequence of this, each of us received a certificate from the commanding officer at New York which dispelled our fears and filled us with joy and gratitude. And, you know, like a lot of the blacks who write at the time, there's a sort of over generous version of actually how benevolent the British are at that moment. They're a mix of benevolence and cynicism for every kind of crude Dunmore, for every hideous cornwallis who's prepared to abandon the 5,000 blacks in the train of the British army at Yorktown. There are genuinely, as we say in Britain, good eggs like sir Henry Clinton, who does care about his black soldiers and sees they have uniforms and even smallpox inoculation, which often didn't happen, and food. And one of the best of the good eggs is the last commandant of the British army. We're still in the last year of war now a man called sir Guy Carleton, who becomes subsequently governor general of Canada. We're now in the spring still of 1783 and Washington is in New York to negotiate the evacuation of the British troops. Okay? And at the last minute, the provisional terms of the peace treaty, the treaty of Paris had included Article 7 at very, very last minute, which said there shall be no carrying off by the British army of, quote, property and negroes It's a way of saying, well, we want our slaves back. Thanks a lot. And Washington, of course, famously conflicted about the morality of owning slaves, frees his slaves at the end of the war, genuinely full of kind of doubt. And a lot of the founding fathers, however they come down, do at least have the decency to be candid about the contradiction between freedom, slavery, slavery, freedom. And Washington was certainly one of them. So on the other hand, he's being hounded by his fellow slave owners and politicians in the south, in the Carolinas and Georgia and Virginia and Maryland, who wants these slaves who've gone in their thousands of the British to be returned. So there's a summit conference at a little place called Tapan on the Hudson River. The house is still there, called the Amos to Winterhouse, should be better known almost exactly as it was when the summit conference happened between Washington and Sir Guy Carleton. And Washington begins the conference very quickly by saying, what are going to be the arrangements for the return of the slaves? And Carlton, who, you know, is one of these people who kind of backs into a single small historical moment, but when he does, he really steps up and basically what he says, well, I wish, my dear General, I could oblige you, but they're all free and they're coming with us. And Washington is very startled by this, but there's a large British military force in New York and there's no way he can actually enforce Article 7 unless he wants to restart the war, which, which some of his colleagues are persuading him he should think about doing, or blockading British New York or something like that. So determined to get the slaves back. But Washington isn't prepared to do that, so he accepts a fait accompli. He's not tremendously pleased that some had already left before. In April, on the first sailings, there were 80 something sailings out of New York between the spring and the autumn of the fall of 1783. And as soon as they started, there were free blacks and whites. Now again, a wrinkle in the story is that this famous offer only held if you're a slave in a rebel plantation shows you the British aren't doing it out of the milk of human kindness. If you're a slave belonging to a Loyalist, tough luck. So of course the Loyalists, the white Loyalists who are leaving New York and Charleston and Savannah, are not very happy to have this free black population among them. And when they all get to Nova Scotia together, the unhappiness becomes institutionalized in all sorts of deceitful Attempts to reduce the free black population to indentures that were really so punitive, they were almost like a kind of titular form of slavery. Now why to go, I hope you don't mind this Google like whizzing around in chronology. Just think of my brain as a kind of soup of indeterminate links that don't go anywhere really kind of. There ought to be a kind of alternative Google which is a kind of chaotic Google called Ganglia, really, which would be me, what's left of my brain. And why would the blacks actually. Merely because Lord Dunmore, it's true that of course the slave population their, their enemy's enemy is their friend. Hence they're prepared to cut British a lot of slack about their intentions. But it's also true to say that and if really the British are the occasion rather than the cause of this great massive exodus, the kind of vote against America, if you like, they of course can't just disappear and hope they won't be found. They need the physical protection of the British army of someone ships, soldiers, wherever. That's another reason to sort of go British in that moment. But there is also another reason which is very interesting and more startling in a way before the war, in about 1773, advertisements for runaway slaves start to appear in the Virginia newspapers, in the Virginia Gazette, which go put in there by masters, of course, wanting to get their slaves back, which run as follows, gone escaped from such and such plantation Cato, Scipio, Lucy, Kathy, whatever their names were, in the mistaken belief that in old England, that slavery was illegal in old England and sometimes actually a specific case, the Somerset case was mentioned, having heard from the Somerset case, that it is illegal to be a slave in England. And this is extraordinary because it refers to a set of cases in London concerning the status of escaped slaves in London themselves that have been fought through the courts. And the great paladin, the great champion of black rights in London was the man who occupies the early part of my book called Granville Sharp. Astonishing eccentric, genuinely noble idealist without any question. He's the son of a clergyman from the North. He's sort of, kind of absent minded, sort of scholar of biblical things. And he has an incredibly boring job sort of ordering wig powder for soldiers really in the army. And then he has a kind of conversion moment. He has a very interesting family. One of his brothers is surgeon to the King. There were lots of surgeons to the King. The King needed a lot of attention. But the surgeon also had a free surgery once a week in London for the poor of London. And they also played a lot of music together. And the brothers and sisters all gathered at his surgery. And then one day after rehearsal, Granville Sharp steps out of his, out of the house. And he sees this great line of broken down sick people stretching down the street. And in the line, quite closely is a man called Jonathan Strong, who had been an enslaved body servant, a house servant of a man called David Lyle, a lawyer from Barbados, who'd been beaten within an inch of his life. He'd been so violently pistol whipped that the gun we learned from Jonathan Strong, who tells his story to Sharp. And we have Sharp's manuscript account of it, that the gun had separated. This guy was almost dead. So he'd been kind of thrown on the street as useless as trash by his hideous master. So they take him in, they clean him up. As a very moving description by Jonathan Strong himself. He goes to St. Bart's Hospital and when he's well, they get him a job as an assistant and delivery person to an apothecary called Mr. Brown. And he gets better and he's fine. And the Sharp son, Jonathan Strong, lose contact. Until one day Jonathan Strong has the misfortune to be seen by his old master while he was postilion on the back of a carriage going through the streets of London. This man called David Lyle, Lyle thinks, I think, I thought he was dead. Wasn't that Jonathan Strong? And he thinks lost an opportunity to sell him because it was common to actually, if you needed the money to take your servants and sell them in the London docks to be taken to West Indies and auctioned at the West Indies, horrible, horrible thing. There were slave catchers all over the streets of London too. So he kidnaps Jonathan Strong, his old master. But something has changed in Jonathan Strong and that something is incredibly important. He's learned to read and write. So he sends a note to Granville Sharp. And after a bit of head scratching, Granville Sharp only because he was still thinking about obscure biblical history, he remembers absolutely everything. And Sharp comes to the prison where Jonathan Strong is being held prior to being declared to be property and shipped off to one of these horrible ships waiting in the Thames. And he issues a writ of habeas corpus. And it works. There's a hearing before the Lord Mayor and Jonathan Strong is set free. And at that moment, Sharp decides he must teach himself the common law of England. And he becomes an extraordinary kind of legal eagle in order to defend the cases of kidnapped blacks who are in a similar kind of position all the way up to the Lord Chief justice and to this case of James Somerset in 1772. And it's probably since we now know that somehow in the world of the slave plantations, these cases were actually known, it's not too much to say that a lot hangs on this extraordinary campaign in London by Granville Sharp. He's the beginning of the abolition of the slave trade movement inside Britain itself. So back to the kind of angle of perspective in America. Those tens of thousands heading for the British A, are desperate. They want protection by the British. B, it's their enemy's enemy. But C, they do believe in some serious way in the possibility of British justice and British freedom. And my book starts with a slave who renamed himself, gave himself the new name of British freedom. And, you know, that sounds like an oxymoron if you're George Washington, but of course, it's incredibly important for those who believed in it. So here's. Actually, I'll just read you the kind of scene. We'll go back to the waterfront. How am I doing for time, Josh, wherever you are, how am I doing for time? Tell me how long, because we'd like to have a discussion, I'm sure. Pardon? Okay, that's good. Here's the sort of scene at the dockside. And then I'll talk a little bit about what happens to them in nova Scotia in 1783 with those slaves who were left. There have been other big evacuations from Charleston and Savannah with the British about 20,000. Not a lot of happiness happened in those scenes. Some people were resold in the West Indies, but some also formed the first free black farming communities in the Bahamas, for example, and Jamaica and for a while in East Florida. But here's the scene in New York, an important moment, I think, in African American history. On the waterfront in that rank, grimy sweat of high summer. On the days before embarkation, a passerby would have observed a heaped mass of rope and canvas, a log jam of wagons and horses, the creak of masts, the crack of whips, cursing drivers, opportunist gulls, hogs and dogs, ship's cows lowing as they were herded on board. Skinny ship's cats prowling the decks. Barrels and tons of salt tack and biscuit tar and rum. Drunks from the grog shop lurching between them, chests piled high as a house on the decks before being lowered into the hold. The usual swarm of sailors and stevedores, buyers and vendors, thieves and whores, much pissing and kissing. A capering fiddler, a thunderer handing out tracks to Save all souls, lest the deep take them. But also amidst the melee, an observer would have seen the passengers, soldiers, men with their hats on and their coats off, bonneted women, scatters of children, some dozing, some scampering, some slouching towards their frightening future. Hundreds on some days, thousands of them, many of whom had seen better days and some of whom had seen much, much worse. These are the Loyalists, black and white, of course. Two different worlds were going with the ladies adventure. The Grand Duchess of Russia, the Peggy, the Mars, the Hesperus, the Fishburne, the Kingston, the Stafford, the Clinton and La Bondance. Between April and November 1783, 27,000 loyalists embarked. Uprooted, disconsolate, demoralized, stripped of power, wealth and property, or even simple farms and cottages, many of them roiling with bitterness at their betrayers in London, the fat politicians counting their gold from East India, opium, salt and tea. Yes, they that tea. And the generals who got to retire to a country estate in the English Isles while decent Loyalists had to make shift hundreds of miles in the north, in Nova Scotia, in the piney desert, amidst ravening beasts, bears and wolves, or in the cobbled byways of an alien town. And these dispossessed Loyalists, the whites, were less than delighted to be cheeped by jowl with that other class of people, people dressed, who knows how, scarcely more than beggars or low tavern musicians, babies sucking at the tear, to class of people who might teach their own slaves insolent manners. Worse, the blacks had the gall to sing while they were lost in sorrow. Sing? What was there to sing about? Everything. Rebirth. British freedom. God's loving kindness, his all encompassing mercy, the honest goodness of the King, the word of Sir Guy Carleton, the promises of food for a year, a piece of land for the rest of their lives. Born again. Born again, dear Lord. The wide sea water lay before them out beyond the harbor, trembling in the July haze. There had been so many boats, so many passages in the night, so many experiences on the water over which they were about to be conveyed to a new life. There were the petty augurs, flat bottom boats they had taken while they lay low in the reeds of Carolina, the tenders that had taken them out to the big British ships, the ins and outs of the islands and marshes of the Chesapeake, their folk dying on the sands from fever, the whaleboats that hunted them, the whale boats in which they themselves had hunted, the mud they had walked harder, enveloping the rivers they'd swum across. And wherever they found themselves, they'd been Looking always for Jordan. So a great kind of moment in the complicated, difficult, conflict ridden history of black and white in America and those leaving America, Nova Scotia turns out to be a terrible ordeal. What happens basically is that these black veterans of British service were promised not just freedom, which they had sometimes in the form of these famous general birch certificates, but also land. Without land you were not going to survive. Depending on your rank in the army, you were going to have 25 to 200 acres. The whites made absolutely sure that they were always first in the line and there was no kind of time or credit possibilities what you needed. Any of you been to Nova Scotia is a good team of oxen to clear the tree stumps. It's incredibly densely forested. There are kind of really tough bald granite boulders. If you were really going to make a go of it as farmers, there's never quite enough time. The Nova Scotian winter closes in around them and they're reduced to hiring themselves out as domestic servants, never as slaves. They always get wages. And when there's any attempt to make them wageless laborers, which would have been a form of slavery, they go to the courts in Nova Scotia and fight court cases themselves. Amazingly moving documents in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, again showing that this black community was not a passive reed blowing in the wind, knew really what it was supposed to have coming to it. And one of them, who is the first great African American politician who every high school student ought to know about, is called Tom Peters, Sergeant Thomas Peters, a millwright from Wilmington, North Carolina who, sort of semiliterate at best, but who is utterly capable of understanding the legal rights concerned in these cases and sends petition after petition, demand after demand to the Governor of Nova Scotia and the Governor of New Brunswick, and is always thought of as a gadfly. He's always giving a brush off. He becomes as though the community distributed around the coast of Nova Scotia their Speaker General, they call him at one point. And he decides that he's not getting satisfaction in Canada. So he gets all the way to Britain. We're not quite sure whether he works his passage, but once in London he finds Granville Sharp, he finds the black community in London and through them he has the ear of the government, which is amazing. The government then send him back to Nova Scotia and a 27 year old white naval lieutenant called John Clarkson, who is the younger brother of a much more famous abolitionist called Thomas Clarkson. And their mission back in Nova Scotia is to make an offer. Either you can stay in Nova Scotia and we'll see that your rights concerning Land are respected. Wasn't clear whether that was going to be possible on the spot. Or you can join the British army and serve in the West Indies. Not a lot of people want to take that up. Or we will pay. We will create a fleet of ships to take anyone who wishes to refound what had actually been an early experiment in your own free governing community in Sierra Leone, which becomes Freetown. And Clarkson goes to Nova Scotia. He's such an interesting figure. He's the next figure who kind of backs into history. He has no experience of this kind of life. He's in awe of his brother, who is a very, very great, charismatic man who really manages the abolitionist campaign. But John has been a naval lieutenant. He served in the Caribbean. He seems to be completely indifferent to the iniquity of slavery until this moment, until he became secretary's brother. But he takes this job and it completely transforms him. And he leaves us an 800 page diary of what happens to him on the voyage, what happens to him in Nova Scotia and what happens in Sierra Leone. It's an incredible document. You can get it online, actually, most of it. And I want to finish by just reading you from one moment. He comes to Nova Scotia and he's sort of a cross. I always describe him as a kind of cross between Russell Crowe and Woody Allen, which sounds incredibly unlikely, but he's very physically brave. He's thin and slight and tall and kind of weedy English, no chin, you know. But he's very physically bright, brave, and he goes through a lot. But he's also very neurotic and hypochondriac, and he writes everything down in his diary every single day until the amazing moment of the voyage when he actually becomes incredibly sick. The voyage back to Africa. He's so close to dying, they think he's dead. And they put him in a canvas bag and are about to drop him into the ocean when he moves. And that's just the beginning of a rather amazing story. But Clarkson, one of the great. He completely falls in love with the black community in Nova Scotia, feels they've been wronged or betrayed, and becomes, as they call him, their Moses. So this one moment is on October 26, 1791, he goes to Birchtown, the site of which is being excavated as we speak. Birchtown is the black. Free black village near Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Went through incredible hardship, but basically everything you think about is important in the African American community. Churches, schools, farming. This extraordinary sense of extending kinship is there in Birchtown. So he goes to put the offer of the government to the blacks in Birchtown. And it's supposed to be an open air meeting, but it's pouring with rain, of course, it's October and so it has to be inside one of the churches. It was Moses Wilkinson's church. The Methodist, Methodist preacher. And I just want to. And what he does, he's worried that too many people are. Because they are over optimistic about. Over optimistic about what might happen to them in Sierra Leone. They're going to be too quick to sell their land. He's always worried about being undercut by the government in London. So he's kind of is very conservative about the way he puts this offer to them. He understands that you historical significance of it. So here's what happens. As he's in the pulpit. Clarkson, standing in Moses Wilkinson's pulpit, had done his duty. He had been stern and cautious as he promised himself he should. Yet every so often, as he said something about their land or about Africa, cries and shouts of joy had gone up as if he were a prophet. And at the end, he could not help himself. He had to offer himself indeed, as their father patriarch, their white Moses. As soon as they had all got themselves to Halifax, that was going to be. This is. They all had to assemble from all over New Brunswick and New Nova Scotia. They were all assembling at Halifax to board this fleet back. And imagine, many of them had last seen the Atlantic Ocean as slaves. So of course, Clarkson goes in a hospital ship. He understands this absolutely. He lisieux very specific instructions about how about food, about diet, about hygiene, about sanitation, about even about abuse. So here's what he says. As soon as they got themselves to Halifax, he said they must look up to me as their. This is his own. His own diary. Beautiful diary. They must look up to me as their friend and protector, that I should at all times be happy to redress their grievances and I would be ready to defend them with my life, in return for which I expected their good behavior during the passage. And they would give me as little trouble as possible and lend a willing hand whenever their assistance might be required. Giving them, however, to understand that this last request would be entirely voluntary on their part. And they must consider themselves in every respect as passengers, not slaves. No compulsive methods would be adopted towards them, nor would any white sailor upon any account be suffered with impunity to lift up his hand against them. When they got to Africa, Clarkson promised he would personally see they each got their land and declared I would never leave them until Each individual assured me he was perfectly satisfied. No white man had ever spoken to them like this. They'd endured captivity, then degradation. They'd been sold, flogged, made to labor like beasts. They had endured the terrors of flight, had seen smallpox, wasted bodies lying untended and unburied on the shore, and soldiers and pioneers shot about. They had frozen in the wastes of the Nova Scotian winter and had their entitlement stolen from them. And somehow, through their ministers and men of God, they'd still not entirely abandon hope. And here was this pale young officer in his blue coat, thin as a swaying birch, saying these things that opened their ears and their eyes and their hearts. Clarkson was done. Now and again there was a burst of exultation from the congregation, with shouts of praise and affirmation. Coming down from the pulpit, he was swamped by effusive rowdy joy. And what happens in Africa is another story. But unless we all have a kind of pajama party tonight, there's not enough, which you probably have at Google, there's not enough time to tell you about that. Thanks. So now the hard bit for me. So horribly clever, well informed, probing questions. You had a question already, so is there anybody else? But I will. So, yeah, Josh back then. And I promise to come to you immediately. Yeah.

So in looking at, at one point you mentioned that 2/3 of the slaves left South Carolina, perhaps as many as 100,000 left the South. How was it less than 100 years later, slavery was still an amazingly entrenched institution.

Well, not 100 years later. You mean 100 years after this. Well, not quite. We're talking about difference between 1783 and 1863. Well, the answer is the same rule. Because they were the losers. You know, there were many more who could take their place. Actually, even after the non importation treaty, the natural rate of increase inside the plantations was enough to make a going concern. The short answer is the Industrial revolution. The demand for manufactured cotton drove the demand for the slave economy. It was thought that however you might actually operate the cotton economy with free labor, you would never actually have as good a profit margin with forced labor, even with all the kind of natural wastage rate from cruelty and death and so on. So that's the economic argument. The other short argument, which is only solved or at least resolved by the Civil War, is that America wishes to be one country. I mean, that's why even people like Jefferson, who are profoundly conflicted, you know, hate slavery, try and introduce a clause in the Declaration of Independence attacking Slavery, yet also thought blacks were racially inferior. Someone like Jefferson felt, well, and Washington too. The first priority is to keep the country together for a more perfect union. We either stand together or we fall together, particularly during the war. If you're going to have one country, if the American republic is going to be unified to the extent that it was then essentially Gary Will's wrote a wonderful book called the Negro President. Then you basically have to accept the South's terms for remaining inside the Union, which was, of course, the protective protection and preservation of slavery in their own. I mean, what this story does is make. I mean, you make an interesting point. It makes the American Revolution seem like Act 1 of the Civil War in a way which is upsetting to kind of take on board. I mean, for a lot of people it is, Josh, because actually, in the autumn of 1775, what is quite clear is in. In South Carolina in particular, what was publicly announced to be the war for liberty against the Brits is in fact the war for slavery. Because you fight the Brits, because they're about to free your blacks and the blacks are going to murder you all. That's what they thought. Because there was a violent slave rebellion going on in Suriname and in Jamaica and in Grenada and St. Vincent, and the Atlantic economy was slow. There were reports coming out all over the place about, you know, what a slave rebellion was really like. That's why Washington called Lord Dunmore when he issued that proclamation, that arch traitor to humanity. It's all incredibly upside down. So the point of actually picking up a gun if you're in the upcountry of North Carolina was to prevent the British from freeing your slaves. That was the point of the whole exercise. Eyes. Not in Boston, not in Philadelphia, and not for many Virginians, and I'm sure not for many patriots, but for a particular group of the population, that was the point of 1776. But you won't hear that on July 4th. Now this gentleman. Yeah, you again. So a generation later in the War of 1812, the British did not attempt.

To use that kind of leverage again.

Well, you know, I don't think. I'm not sure there was a proclamation, but it happened. There is another huge exodus out of the plantations. And in fact. And I should. I should. I'm just. I really. It's bad. I've got to do more homework on that. I know that the black population of some of the villages in Nova Scotia, Preston, Nova Scotia, are direct descendants of the blacks who came after the war of 1812 very impoverished and who do manage to kind of migrate in 1814 and 1815. So something of that phenomenon does happen. That's how people like David Walker, who's a militant abolitionist pamphleteer, black in Boston. That's why he says the English are the best friends we have in the world. Exaggerating, he does say, just notwithstanding West Indian slavery. And Frederick Douglass also has this very starry eyed view of the British because of that. There are some other. Yes, gentlemen here. Isn't it true that the Loyalists were.

Taking over land vacated by the Acadians?

Oh, in Nova Scotia. Yes, absolutely. That had happened already, though, before the war, but that's true. And someone asked me the other day in Boston actually, well, did. Did the Loyalists, black or white, know about the Akkadians? You know, know the incoming Loyalists, and you know, they do. Well, I don't think the blacks did. The whites probably did. But everyone chooses to be amnesiac about it. I mean, unless I'm not looking in the right place in the. In Nova Scotia and in the public record office in London. It's amazing how that ethnic cleansing has sort of disappeared as a topic of discussion. Discussion. But that's quite true. Yeah. Yes.

So you brought up a few times that it's sort of hard to fit this episode into kind of the national narrative of the United States and sort of chosen the narrative for our history of freedom. Yeah, you still hear people talk about that.

Was it just a mistake to try to have a national narrative? No, I don't think it's a mistake at all. I think we all need one, actually. But I may. Oh, the question is, I talked a bit about how difficult it is to put this kind of more painful history into the national narrative, because we kind of needy for a national narrative and therefore is it a mistake to have one at all? And my answer would be we need to distinguish between national narrative, which I'm all in favor of, actually, and national mythology, which I'm not in favor of, in fact, in a kind of petulant, childish, half limey way. And I've spent exactly half my life on either side of the Atlantic. It sort of still gets up my nose, as we say in London, a bit, that the Freedom Tower has to be 1776ft high, as if freedom arrives in the world when the Brits leave. I thought, tell that to British freedom. He didn't think so. Or, you know, Patrick Henry slave. But the answer is, Thucydides answer, that you have a narrative because without it, actually you're just, you know, a short attention span culture and it's sort of hallo Baghdad, you know, really. And you actually aren't historically sobered by the complications of the past, but the national narrative you have has to sort of allow room for darkness and tragedy and complication without losing the thread. The story of freedom is a genuine story of freedom, but guess what? There are many, many different routes to arrive at it and there are many kind of one step forward and two step back moments. I think in Britain we've lost the national narrative altogether, except when people leave school. That's sort of true. Not for you guys I bet. But actually the great difference in Britain, history has achieved something astounding. It's the most unpopular subject, it's even worse than mathematics. It's overtaken math as the least popular subject, which is terrible. And the reason is that you hardly do any of it. And it's called Hitler and the Henrys. All you do is thought to be impossible to have a narrative. So you do. If this week it's Henry viii, if it's next week it's Adolf Hitler and you know, sort of say you have this kind of mad feeling that some, you know, half asleep, doped out, 13 year old in, you know, Stepney somewhere says, you know, but did Henry VIII actually meet Hitler? You know, and if they. Something like that. So this is not good. Yes. Hi. So I've seen some of the books you've written. How do you sort of choose what subjects you're going to focus on next? It's so adventitious. I mean sometimes it's mistakes I've made. I don't mean factual mistakes, we try never to make those. But I made some in some deep way things I've not gone right about the book that happened before. For example, my very first book was called Patriots and Liberators and was about a very obscure history overwritten book. It's wonderful. The combination of overwriting obscurity won me lots of prizes actually. But it was about what happened to the Dutch during the French Revolution war. It's very obscure but it's actually a moving story if you're on the look at it through the little people side, the side of the small country. But it was a very tragic story and I thought I kind of over determined the tragedy and I thought looking back on that, well, I did that because I was a bit clueless about the kind of glue that held Holland together not as a state but as little towns. And therefore I thought, well, what I want is a kind of anthropology of life in Holland. You know, and I couldn't find one. So that's how the Embarrassment of Riches happened. How did Landscape and Memory started? Well, I was touring. I got interested in mythologies of all kinds and a bit of interest in Jung. And I was touring with the German edition of the Embarrassment of Riches, my book about Holland. And I arrived in Munich and I had a combination, and my wonderful publisher gave me a party which was kind of, you know, where you couldn't breathe anything except vodka. You know, basically it was sort of just entirely vodka. And so the following morning I had jet lag flu and a hangover. And I felt unbelievably horrible. And I was taken to a kind of healing restaurant where we had Leberkenodel super, which are these tiny little kind of miniature Aryan Kraplach, which are sort of tiny weeny things. And I gradually came to. And my blood started to flow around what was left of my veins. I looked around and all I saw was because it was Munich and Bavaria with these kind of birds that had landed on people's heads, these amazing hats that the Bavarians wore, and these kind of hairy Loden coats. Actually, complete bemusement on your faces. Obviously, Loden and hairy hats are not a thing really, in Northern California. So I said rather churlishly to my host, my German publisher, what is it with you Bavarians and the forest? And actually then I thought, well, mythologies and. And national identities and how they work themselves through images of nature. There's an interesting subject. And a few years later I came up with Landscape and Memory. And I realized it was a very important book for me to write. It was one book. It was my kind of truck fender book, by which, I mean, if you kind of step into the road, this is a New York thing, and you know that, you know, you're going to go under the truck, which comes around at 80 miles an hour, you know, down Madison Avenue or something. And as you slide under the fenders, you think, shit, I wish I'd written that book. That was Landscape and Memory was the book. Now I can die. Landscape Memory is the one I wanted to do. So this came out of wanting to write an Anglo American story, but not. And actually, in the aftermath of 9 11, I mean, it was when I went to the memorial service for the Brits who died in 9 11, and the two flags and the two national anthems were there side by side. And I thought, well, you know, we have such a lot in common. But the interesting things are the things you find out that you share through Argument. That's the Jew in me. I think, actually, that, you know, disputes and arguments. You find out what your kinship is rather than sentimental cliches about Hands across the Sea. All that stuff doesn't teach you anything. Yes.

This book is laid organized in a different way than most books. It has the.

Is it.

Parts and the chapters that go down.

Right, right. They change. Yeah.

It's laid out almost completely sequentially as far as like.

Right. It is chronologically.

Why do you choose this particular layout?

Well, it's true. It's sort of a true novel. There's absolutely nothing made up. Even when I talk about the way. Because I know about it. There is a line about how much it rains in Charleston. I know that because Henry Lawrence is obsessed with the weather. And every time he writes to his son, which is every day, he talks about the weather. So I know that. So it's kind of true. But I wanted it to be seamless. I actually am very allergic to something that says introduction and conclusion. I don't know why. I just, you know, not. It would be grotesque to. To compare myself to either Thomas Carlyle or Tolstoy. But what impresses me about War and Peace and also about the French Revolution is that there is no introduction. You just have a kind of window thrown open and you're kind of thrown into an historical moment, sort of just like that in Media Race. And it's a Victorian conceit. And I rather love that, actually. And, I don't know, just felt the right thing to do. So I start with a particular person, British Freedom and a particular place. And then I. That preface is that first British Freedom's Promise lays out the story that you're, you know, going to hear and then just the narrative. I think also because I felt this book. I always describe myself in this book as a kind of ventriloquist that more than almost any book I've written so much sources are so eloquent and so moving that I just felt I was a kind of sounding board, actually, to sort of get those voices in print. I mean, I know. I mean, you know, my own narrative intrudes, as you heard, all over the place. But essentially, the story just really. It does sort of tell itself in a way. It's sort of naive because I have to make it tell it. But more than many books I've written, letters and documents really just roll out. Does it bother you that actually. And I don't know about chapter titles. I don't know. I know that was a very odd thing to do. Not to have. But I thought, why do you need chapter titles? Actually in this story, I kind of didn't want people saying, oh, now it's the American Revolution and the Black sort of something. I did want people to read it as a story, I guess. Yeah.

So my style of reading has changed in the past year. I used to read from one end to the other.

That's laid out that way. It's not a book to hop around in. You can't.

But now what I do is I go read a chapter. I throw myself into the middle of the book, if you want, but I only go read a chapter and I go make up. Imagine what the background is or go back and go pick it up.

That's okay. That's okay because life is short. But you can't be. But if you actually read chapters out of sequence, you're screwed. Actually, there's no point reading it. Actually. I have written books like Landscape and Memory and the Embassy of Riches where you. Absolutely. It's kind of free form and it's no problem at all. But actually it matters the way in which one event like the Granville Sharp Jonathan Strong causes something else to happen a little further on in Time Matters Terribly. Dramatis Personae is stolen from 19th century novel. But that's actually. Many friends of mine said there are too many characters. We want to know who they are. We want a kind of a cheat sheet of who they all are. The beautiful beginning of the book. Everybody loves that, apparently, and I was perfectly happy to do it. But not all my books are like that. The French Revolution book, it would make no sense at all jumping from chapter to chapter and coming back at all. You either read it in sequence. I don't mean literally at one moment, obviously, but the way you read it, when you can read it has to be in sequence. And this one too. Yeah. Well, it's only just out, so. I mean, other people have written pieces of the story before me and you know, and they keep on doing it very, very good historians, as I said, Sylvia Fry and Ellen Gibson Wilson and, you know, they've. As Jules Lepore said in a piece in New Yorker, somehow it hasn't come into the mainstream even of writing about slavery in America, because it's been sort of marginalized as a British story or an African story or a Canadian story or something, or a kind of freaky loyalist story, not as an American story. But I think that's changing a lot. There are now Adam Hochschild's book, Gary Wills book, Gary Nash's book called the forgotten fifth that's just come out and a chance to see. So it's a kind of steady drumbeat really of thinking about the revolution in a different, different way now. So I hope that will change. Yeah, yeah. I'm just curious how the integration is particularly. Yeah, it's been difficult too. I mean there were race riots in London, in Brixton in the 60s. The dominant fact of course has been Caribbean immigration after the war. And we have a huge Asian British issue which, which, I mean, on the one hand we congratulate ourselves in Britain for not ghettoizing as much as the French, which is true, I think, actually. Not to say there aren't ghettos, there certainly are in Britain, but also the possibility, oh, I don't know, just Caribbean Britons as major, to be silly about it, but, but major news anchors, you know, it's long happened in Britain all over the media, for example, in serious positions of political leadership in both parties, but particularly in the Labour Party, that's happened. So we're at a different moment I think than we were in the 50s and 60s. But it did, you know, there were no grounds of complacency about that. We didn't have, I mean the Americans, you know, when the Brits accused the Americans of hypocrisy in the revolution, of talking about liberty and owning slaves, Benjamin Franklin shot back and saying, well, you're hypocrites too because actually it's fine for you to be high minded, but There are only 15,000 blacks in Britain and we have, you know, quarter million or whatever. And he had a point. He said it's easier for you to be hungry minded. I think that the telling point in British history is a long story is 1833 is, you know, that's when Britain abolishes slavery altogether in the empire, including the West Indies, which they kind of don't have to. And it used to be thought world's pure sugar economy is collapsing, but it's not collapsing, it's thriving actually. And at that moment is one of those rare moments in history where something good happens out of what I think are kind of purely philosophical and ideological reasons really. So there is that kind of background. I mean, it's not something I should have. I'm asked this question more than once and I should really give more thought to it. But it is a mixed record in Britain too. But what we don't have is this immense, immense legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. It just sort of never really goes. It gets better. It does, I'm sure. I'M not the person to say this, but never really goes away. Yeah. Yes. Do you have an alternative which would be very interesting? Oh, well, it really would take too long. It's almost a kind of quarter of the book. But actually There is this 10 year experiment in free black government, which is amazing, although there are white councillors that are sent out to kind of supervise it. But essentially it's kind of self government under Clarkson. Clarkson's the person who protects their own forms. But then there's a French raid on Sierra Leone. Sorry, you were going to. Yeah. Actually my question was more of what happened to today's Sierra Leone? Oh, my God. Well, that's. Yeah, right. No, it's so forgotten. I mean, there are great Sierra Leone historians who actually do look back on it, but so much happened. In the middle of the 19th century. A new two things happen. A population so called maroons who were self liberated slaves in Jamaica, who joined the British army and who brought Sierra Lerian to make sure the free blacks didn't cause too much trouble. They called them Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone, oddly enough. And then what happens is when Britain abolishes slavery and British warships hunt down slave ships, those who are liberated from the slave ships and indeed from the slave forts in West Africa by the Royal Navy, all kind of immigrate to the one enclave of freedom in West Africa, which is Sierra Leone. So ethnically and demographically, that original slave so called Nova Scotian population is kind of swamped. They don't disappear. They have their own language, their own festivals, their own food, their own songs, their own particular form of evangelical Christian religion that remains. And that tradition of these went all the way into the 1930s and 1940s and into decolonization. What then happens to get us to the nightmare that's the Civil war and next door, Liberia? I'm not the person to talk about, actually, but you do hear Sierra Leone of an older generation.