The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves | 
 enlarge | Author: Andrew Ward
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 32179
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0618634002
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.711
EAN: 9780618634002
ASIN: 0618634002
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
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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.
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The Slaves' War August 17, 2008
This was by far the best book of its kind written about this particular event in American history. The author used great care in weaving a histroical story by first person accounts of the events surrounding some of the major battle of the civil war. Few authors have possessed the courage to write such an unbiased account of the slaves and how the civil war affected them both individualy and as a people as a whole.
I highly recommend this book to any and all students of history especially those students of African American history. Five stars plus.
 Great Follow-up to Complicity July 21, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I had just finished reading Complicity (The North's involvment in the slave trade) when this book arrived. It is a wonderfully written "history" book & I love history
Invaluable! June 21, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is a superb telling of the story of the Civil War with running commentary in the actual words of slaves who saw it, fought it, endured it and lived to tell about what it was like for them and their fellows before, during and after the war. For anyone interested in the war, it provides a unique and invaluable perspective never seen before. For anyone interested in African American history, which of course should be every American who wants to be politically awake, this is a wonderful opportunity to let the people speak for themselves, a most welcome change in historical writing about these terrible and awesome events. Must read.....
"Thank the Lawd, us is free as the jay birds!" * May 27, 2008
30 out of 31 found this review helpful
There are many excellent studies of black Civil War soldiers and equally good editions of letters and reminiscences from black veterans. (In fact, following the 1989 release of the film "Glory" about the black Massachusetts 54th, there was something of a flood of such books.) But until now, there really hasn't been a good study of the reactions of southern slaves to the war. Andrew Ward, familiar to Civil War buffs from his excellent River Run Red (2005) has changed that with his The Slaves' War.
Mr. Ward's book is perhaps best described as a hybrid between straightforward narrative and oral history. In ten well-written and organized chapters, he transcribes the chronological reminiscences of slaves from both eastern and western theaters of the war. The witnesses come from all walks: house and field slaves; skilled and unskilled; men, women, and children; slaves who eagerly followed the course of the war, and slaves who wanted nothing to do with it; slaves who were rented by their masters to dig fortifications, and slaves who remained on the farm while their white owners went to the front; slaves who remained convinced until their dying day that they'd met Lincoln on an incognito journey through the south he made before the war, and slaves who actually did observe Jefferson Davis on a regular basis (one black preacher humorously prayed: "Shake Jeff Davis over the mouth of hell, Lord, but don't drop him in"); slaves who welcomed blue-coated soldiers as harbingers of Jubilo, and slaves who, frightened by their masters' tales of northern barbarism, were frightened; and slaves, always and everywhere, distrusted by masters worried that all the northern-spawned talk of abolition would spawn rebellion south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Ward tells us that he surveyed thousands of recorded interviews, memoirs, obituaries, diaries, and letters in compiling The Slaves' War. It's both remarkable and a bit disconcerting that this material hasn't been mined until now. Hopefully Ward's revitalization of these slaves' voices, with all their eloquence, hope, fear, pain, joy, anger, pride and even humor, will spark more research into this too neglected Civil War perspective.
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* This joyous cry was raised by plantation slaves upon the news that the Confederacy was defeated. But as would prove all too often the case in the post-war years, the joy of freedom was quickly shadowed by threats. Immediately after the slaves shouted their thanksgivings, "a white man come along and told them that if he heard them say that again, he would kill the last one of them." From Addie Vinson's reminiscences, p. 263.
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