The Civil War is one of America's unending stories. More than 70,000 books about the war sit on library shelves, and an additional 65 new titles were published this spring alone. On top of this collection, Andrew Ward has added "The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves," a fascinating, sometimes deeply moving oral history of the war's battles, betrayals, carnage, contradictions and human endurance.
An independent, award-winning author, Ward opens his book by asking readers to imagine they have entered an enormous tent to listen to thousands of former slaves testify about the war. Of course, Ward has edited and organized the former slaves' recollections into a vivid chronology that starts April 12, 1861, at Charleston Bay a few hours before the first cannon is fired on Fort Sumter. It ends at the soldiers' graves that former slaves are digging on Gen. Robert E. Lee's old plantation —- the original section of today's Arlington National Cemetery.
From beginning to end, "The Slaves' War" provides a rich, readable narrative that is the first account of the Civil War's major battles and events from the perspectives of those whose legal freedom it won. The book is told from the viewpoint of slaves who often watched the conflicts or who cleared out the dead and wounded. Also portrayed are the actions and attitudes of both Southern and Northern leaders in the war —- Jefferson Davis, Lee, Lincoln, and others —- through the eyes and ears of the men and women who served them.
The slaves' stories recall aspects of the war that are not often told. When Union troops approached a local area, for example, some plantation owners quickly moved slaves deep into the woods without food or proper clothing. In other places, soldiers on both sides commandeered what little food local slaves and plantation owners had for survival. And many slaves remembered how captured runaways were severely beaten or killed —- even after most Southerners knew Lincoln's army had won the war.
Ward is at his best when he captures the hard-earned, sly wisdom of former slaves like Texan Martin Jackson, who observed: "I knew the Yanks were going to win . . . I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners. But ... the war wasn't going to last forever" and, as his father told him, "our forever was going to be spent living among Southerners after they got licked."
A few pages of "The Slaves' War" also chronicle Sherman's siege of Atlanta. One of Atlanta's child slaves, J.H. Hill, remembered thinking that a Northern black woman must be truly crazy because, while accompanying the invading Yankee soldiers, she instructed black children to "get off that fence and go learn your ABCs." But, of course, "we had never been allowed to learn nothing at all like reading and writing," Hill recalled.
Much of the book's material comes from interviews undertaken in the early 20th century by scholars at historically black colleges and universities and from the New Deal's Federal Writers Project. Ward boiled down thousands of recollections and memoirs into a story of fewer than 300 pages interwoven with the author's own historical context, narration and descriptions, which put the slaves' memories into context.
The author did not attempt to verify the accuracy of slave remembrances, but he did alter their language. He rewrote dialect and eliminated references (by slaves and others) to the n-word. In historical nonfiction, this editorial license risks obscuring the raw emotion of personal histories, but in this case it does not hide the slaves' voices or feelings.
Civil War buffs who devour thousands of pages on military tactics will find little of that in Ward's work. There also is not much here about the war's politics. Readers seeking the life stories of former slaves also will get only momentary, fleeting glimpses. And those who appreciate oral histories will find many powerful phrases in "The Slaves' War" but too few powerful stories capturing the person and the storytelling personality of former slaves.
Ward has provided a long-overdue addition to America's unending story. In every chapter, "The Slaves' War" not only reveals how slaves saw the war, it also suggests how much more we might have learned had we been able to sit down with those mostly illiterate men and women whose collective memories provided a unique bond to our national history and who often had a way with words that no book will ever justly convey.
Steve Suitts, author of "Hugo Black of Alabama," was executive producer and a writer of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a 1996 Peabody Award-winning radio series of oral histories on the South's modern civil rights movement.
NONFICTION
"The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves" by Andrew Ward. Houghton Mifflin. 386 pages. $28.
Bottom line: Sheds overdue light on America's unending story.
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