Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

[evanovitch]

<span style="font-style: italic">From Publishers Weekly</span>

This historical novel dramatizes the American Revolution from the dual viewpoints of George Washington and <span style="font-weight: bold">Caesar, Washington's &quot;dogs boy&quot; slave who escapes Mount Vernon to become a soldier in the Loyal Ethiopians, a unit of runaway slaves who fought alongside the British in exchange for manumission</span>.

Cameron hits on the oft-ignored and embarrassing fact that America's fight for freedom from the British never prevented even the most fervent patriot from owning slaves. The exploration of this tragic irony, however, undermines Cameron's effort. Not satisfied with establishing the point and moving into the dense military and political machinations of the ordeal itself, Cameron belabors the issue on almost every page.

To the author's credit, his portrayal of George Washington, particularly in the early chapters, is compelling. He humanizes the general and presents him as a modest but self-confident gentlemen farmer who acknowledges his limitations as readily as he embraces his duty.

Caesar's initial characterization as a victim of the greatest moral injustice in American history is also believable, but Cameron cultivates in him a near savant precociousness that strains credibility. The novel is meticulously accurate in its historical detail (if sometimes repetitive), but the story meanders in an undisciplined way before finally grinding to a tedious and predictable ending. FYI: Cameron is the son half of the father-son team that writes the Alan Craik thriller series under the pseudonym Gordon Kent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


<span style="font-style: italic">From Booklist</span>

Cameron provides a compelling fictional account of a regiment of slaves, promised their freedom by the British, who fought in the Loyalist corps during the Revolutionary War.

Acquired by George Washington in 1773, Caesar is sent away from Mount Vernon for having the temerity to laugh at a comedy of errors involving his normally staid and dignified master.

Forever changed after being discarded so casually, he educates himself and, once war is declared, jumps at the chance to fight alongside the British. Rising through the ranks, Caesar becomes a leader in the Corps of Black Guides, eventually earning both his freedom and the respect of his former owner.


Though Caesar is a splendidly drawn character, Cameron's complex portrait of Washington as a brilliant but flawed leader, capable of insight and change, is the real standout in this authentically detailed American drama. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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[evanovitch]

Re: Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

read an excerpt here:

http://www.kobobooks.com/content/Excerpt...nA/page1.html#1

[Wahalla]

Re: Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

The best account of this is Rough Crossign by Simon Schama....There are alot of details... That are surprising... I read as far as the Sharpe Brothers and others set up Sierra Leone and the mess ups.. Fnirom the fact that the silver smith Revere and Give me Liberty or death speech maker were slaves owners.. The treaty between the US and the United Kingdom was delayed by the U S wanting compensation.. And the British negoiator actually trying not to betray too many..

The negotiations were held in a Tavern owned by a freed slave who was a spy for the British....King George the mad fella was the one who was seen to hold the promse of freedom.. dont get me wrong they sent a bunch of soldiers back to slavery.. But by en large the British tried their damndest it seems to keep as many people free as to the letter of the treaty...

At this point I thought I knew what was coming next....

[evanovitch]

Re: Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

Thanks... i will read it ...Rough Crossign by Simon Schama...going to see if i can download to mi Kindle..if not, will still get it

btw, am thinking of rereading something on the Borgias given the current mini-series...dont want to reread wat i have..any suggestions????

[evanovitch]

Slaves, Pursuing Liberty, Looked to a King

Slaves, Pursuing Liberty, Looked to a King
Published: May 3, 2006
When Patrick Henry declared, &quot;Give me liberty or give me death,&quot; his ringing proclamation reached unexpected ears. White patriots were not the only ones in Colonial America who thirsted for freedom. Black slaves, as the war for independence broke out, spied their own opportunity to throw off the chains of oppression, and it lay not with George Washington or the founding fathers, but with the British.

In &quot;<span style="font-weight: bold">Rough Crossings,&quot; the British historian Simon Schama</span> offers an impassioned account of the war waged by black Americans against their former masters, and, in the aftermath of defeat, their long struggle to obtain justice from the British, who had promised liberty and land. It would take years, and a brutal exodus to Nova Scotia and onward to Sierra Leone, before many of them got either.

The shot heard round the world did not pass unnoticed in Virginia. The smoke had barely cleared in Lexington and Concord when hundreds of slaves presented themselves before the beleaguered British governor, Lord Dunmore, and offered to fight in return for their freedom. Dunmore (a slave owner himself) soon organized more than 300 volunteers into a unit he called the Ethiopian Regiment, whose uniforms carried the motto &quot;Liberty to Slaves.&quot;

All over the South blacks fled the plantations in droves. A quarter of South Carolina's slave population and a third of Georgia's left, part of a human tide that reached some 80,000 to 100,000 over the course of the war. Many took up arms and fought for the British. (Curiously, Mr. Schama has virtually nothing to say about black soldiers who fought on the patriot side.)

Some acted as scouts, leading British troops through swamp and wilderness trails, while others worked behind the lines. Still others were employed as drummers, fifers and trumpeters. &quot;The soldiers of the king,&quot; Mr. Schama writes, marched to the music of &quot;African-American musicians.&quot;

At the battle of Long Island there may have been as many as 800 black soldiers fighting for control of Brooklyn Heights. Three years after the Treaty of Paris was signed, a force of 300 former slaves continued to wage partisan warfare along both sides of the Savannah River in South Carolina and Georgia.

The British of course lost, and here the larger story begins. Uprooted and transported to Nova Scotia, former slaves found themselves at the bottom of the social heap. Some scratched out a living on the worst land set aside for the loyalist exiles, but fewer than half got any land at all. Their plight, however, would capture the imagination of a dedicated band of abolitionists in Britain, led by the unstoppable Granville Sharp.

It was Sharp, a minor official in the royal ordinance office, who would help create a free black colony in Sierra Leone, and whenever he steps onto the stage, &quot;Rough Crossings&quot; picks up speed and gains focus. A fair deal for the former slaves depended largely on moral change in Britain, from indifference to slavery to an abhorrence that would result eventually in its abolition, and the history of this transformation amounts to a book within the book.

The long march, through the courts and into the hearts of individual citizens, engages Mr. Schama's passions and inspires his most gripping chapters. Elsewhere, as is his wont, he can be verbose, digressive and given to extravagant scene painting with a heavily loaded brush. But the abolitionist movement brings out his best writing.

Sharp and his allies mounted public appeals, solicited donations and organized a boycotts of West Indian sugar, the Anti-Saccharine Campaign. They distributed posters showing the interior of a typical slave ship, with shackled human beings wedged side by side. They struck medallions depicting a manacled slave with the inscription &quot;Am I Not a Man and a Brother.&quot;

As British sentiment changed, the plight of the black loyalists, many of whom had made their way to England and begged on the streets, captured the public imagination. Private money, and the unstinting efforts of Sharp and his abolitionist allies, supported an ambitious (and utopian) rescue mission, with African freedom its goal.

Sierra Leone was no promised land. Black and white settlers died in alarming numbers, and black self-rule was slow in coming. John Clarkson, a former naval officer who took on the duty of administering the new colony, faced opposition from local slave traders, tribal chieftains and his fellow governing directors. &quot;What he wanted were Plato's Guardians,&quot; Mr. Schama writes. &quot;What he had were vain, imperious, disputatious, dissolute popinjays and nonentities, many of whom spent the day drunk.&quot;

In a replay of the British experience in America, the former slaves began chafing against limits to their freedom. They drafted petitions, presented grievances and finally issued demands. &quot;We are all willing to be govern by the laws of england in full but we donot Consent to gave it in to your hands with out haven aney of our own Culler in it,&quot; one document stated. They made headway. By October 1792 Freetown, the colony's main settlement, was no longer an idea. &quot;It was a place — a place quite unlike any other in the Atlantic world; it was a community of free black British African-Americans,&quot; Mr. Schama writes.

History robs &quot;Rough Crossings&quot; of a tidy ending. The colony, beset by political strife, ends as another imperial outpost. There are other loose threads that Mr. Schama ties up in a series of postscripts. It is symptomatic that he begins his narrative with the arrestingly named British Freedom, a former slave who emigrated to Nova Scotia, but whose life in the end defies the kind of closure that a historian might like.

He makes his way to Sierra Leone, and there, like &quot;Rough Crossings,&quot; slips into the historical mist. Even half perceived, though, his life, and that of his fellow slaves, makes a story for the ages.

[Wahalla]

Re: Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

only book I read on the Borgias was one by Mario Puzo, I must confess....The Family I think.. It was only yhen I realised that Pope Alexander was a Borgia and signed the Treaty of Tordisillas....Wasnt bad..

Why does the auhtour make the black character need afirmation by his owner ???? The British expiditionary forces respected the men enough to arm them, train them, and use them in expedience. The only afiration a person needs is that of his peers not of his slave masters....We were sub human.. the authour by doing that makes us seem we need recognitions as id that is what the historical journey is about...

One of the messages of the greatest novels ever written &quot;things fall apart&quot; was at the end.. We were reduced to cultural curocities.. as the District commisioner writes a book &quot;Native Customs of the upper Niger&quot;...

I dont seek the respect of the oppressors nor do I need him to grant me favours. I will claim mine and his be damned.