Thousands of books have been written on the American Civil War, a brutal and devastating four-year conflict from 1861 to 1865 that left more than 600,000 combatants dead and imperfectly freed the enslaved people of the South. Virtually all of the histories focus on battles, campaigns, and the lives of white soldiers and civilians.
As he researched the stories of African Americans in the 19th century, award-winning author Andrew Ward found more and more comments from slaves about the Civil War. He was amazed to find that a narrative history of the war from the perspective of slaves -- the people affected most by the conflict's outcome -- had never been written, and he embarked on years of archival research.
Based on his investigation, Ward now presents an alternative view of the war in his innovative history The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). This layered account presents an array of poignant and often surprising slave perspectives on masters, liberators, and the carnage around them.
The book earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and Ken Burns, the legendary documentary producer, called The Slaves' War "riveting." He added: "The most neglected of participants, and their ancient and honorable struggle, are in the foreground where they should be -- an antidote to the mythologizing that has over the years smothered this moral tale."
Ward, a renowned essayist for the Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Post, explored other aspects of African-American history in Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (2000) and River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (2005), as well as Indian history in Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1996).
Ward recently discussed his new history of the Civil War and study of African-American history from his home in Seattle.
In the 1970s, you were compared to James Thurber for your witty essays. How did you come to write about African-American history?
I'd always been interested in African-American history and the Civil Rights movement.
Did you work in the Civil Rights movement?
Work in it would be overstating it, but in high school I organized a picket of Strom Thurmond, who came to speak at our high school. I went to the March on Washington in 1963. I picketed Hammermill Paper Works in 1967 when Martin Luther King was trying to get them to hire Black mill workers.
I think that all derived from my having lived in India as a child for four and a half years. Coming home, having lived in a country run by people of color, then seeing this news footage of Black people being beaten up for wanting to eat at a luncheonette seemed to me incredibly cruel and, in a way, inexplicable. It's always haunted me.
But I blundered onto African-American history. I'm fascinated by the Civil War and by Lincoln, and I long contemplated writing a Civil War novel. I got so enraged by slavery and the resonance of that history with race relations and the economic plight of the African-American community, I just couldn't write it. I lost all my composure.
But then you wrote your Jubilee Singers book [Dark Midnight When I Rise]?
Yes. It's a redemptive story with individual experiences of slavery. They were mobbed in the streets all over the world, and they reduced audiences to tears. The great thing was that they were so wonderfully articulate themselves. They were all former slaves, so I assumed they hadn't left much writing, which was total nonsense. Some picked up reading and writing faster than you can imagine and wrote beautiful letters. They were an amazing bunch.
I began to collect snippets on the Civil War, and I realized when I was writing River Run Red, a book on the Fort Pillow Massacre [of 1864, in which Confederate troops who had captured a Tenn. fort killed surrendering Union soldiers, many of them Black], it's possible that there was enough eyewitness testimony to cobble together a slaves' eye view of the Civil War. I [found] nobody had done this.
You made a point of including a directory of witnesses in The Slaves' War.
One of the things that clobbers me the most about slavery is the notion of disappearing. I'm not a religious person [but] I have a horror of oblivion. These people were dragged over here on slave ships, survived the Middle Passage, got here, were [given] another name, became almost strangers to themselves, and died without a marker or record. This business of robbing them of their identities, their pasts, their selves, has a lot to do with why this [material] grabs me.
That's why I feel obliged to individuate these people as much as I can, and it's one reason The Slaves' War has such a variety of perspectives. African-Americans need, whenever possible, additional background information, and it's incumbent on me to provide it. But it's basically their book, not mine.
The slave opinions of Lincoln were at the extremes.
Some people didn't think much of Lincoln. One said, "I just hated Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe and all that crowd. They didn't do anything for me, and they never will." The concept of Lincoln from the interviews run from next to God, Moses, and Jesus, and on the other hand, there wasn't a Negro in the country who wasn't cursing Lincoln that first winter after [eventual] emancipation, even though Lincoln was shot, [because] they felt a sense of abandonment and betrayal.
So you go well beyond a one-dimensional view of slaves.
That's exactly what I had in mind. Instead of this generic picture of slaves who you're to assume all viewed everything in the same way, the basic message is that they're all human beings and individuals.
Despite the cruelty and brutality of bondage, many slaves displayed remarkable empathy and an ability to forgive their masters.
Depicting that is delicate because the fundamentals of slavery were ghastly. Even when somebody said, "We had a good master," that master, however good he was, could sell you, could separate you from your children, could rape you, could kill you. The system was so fundamentally coercive, you have to remind yourself of that through all of these accounts.
So the empathy and forgiveness is extraordinary to come upon, but you have to remember these are human beings, and human beings under all kinds of circumstances have complicated relationships with one another. That kind of empathy is complicated, but it is also breathtaking at times to hear how shocked they were to see their masters ruined by war.
And the slaves were shocked at the brutality and butchery of a war between great, mainly white, armies.
They knew what white people were capable of doing to Black people, but they had no clue about how brutal they could be to each other, and the scale of the war was insane. One slave [called the war] scandalous. Another asked why can't white people settle their differences without killing each other? They saw whites as brutal, but they couldn't believe the scale of that war. It was horrendous.
The slaves speak of treating the wounded, burying the dead, the horror of piles of amputated limbs, blood dripping from wagons. Your book doesn't glamorize war.
Fundamentally, I hate the Civil War. I have no patience with people who glorify it. This was an avoidable war. It was greed, inhumanity, fanaticism, and a total political failure on the part of the government. President after president tried to avoid dealing with it. The southerners said we're just protecting a way of life, but it was a way of life predicated on human bondage. In that economy, the surest route to wealth was to own slaves. The value of slaves in the South was greater than the value of land.
In our popular imagination you have benign, Gone with the Wind views of slavery.
It's romanticized by them, and Uncle Tom's Cabin was the flip side. White people [are unable] to recognize the effect slavery had on us. What did it do to religion? Whole Protestant denominations defended slavery based on a couple of lines of Leviticus. This fraudulent southern evangelical stuff and right-wing reactionary politics has some roots in the fact that those denominations started out as pro-slavery. If you can go through the distortions to use Christianity as a defense of this incredibly iniquitous system, you're capable of using religion to justify anything.
In the book you avoid the Black dialect imposed by white interviewers.
The transcription of speech is always tricky. George Knox, one of my favorite characters, said that whenever a Black person sent a letter to the editor, no matter how erudite, the editors would put it into Black dialect with "dems" and "dose" and "comin' fo' ta carra me home." I have two problems with it. I don't think it's at all accurate. There are a few sound transcriptions of these interviews, and when I compare them with the transcripts, they're not accurate. They were symptomatic of how white people felt they had to represent black speech. It's a barrier, and has this insinuation that [the transcriber] is elbowing you in the ribs and saying, "How much smarter are we than they." There's a complicity about it that I find offensive as a reader.
I dropped all this gratuitous stuff [and] found it lifted a veil so you paid attention to what they were saying, rather than how they were saying it. When you get rid of that crap, there's almost a Shakespearean, primal feeling to the way they talk.
They are very direct about the war, their lives. You also decided to omit uses of "the N word."
Yes. With "the N word" I was faced with a choice of either use it or lose it. The main reason was a technical one. I couldn't tell, reading various transcriptions, whether the N word was something the transcriber used or whether it was something the interviewee really said, and if they did say it, whether it was really "Nigra" or "Negro." There are cases where the original transcription said "Negro" and the published version said "darkie." I couldn't tell if it was validly used, and couldn't be sure about it's use.
At the same time, it's such a corrosive word, especially among African-American readers -- and should be among white readers -- that to take it out, though it may [temper] the depiction of the humiliation and psychological abuse imposed on them, brings the noise level down. It becomes so overpowering that, like the dialect, it obscures what is said. For the sake of the people who can't read when they see red, I took it out.
This book focuses on civilian slaves. What's your next project?
The next book will be a companion attempt with the voices of Black soldiers. I wanted to keep them separate because I was afraid the soldiers' experience would bump the civilian experience aside, and they were separate experiences. I want to find out what happened to them after the war. Many were lynched, [and] a lot were chased off their lands. About 30 came to Seattle, according to a local genealogist. A lot [migrated North] because they were at risk as Union veterans.
What's so compelling to me about this [history] is it helps explain a lot about the United States, in bad ways mainly: our attitude toward labor, how we treat people who do the dirty work, the incredible persistence of poverty in the African-American community. One statistic I read is that African-Americans at the end of the Civil War owned 1.4 percent of American assets. They now own 1.6 percent. The reason is generation after generation of unpaid labor with no equity built up over all those years. It's still a primary factor in what differentiates African Americans from immigrant descendents.
Your book resonates now with the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.
My only concern about that candidacy is not about him, but I have a nagging worry that some white folks feel that by voting for Obama they wipe the slate clean. In some ways, it's an end run. An African father, a white mother: He's not a direct descendent of this institution. I think he'll be a wonderful president but I hope if he is president, people won't say, "See, we're not a racist society," or "See, a Black man can aspire to the highest office." Great, but there still will be incredible economic disproportion.