Negro Comrades of Crown: Americans and British Fight U.S. Before Emancipation. By Gerald Home. (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Pp. 368, $39.00.)Reviewed by Van GosseBeginning with seminal scholarship by Benjamin Quarles, Betty Fladeland, and Robin Winks, and later R. J. M. Blackett and Don Fehrenbacher, historians have moved to place abolitionism, and all of U.S. 's racialized post-Revolutionary polity, into a global frame. Although Ibero America and Caribbean (the American Mediterranean, to borrow Matthew Pratt Guterl's fine formulation) are important to this transnational turn, major impetus has been bringing back what should never have been left out - subordinate position of young within British Atlantic world.Gerald Home's Negro Comrades of Crown is a major addition to this scholarship, principally because of its author's vast erudition. Home is a remarkable researcher and goes deeper than anyone before into minutiae of Anglo-American diplomatic relations on this vexed topic. Uncovering every kind of archival record, obscure memoirs, letters, and travel narratives, he documents how, between 1775 and 1861, from Bermuda to British Columbia to Bahamas, black men found refuge under Union Jack. With great consistency, he shows, they were permitted to take up arms against (and take revenge on, he argues) slaveholding American republicans, especially when British commanders operated inside North America. Although some of this history is known, such as during War of 1812, where slaves were recruited in large numbers in Chesapeake and Old Southwest borderlands, Home winkles out many smaller instances of black colonial militias eager to take King's shilling, or armed gangs protecting runaways who had reached British soil to whom Crown officials turned a blind eye.In that sense, latter part of his title tells reader exactly what this book intends: a catalogue of all times when African Americans and British fought U.S. before emancipation. Its massive documentation, with 136 pages of notes, fulfills that goal, but its diffuse focus impedes author's stated purpose, which is to show that alliance between London and Africans within republic constituted the single most important threat to U.S. national security (5). (That this perspective was shared by many of leading southern politicians, from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Jackson, raises many questions: Was it empirically true, or at least reasonable, or rather an instance of the paranoid style? The impact of an fifth column inside U.S. domestic politics, including politics of Americans, lies outside book's purview, however, which may frustrate readers seek- ing a deeper understanding.) On various occasions, book's narrative spreads well beyond its stated parameters, to encompass all those of descent who did - or, often, simply might have - allied them- selves with British imperial state against United States. In these instances, people Home describes were not Americans, but Afro Caribbeans, as in West Indian regiments feared by southern political leaders, or Afro Canadians (who, like Empire Loyalists, had roots in republic, but embraced their Canadian iden- tity), or, most confusingly, Haitians and even Mexicans not in any evi- dent way connected to British Empire.A related issue is question of motive. …
Read full abstract
Mar 1, 2014
Sarah Fabian 
Open Access