THE SLAVES’ WAR

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.