Customer Reviews

Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History)

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It appears that a lot of people had a knee-jerk reaction to the title of Professor Jordan's book. This is far from an Apologia for the Confederacy. It is a very well researched and documented account of Black Experience in Civil War Virginia.

While working on my own family history I have been doing an analysis of the 1810 Federal Census for Spotsylvania County. What stands out is the number of Free Black households headed by women. In our politically correct age we tend to over-look the fact that in Colonial and pre-war Virginia, women and children owned property, and that the courts vigorously protected their property rights from husband and estate seekers. In both white and black households in Spotsylvania County, one out of six were headed by women.

Finally, the truth is exposed. Many African American Southerners fought for the South. This book is one of the first of it's kind.Although alot of this book should be re-edited, and he should re-check his sources, the basic idea is correct. Although I find it hard to believe that two whole regiments of Free blacks fought at Manassas, some did.

This book is a must read for any person interested in learning the facts, not propaganda.

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.

Jordan has penned a well researched and accurate portrayal of non-white sentiment during the War Between the States, most refreshing in this politically correct era when some want to revise history. Painting the Confederacy as an entirely racist nation and all CSA soldiers as slavery fighters not only does a disservice to the men in arms, but to the thousands of "Confederates of Color" who served the southern cause with weapons and support from 1861-1865. The rebel gray clothed many shades of skin, and Jordan has brought their contributions to history, as well as to the southern cause, to the attention of a new era. An excellent, well written addition to the historian's or buff's library.

A certain lack of critical skills on the part of a young historian is certainly not unusual. For a major university press and a distinguished American historian to allow a new writer to publish uncorrected a book so filled with blantant and (in many cases) easily rectified errors of both simple fact and interpretation, however, is both a mystery and a disappointment.

Unfortunately, in Black Confederates we're burdened with not only "subjective" (and hence debatable) "errors" of "interpretation" . . . we're faced with blantant, easily detected, undebatable errors of fact . . . not those slippery "historical" facts, but things like miscalulations of simple percentages . . . silly things that Jordan's editors should have caught, and asked Mr. Jordan to rethink and, perhaps, re-write.

Jordan, for example, gets his math all wrong in computing the percentages of growth of slave and free black populations in Virginia . . . and then goes on at length to "explain" the phenomena he has just miscalculated.

My favorite of the author's "revelations," however, remains his assertion that not one but TWO black REGIMENTS participated in the First Battle of Manassas . . . one free-black and one slave . . . and that their "colonel" allowed the black confederates to loot the bodies of dead yanks left on the field after the battle.

Jordan's source for this extraordinary account was a post-war pamphlet advertising 10-cent-a-ticket admissions to a "lecture" by someone claiming to be the last black veteran of the Army of Northern Virginia. Hmmmmm. A very interesting and provocative source . . . but not one I'd count on for what happened on Henry Hill in July of 1861.

Strange, it seems, that Jordan's editors didn't temper his writing . . . and stranger still that distinguished Professor James Robinson, the editor of the series in which Jordan's book appears, and most recently the author of a massive biography of "Stonewall" Jackson, allowed such things to escape his critical eye.

Could it be that Robinson (arguably the world's leading authority on General Lee's good right arm) was convinced that he and all his predecessors had somehow "overlooked" both the two black regiments and their atrocious behavior after the battle that gave General Jackson his name.

Hmmmmm. I don't think so.

Great topic. Bad book. Worse editing. A disservice to both Mr. Jordan and his readers.

But, hey, to cop a phrase from that dashing young man on HBO , that's just my opinon. I could be wrong.

The book's worth the candle, I think, for its bibliography and notes . . . and as an object lesson in how not to use them.

Caveat emptor!

Dan Morrow

Ervin L. Jordan's "Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees" is a sad example of how sloppy analysis and writing can make you very, very famous.

Jordan attempts to provide the reader with a well-rounded understanding of the lives of African-Americans (henceforth "Negroes" in the parlance of the time) living in Virginia at the time of the Civil War. The results, however, are mortally wounded by the author's inability to correctly evaluate evidence, or to remain mindful of terminology.

The damage is almost immediate, when Jordan begins to use such terms as Afro-Virginians and Afro-Confederates. These terms hinder the understanding of the text for several reasons. First, it muddies the meaning of events, since the reader is often unsure whether the text refers to freemen, slaves or both. Second, it implies something that the Negroes did not have: citizenship within the state or in the rebellion. Most Negroes were slaves and were no more a citizen than a horse or a plow. The freeman had no right of citizenship; they didn't even have the automatic right to residency in Virginia. Other bizarre terms are created by the author. One particularly amazing howler is one page 241, when the author claims Richmonders wanted "Afro-Virginians" for its -- no kidding -- "New Model Biracial Army."

But these problems are just the beginning. Lead sentences--often making bold declarations--are followed by text that do not support the author's conclusion. Paragraphs contradict each other. It appears that the author had done tremendous research and, instead of withdrawing minor or contradictory material, he jammed it all in and tried desperately to make it all consistent. He failed. Interspersed are Negro spirituals which the author cannot confirm as associated with the described events.

Poor source choices abound, as when the author cites a London paper that Davis considered arming slaves as early as 1862. This is obviously a poor source for intimate details of what was underway in the Confederate government, and is contradicted by available primary sources. Indeed, the entire sections dealing with alleged "Afro-Confederate soldiers" is based upon, in most cases, second-hand reports, reports obviously false (as when two nonexistent black Confederate regiments were allegedly involved in at the battle of Seven Pines) and folklore. The author provides numerous "sightings" of black Confederate "soldiers." I can find an equal number of persons who claimed they were abducted by UFOs. Claims do not make it so. Missing are solid facts: Where are the rosters? How could these combat units exist when it was forbidden to have Negroes in the ranks or for Negroes to own or bear arms?

Being a slave in service to the Confederacy does not make one a Confederate any more than being a slave to the Third Reich makes one a Nazi. Impressed and oppressed, the Negroes of Virginia in most cases could not be Confederates because they were not offered any choice in the matter. Jordan seems to have missed this point.

I cannot recommend this book. It's poor construction and hapless conclusions cannot help us understand how our African-American population responded in the South. The reviewer can recommend, as an alternative to this book, "The Gray and the Black" by Robert F. Durden which provides an excellent account of the debate among major Confederate figures over whether to arm their slaves.

It's not an impressive work. One portion of the book is a standard overview of slavery in Virginia, drawn from secondary or much-used primary sources. The second portion discusses alleged "black Confederates" in the South, and uncritically accepts every rumor, alleged sighting, and unsupported account of mostly mythical "black Confederates." Never once does the author engage any critical faculties in looking at such accounts, nor does he explain how it is that none of these "black Confederates" show up in the records of the Confederacy, as opposed to ostensible sightings recorded by Union war correspondents, etc.

An old saying fits the book well: "What is good in it is not original, and what is original in it is not good."

It is exceedingly sad, at this late date to see such a collection of rumor and false conclusions promoted as truth. Yes, indeed, slaves went to war with the Confederate army-but as cooks, teamsters, laborers and personal servants. That did not make them SOLDIERS. Where are the rosters and muster rolls? Anyone who has done even minimal research into the Civil War and Confederate use of Blacks knows that it was illegal to enlist them in the military until just weeks before Appomatox, when desperation made Davis yield to pressure from his generals and cabinet. NO REGIMENT OF BLACK CONFEDERATES was ever fielded!
There is so much half-truth and misinformation in this book, it should be pulled from every shelf in every home, library and bookstore. It is hype, it is terrible-from the AFRO-YANKEES in the title to the last page. Avoid it at all costs, there are far too many better books out there