Rough Crossings by Schama Simon

Author:Schama, Simon [Schama, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-04-27T20:00:00+00:00

THE WORK WOULD ENDURE; but what tribulations had been sent his way! In Charleston, in October 1782, David George, his wife, Phyllis, and their four children had been swallowed up in the panic that marked the end of British rule in the Carolinas and for a while he had been parted from his family. Ships such as the Free Briton were hastily loading with free blacks, most of whom had got their liberty through serving the king. Now they were free but hated. The white loyalists who scarcely gave them room to board on the gangplank detested them for sowing wicked and ridiculous notions of freedom among their own servants and slaves. The white Americans whose property they had been looked at them as though they would hunt and kill them if they could. And the blacks still in bondage, who boarded with their masters, envied them their freedom.

It was a twenty-two-day sail to Halifax, and David George wrote that he was “used very ill on board.”27 Perhaps wanting so badly to preach and convert made matters worse. In the hilly Nova Scotian port David managed to find his old benefactor, General James Paterson, and was at last reunited with Phyllis and the children. But in that city those of his colour were not permitted to preach to the blacks, much less to baptize (indeed, they were not even allowed to pray in St Paul’s alongside whites). So when General Paterson went to Shelburne David accompanied him, for the moment leaving the family in Halifax. In the tented town he discovered “numbers of my own colour,” but once more met with suspicion and resentment from the white people. This hostility fed his calling and made David George more convinced than ever of what he must do. He shone with its necessity.

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