No matter how many documentaries, books, and poignant recapitulations are produced about it, the War Between The States always seems to contain unexamined facets. Historian and essayist Andrew Ward brilliantly captures the complex surface of one neglected aspect of the conflict in his indispensable compilation The Slaves' War: The Civil War In The Words Of Former Slaves. Bringing together hundreds of memoirs, interviews, reports, and recollections by former slaves, the book offers a searing portrait of a war that remained mysterious, in its larger outlines, to many of the people for whose benefit it was supposedly waged.
Ward arranges his material in a combination of chronological and geographical chapters, describing the sequence of major battles, troop movements, and political events over the span of a few months, then quoting the slaves who recalled their experiences after the war. As might be expected (but as people looking for easy messages in American history often forget), there was no single "slave experience" in the war. Some slaves protected their masters from Yankee invaders; some snuck off to the Union camps as soon as possible to join up on the other side; some took delight in making their masters serve them, once the tables were turned. Many slaves were fed propaganda about their Northern enemies, and when a bluecoat took off his cap, they stared at him, trying to see the horns they had been assured grew from those inhuman heads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Southern values were deeply ingrained in many slaves' worldview, leading to the widespread perception that Jefferson Davis was preferable to Abraham Lincoln, because he was a higher class of gentleman. On the other hand, several former slaves were convinced that they had served Lincoln at table as he roamed the South in disguise before the war, and reported their contact as a source of great pride.
Thanks to the direct experience of men and women facing their fellows across cultural, military, and racial divides, The Slaves' War is as affecting as a novel. Ward reminds us that these experiences rarely line up neatly with the eventual fixed cultural meaning of the Civil War. When he reports a manservant asserting, about the war's bitter end, "There ain't never been nobody fighting like our Confederates done, but they've ain't never had a chance," it's a stark reminder that loyalties were—and still are—complicated affairs.
A.V. Club Rating: A
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