Humdrum Selfishness

Nicholas Guyatt

  • Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
    BBC, 448 pp, £20.00, September 2005, ISBN 0 563 48709 7

Ever since Samuel Johnson’s icy comment of 1775 – ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ – British observers have felt a little sour about the American Revolution. For Tories like Johnson, the colonists were ungrateful wretches who had squandered the precious gift of British liberty. Worse, they had the temerity to crow about it, arguing that the American Revolution had purified their political inheritance. But British accusations of American hypocrisy foundered on the unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain (and its controlling interest in the slave trade) for the introduction and persistence of slavery in America.

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[*] A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard, 624 pp., £12.95, April 2005, 0 674 01765 x).

[†] In Black Experience and the Empire, edited by Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins (Oxford, 432 pp., £15.99, May, 0 19 929067 9).