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Summary
Summary
The first narrative history of the Civil War told by the very people it freed
Groundbreaking, compelling, and poignant, The Slaves' War delivers an unprecedented vision of the nation's bloodiest conflict. An acclaimed historian of nineteenth-century and African-American history, Andrew Ward gives us the first narrative of the Civil War told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided. Woven together from hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, here is the Civil War as seen from not only battlefields, capitals, and camps, but alsoslave quarters, kitchens, roadsides, farms, towns, and swamps. Speaking in a quintessentially American language of wit, candor, and biblical power, army cooks and launderers, runaways, teamsters, and gravediggers bring the war to vivid life.
From slaves' theories about the causes of the war to their frank assessments of such major figures as Lincoln, Davis, Lee, and Grant; from their searing memories of the carnage of battle to their often startling attitudes toward masters and liberators alike; and from their initial jubilation at the Yankee invasion of the slave South to the crushing disappointment of freedom's promise unfulfilled, The Slaves' War is a transformative and engrossing vision of America's Second Revolution.
Author Notes
A former commentator for National Public Radio and an essayist for the Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Post, ANDREW WARD is a distinguished historian of nineteenth-century and African American history. He is the author of several award-winning works of history, including Our Bones Are Scattered, Dark Midnight When I Rise, and River Run Red. He lives in Davis, California.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Ward's groundbreaking history, the Civil War is recounted from the previously silent victims that it most directly affected: the slaves themselves. Through hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters and memoirs, Ward offers an entirely new perspective of the war and firm-voiced Richard Allen presents the material with tremendous passion. Allen reads at a solid pace, letting every word seep in so that by the end of the book, the outrageous tragedy of slavery saturates each listener. With believable and realistic shifts in tone and dialect, Allen displays his inherent storytelling talent by furthering the previously silenced voices of slaves. A truly compelling listening experience that demands repeated listenings. A Houghton Mifflin hardcover. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Even after the Emancipation Proclamation supposedly transformed the goals of the Civil War, many in the North were reluctant to wage war on behalf of the liberation of slaves. After the war, the nation was engulfed by the remembrances of Northerners and Southerners, almost exclusively white, who participated in the conflict. Ward, an award-winning author and commentator for NPR, has provided a unique and immensely valuable narrative that gives voice to the experiences and attitudes of slaves who endured the conflict. Ward utilizes testimonials, diaries, and letters, and organizes them in chronological order from the months before the commencement of hostilities to the aftermath of the surrender at Appomattox. These remembrances include impressions of slaves who witnessed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the shelling of Fort Sumter. A Mississippi slave recalls the character of both Jefferson Davis and his wife. There are surprising accounts of the reaction of slaves to the invasion by Yankee outsiders. This is a work that will interest both scholars and general readers and will be an excellent addition to Civil War collections.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A Civil War history created out of slaves' narratives. Veteran historian Ward (River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War, 2005, etc.) takes his material from memoirs, letters, diaries and interviews with former slaves, created during and after the war. They provide a rarely seen perspective on one of the key events in African-American history. Ward notes in a preface the heterogeneous nature of his sources. Some are bare-bones accounts, others wildly embellished, still others eloquent and moving. Some narrators claim to have seen Lincoln traveling the South in disguise before the war began. On the other hand, we get such eyewitness accounts as Jim Parke, Robert E. Lee's 18-year-old servant, recalling his master's agony over whether to resign his U.S. Army commission and fight for Virginia. The author generally pays more attention to the narratives of civilian slaves than to the better-documented accounts of men who took up arms. As the war began, many slaves were at first elated, thinking they would soon be freed; cold reality sank in with early Confederate battlefield successes. The slaves' grapevine revealed the extent of their masters' lies by bringing news of such important events as the Emancipation Proclamation. Some jubilant slaves mobbed the Union troops that came their way, certain they were now free. Others, Ward notes, were afraid to assert their freedom too quickly. Some were still being sold in the late days of the war. Freedom, when it came, did little to ease the lot of those still in the Deep South. The author shows the course of the entire war, giving equal weight to the neglected Western front. Except for standardizing the more blatant renditions of slave dialect, he quotes these accounts essentially as they were written down. A fresh angle and a wealth of material that will be unfamiliar even to avid buffs. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A portrait drawn from interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE We DoneNow Fort Sumter Gladness and LamentationWell before sunrise on Friday, April 12, 1861, George Gregory joined a group of his fellow slaves on the Charleston waterfront and gazed across the harbor at Fort Sumters dismal, hulking silhouette. Sumters commander, Major Robert Anderson, had been holding out since the previous December, refusing demand after demand that he turn the fort over to Secessionist South Carolina. Now his time was up. Abe Lincoln had sent the word that he going to send provisions to the fort, recalled a local slave named Josh Miles, and the whole town of Charleston went down to see the first shot fired. White Charlestonians darted around crying, Everybody get back! The fort will fire on the town and kill every person, Gregory remembered. But nobody care, cause they figure if one going to be killed, they all going to be, and it dont make a difference no-how. And just as the light commence making the sky red, and its light enough to see who that is standing by you BOOM! the first gun went off! from the Secessionist batteries. The light from it shone in the sky, and made it redder! The war done commence, and all around Gregory the folks shout, and some cry, and some sing. That morning William H. Robinson was driving his master and a companion to Wilmington, North Carolina, when they heard the booming of cannons echoing down the Cape Fear river and across the broad bosom of the Atlantic. Slapping his hands together with a curse, his master looked deathly pale as he turned to his friend and said simply, Its come. He hastily jotted a note and handed it to Robinson to take back to his mistress. But as was his habit with all his masters mail, Robinson stopped first at the cabin of a literate slave named Tom to hear it read aloud. We have fired on Fort Sumter, it said. I may possibly be called away to help whip the Yankees; may be gone three days, but not longer than that. Robinsons master went on to instruct his wife to tell their overseer to keep a very close watch on the Negroes, and see that theres no private talk among them, and to give two local whites suspected of abolitionist tendencies no opportunity to talk with the Negroes. Soon after the firing on Fort Sumter, Louis Hughes was waiting with his team outside a store in Pontotoc, Mississippi, when his owner emerged. What do you think? blustered master Ed McGee, climbing into his carriage. Old Abraham Lincoln has called for 75,000 men to come to Washington immediately. Well, let them come, he snarled, we will make a breakfast of them. I can whip a half dozen Yankees with my pocket knife. Arriving home, McGee instituted daily pistol practice that required Hughes to run over and check the target after each of his masters rounds. He would sometimes miss the fence entirely, the ball going out into the woods beyond, but when he managed to shoot within the bulls eyes vicinity, he would exclaim, Ah! I would have got him that time, by which he meant a Yankee soldier. Excerpted from The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves by Andrew Ward All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| Part I The Union, 1850 to 1860 | |
| Prologue: "We Done Now" | p. 3 |
| 1 "Before Their Time" | p. 6 |
| 2 "A Grand Man" | p. 12 |
| 3 "The Union, Gentlemen, the Union" | p. 23 |
| Part II The East, 1861 | |
| 4 "Worser for Us Than Ever" | p. 37 |
| 5 "They's Folks!" | p. 44 |
| Part III The West, 1861 and 1862 | |
| 6 "Grant Shelling the Rebels!" | p. 55 |
| 7 "The Blood Run Deep" | p. 61 |
| 8 "I Couldn't Leave" | p. 74 |
| Part IV The East, 1862 | |
| 9 "This Child Just Pray" | p. 89 |
| 10 "A Squally Time" | p. 94 |
| 11 "Ain't God the Captain?" | p. 99 |
| Part V The West, 1863 | |
| 12 "I Rejoiced All I Could" | p. 107 |
| 13 "Ungodly Times" | p. 117 |
| 14 "Ain't Over Yet" | p. 128 |
| 15 "Running from the War" | p. 135 |
| 16 "A Drizzly Day" | p. 145 |
| Part VI The East, 1863 | |
| 17 "All the Poor Soldiers" | p. 159 |
| 18 "Fearing and Trembling" | p. 165 |
| Part VII The West, 1864 | |
| 19 "Still I Rebelled" | p. 175 |
| 20 "A Rugged Cross" | p. 184 |
| 21 "Don't Want Any Such Again" | p. 192 |
| Part VIII The East, 1864 | |
| 22 "All That Killing" | p. 199 |
| 23 "A Most Scandalous Thing" | p. 209 |
| Part IX Sherman, 1864 | |
| 24 "Ain't Gonna Be Long Now" | p. 223 |
| 25 "What They Care?" | p. 229 |
| Part X East and West, 1865 | |
| 26 "I Have Seen Father Abraham" | p. 241 |
| 27 "The Plans of God" | p. 248 |
| 28 "A Tired Old Man" | p. 254 |
| 29 "The Row's End" | p. 262 |
| 30 "Nowhere to Go" | p. 277 |
| 31 "I Got My Own Again" | p. 284 |
| Epilogue: "All Alike" | p. 298 |
| Author's Note: "We'll Talk This Story Over" | p. 303 |
| A Directory of Witnesses | p. 312 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 352 |
| Sources | p. 354 |
| Index | p. 373 |
