Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (A Nation Divided : New Studies in Civil War History) |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Delaware History > Item 231
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Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (A Nation Divided : New Studies in Civil War History)
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by Ervin, L Jordan
Sales Rank: 809376
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List Price: $24.50
$22.05
At Amazon
on 9-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 476 pages
Published by: University Press of Virginia January 1, 1995
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0813915457
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0813915456
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.4 pounds
Reader Reviews
Jordan is to be congratulated for his wide-ranging research and for taking steps to address historical issues that tread on politically correct toes. Unfortunately, this is not a finished work of history. It is perfunctorily written, and the chapters are poorly organized. It contains some excellent information, but it is not a book for the casual reader or even the casual Civil War buff. The antebellum South, and the Confederacy it spawned, was a complex place -- 9 million individuals, white and black, whose support of, opposition to, or acceptance of slavery and secession stemmed from a thousand different motives. If one can generalize about the slave South, it is to say that an attitude of white supremacy and black inferiority prevailed among its white citizens (as it did in the North); and that African-Americans, both slave and free, who lived in the slave states were subjected to a stifling degree of legal control by slave owners and state governments. Jordan goes over these two major points -- already familiar to students of the era -- in the first section of the book, "Uncertain Trumpet." The breadth of his research is commendable, but his technique of relating it is a bit numbing; a string of paragraphs, each a topic sentence and several redundant supporting anecdotes, is hardly historical analysis, much less a readable narrative. Some of the anecdotes are powerful -- e.g., a slave mother is haunted by the sound of her owner's piano, purchased with the proceeds from the sale of the slave's daughter -- and the author would have done better to concentrate on those, to examine their meaning more closely. The most controversial parts of the book are in the second half ("Give Us a Flag") and deal with black Virginians who served the Confederate cause either by taking up arms in its defense or voluntarily supporting the white soldiers who did. As have many other authors (including Confederate apologists who continue to deny that the Civil War and the Confederacy were essentially about slavery and racism), Jordan cites numerous anecdotes about black Virginians fighting with Rebel forces or serving as cooks, teamsters, servants, musicians, laborers, and in other noncombatant roles in the Confederate armies and government. He also supplies a fair amount of anecdotal evidence for a deep split among white Southerners over the propriety of arming slaves. Even as the Confederacy was sliding to destruction in the spring of 1865, many whites were adamantly opposed to the tardy steps taken by the Confederate congress to organize black fighting units. This ongoing opposition from all corners of the Confederacy -- not to mention the overall pattern of racism and subjugation of blacks in Civil War America -- calls into serious question the value of the anecdotal evidence often cited to "prove" widespread African-American support for the Southern cause, because it implies widespread white gratitude for this support. Examining this topic alone would have been a worthwhile book. As other reviewers here state, Jordan could have done a much more thorough job in testing this anecdotal evidence. There seems to be little question that some African-Americans supported the Confederate war effort, including military service, even before 1865. But to what extent? To what military effect? Did the arming of some slaves, or the volunteering of some blacks for military or quasi-military duty, have any widespread impact on the racial and political attitudes of white Southerners? Were these "Afro-Confederates" genuine Southern patriots, or infrequent exceptions to the repressive laws of racism and slavery, or simply black men and women who sought to ingratiate themselves with their white owners and the white community? These are questions that Jordan raises in this book, and that's a start. I hope he'll spend some time and a couple of other books trying to answer them.
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Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (A Nation Divided : New Studies in Civil War History)
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Price: $22.05
Updated on 9-15-2008.
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