Rough crossings

Fascinating excerpt from Simon Schama's new book, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. This chapter concerns a utopian plan by the British to establish a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone. It was a failure from start to finish.

To many historians, this entire operation has seemed more like social convenience than utopian idealism. In this view, what the government wanted was just to be rid of the blacks as irksome beggars, petty criminals and (since interracial sexual liaisons were becoming commonplace and noticed) a threat to the purity of white womanhood. The involvement of slave owners such as Angerstein and Thomas Boddington in the Sierra Leone plan, and the approval of slavery's most ardent apologist, Edward Long, who may indeed have thought of it as an experiment in social hygiene, does not, however, make it a conspiratorial racist deportation. For every Long, there were 10 dedicated abolitionists. George Rose, the Treasury man overseeing the plan, for example, was a heartfelt, militant abolitionist, committed to closing down the whole sinful institution. Then, as always, there was the veteran campaigner Granville Sharp, who was in no doubt at all - provided slaveholding of any kind was strictly forbidden - that Sierra Leone could indeed be made into "the Province of Freedom".