Product Description

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 also slave 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18471 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Review
"This is a riveting book about the most important event in our history . . . readable and compelling." --Ken Burns

About the Author
ANDREW WARD, a writer for television, an essayist for the Atlantic, National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and the Washington Post, concluded that he would never understand this country until he understood the history and legacy of slavery. Researching his award-winning accounts of the roots of the African-American spiritual in Dark Midnight When I Rise and a Civil War massacre of black troops in River Run Red, Ward kept encountering former slaves' astonishing reminiscences of the war. Amazed that no one had assembled their testimony into a narrative of the conflict that set them free, he has sifted through thousands of eyewitness accounts of every major episode and personage to create a headlong and deeply human chronicle of the bloodiest war in American history.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
"We DoneNow"
Fort Sumter • Gladness and Lamentation

Well 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 Sumter's dismal, hulking silhouette. Sumter's 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 don't make a difference no-how. And just as the light commence
making the sky red, and it's 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, "It's 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 master's 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."
Robinson's master went on to instruct his wife to tell their overseer "to keep a
very close watch on the Negroes, and see that there's 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 master's
rounds. "He would sometimes miss the fence entirely, the ball going out into
the woods beyond," but when he managed to shoot within the bull's eye's
vicinity, he would exclaim, "Ah! I would have got him that time," by which he
meant a Yankee soldier. It seemed to Hughes that "there was something very
ludicrous in this pistol practice of a man who boasted that he could whip half
a dozen Yankees with a jackknife."

When Sumter fell, recalled Sam Aleckson of South Carolina, "in the big
house there was gladness and rejoicing, while at the quarters there was
groaning and lamentation." His fellow slaves "believed that as long as Major
Anderson held Fort Sumter, their prospects were at least hopeful; but when
Sumter fell, they felt that their hopes were all in vain." "We done now," they
kept repeating. But then an old slave named Ben stepped forward to declare
that though the white folks could "laugh now," slaves should "wait till by and
by." When a young slave eyewitness to Anderson's surrender "drew himself
up" and imitated the major declaring to the Rebels that "if I had food for my
men, and ammunition, I be damned if I would let you come in those gates!"
Ben's wife, Lucy, took heart. "Amen! Bless the Lord!" she cried, and
admonished her fellows to "hope and pray."
Their master took Aleckson and Uncle Ben to Charleston, where
they found whites "going about the streets wearing blue cockades on the
lapels of their coats. These were the 'minute men,' and the refrain was
frequently heard, 'Blue cockade and rusty gun / We'll make those Yankees
run like fun.'" One day young Aleckson overheard recruits saying "they were
on their way to the 'Front.'" "Uncle Ben," Aleckson asked, "where's
the 'front'?" The old man "made no immediate reply," but eventually looked up
at young Aleckson with a scowl. "The front is the Devil," he said, and returned
to his chores.

1
"Before TheirTime"
Harbingers ofWar • John Brown • Masters' Panic
Abraham Lincoln

Now everything was stirred up for a long spell before the war to free us come
on," said Temple Wilson. For well over a decade, the nation had been roiling
over the slavery issue. Though the Compromise of 1850 had reinforced the
Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to assist in returning escaped
slaves to their masters, and despite various Northern states' efforts to
exclude them, thousands of escaped slaves continued to seek refuge above
the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded to
campaign against the extension of slavery into free territories. Congress
passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which held that the settlers living in the
two territories could determine for themselves whether they would join the
Union as free or slave states. The result was a savage war between
proslavery and abolitionist émigrés that would result in hundreds of deaths. A
year later, several Northern states enacted laws forbidding state officials to
enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1856, as slaves in seven Southern states
revolted against their masters, abolitionist Charles Sumner of Massachusetts
was almost caned to death for denouncing slavery on the floor of the Senate.
The following year, the Supreme Court ruled that an escaped slave named
Dred Scott remained his master's property and therefore could not sue for
citizenship in the North. And all the while there had been the rising,
accelerating drumbeat of Northern abolitionists on the one side and Southern
apostles of disunion on the other.
As their masters waxed hysterical about Yankee agitation, many
of their slaves sought prophecy in signs and omens. "It was talked and
threatened and all kinds of bad signs pointed to war," said Temple
Wilson, "till at last they just knowed it was bound to come on." "I saw the
elements all red as blood," recalled Frank Patterson, "and I saw after that a
great comet; and they said there was gonna be a war." Harriet Gresham of
Florida recalled that "there were hordes of ants, and everyone said this was
an omen of war." "One night before the war come," Dora Jackson's
mother "and some other women was washing clothes down at a creek, when
all at once they look up at the sky, and they see guns and swords" streak
across the firmament and stack themselves together. "They was so scared
they run to the house and call old Master and tell him about it. He laughed at
them and told them they was just imagining things, but it was just a few days
before the war come, and they saw them guns just like they did in the sky."
In the winter of 1860 to 1861, Mississippi experienced the worst
freeze "that us had ever had," recalled Liza Strickland. "The limbs of the trees
got so heavy with ice till they broke off. It sounded like guns firing." Strickland
knew "right then and there that was a bad sign, and a war was sure coming,
and when it did break out us weren't surprised at all, and us had to stay
scared to death for four long years."
Before the war "I seen troubles in this land," declared Lu Perkins
of Texas. "I seen a big black wave of hating going on over the land and the
folks getting poorer and poorer and starving for the childrens and the old."
Perkins had a vision of "new kinds of soldiers and folks fighting till blood run
over the land," starting in the "far corner of the world and spread over the
country" — the judgment, she said, "for folks being mean and greedy." One
night she awoke and saw a "blazing star dragging its long tail along the
ground," whereupon a white man ran out into the night crying, "Judgment!
Judgment is on us!"

In the east the first concrete sign that something momentous was at hand
came in the fall of 1859 when a shard from the war for Kansas arced
eastward. After leading murderous raids on proslavery encampments along
the Missouri border, the abolitionist John Brown and a party of whites and
freed blacks set out to spark a servile insurrection by attacking the Federal
arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Jared Maurice Arter's master had departed for work as the
arsenal's inspector of arms when Arter heard that Brown and a party of
freedmen had galloped "through the county on the previous night, taken into
custody a number o...

Customer Reviews

Content Over Style
As someone who has been an amateur Civil War historian for over 40 years, this is a glimpse of the war from an entirely new, and sobering perspective. The reader needs to understand Ward has captured the oral testimonies of former slaves, and as such, the style of presentation is unavoidably choppy and not congruent. But that pales in comparison to the CONTENT of what the former slaves relate in this book. It is a unique, and again, very sobering collection of stories. And I HIGHLY recommend reading it. I am adding it to my library.

It was okay
I have recently purchased The Slave's War after seeing the author on The Daily Show promoting it. I absolutely love reading about history and real events from real people, but I found this a kind of difficult read. It started out good, but it seemed like halfway through, the stories seemed to be repeating, like I kept reading the same stuff over and over again. And it sort of jumps from one account to the next, confusing me some. Maybe it's just me, but I thought is was a slow read.

Compelling, enlightening book on Civil War
Although this book is a hard one to read more than a few chapters at a time, it is worth the effort. I think you need time to let each section sink in and be mentally absorbed before takling the next one. I found it a bit difficult to follow exactly the narrations, as they tended to get mixed together a bit. However, of course, I waa reading late at night, so that may account for some of it. But, I did plod through and found this book an informative and unique one in recounting the harshness and suffering for both the northern and southern soldiers,plantation owners in the south, and. of course. the slaves. The damage done to the south by this war,and the lack of support to the slaves after the warby the Union was made vivid.Since the south was phycially and mentally devastated by the war,and the slaves had no real chance for decent jobs ,due to their inablity to read or write, or even do math, and the plantation owners almost total dependancy on their slaves to do manual tasks and their loss of them threatening their own survival, certainly brought home the starkness of the post war southern landscape.All in all, a definite read for people who wish to know more in depth about the American Civil War.