Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (review)

The essays that Gregory Urwin has collected graphically illustrate the nature and frequency of the atrocities that occurred across the South once black troops entered the war. Writing to Jefferson Davis in 1865, Maj. Gen. Howell Cobb attacked the "pernicious" idea of enrolling African Americans in the Confederate armies. It was impossible, he argued, to make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers. The proposal challenged basic southern assumptions about the nature of African Americans and the legitimacy of violence to enforce racial control. Cobb warned the president, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." White Southerners justified the exercise of harsh, relentless control over black Southerners by the contradictory belief that otherwise happy and devoted slaves, if armed and empowered, would inevitably engage in acts of rape and revenge. For many Southerners, those fears justified a draconian policy towards black Federal soldiers and their officers.

In May 1863, the Confederate Congress passed an act that reflected the popular anger. The act superseded instructions from the secretary of war to summarily execute black prisoners and instead ordered "all negro slaves captured in arms" and their white officers to be turned over to state authorities to be dealt with according to state laws (35). The expectation was that most prisoners would be returned to slavery or executed. The response of both Lincoln and local Federal commanders was to threaten retaliation for any mistreatment of black prisoners. As a result, the Confederate government never actively enforced its official policy towards the men of the black Union regiments. In the absence of clear direction from above, local Confederate commanders and common soldiers often took matter into their own hands. Some stated their determination to take no black prisoners. Clashes between white and black soldiers took on a new level of savagery and all too often in the aftermath of battles, acts of individual or organized murder occurred. It is this frequently ignored but bloody and sinister side of the Civil War that is the focus of the essays collected in Black Flag Over Dixie.

Eight of the eleven essays in the book have previously been published but even the oldest one, Albert Castel's seminal account of Fort Pillow, has held up well in the face of ongoing research. The essays are organized chronologically and include a Texas cavalry raid in Louisiana (Anne Bailey), the Confederate dilemma in handling captured black soldiers at Charleston (Howard Westwood), the possible execution of white officers from black regiments (James Hollandsworth), and analysis of the conflicting claims of atrocities at Olustee, Florida (David Coles), Fort Pillow, Tennessee, (Castel and Derek Frisby), Poison Spring, Arkansas (Urwin), Plymouth, North Carolina (Weymouth Jordan and Gerald Thomas), and the Crater in Virginia (Bryce Suderow). The geographical range of the incidents supports Urwin's argument that the atrocities must be seen as a part of a widespread and deeply held Southern mind-set that united both slaveholders and non-slaveholders.

As in most essay collections, readers will find considerable variation in the coverage if not the quality of the chapters. Suderow's contention that the Battle of the Crater was the war's worst massacre is developed in only seven pages while the finely textured and nuanced account by Jordan and Thomas of the massacre of black soldiers and white "Buffaloes" at Plymouth takes almost fifty pages. Although most essays focus on deconstructing conflicting claims, Frisby's fascinating chapter examines why Fort Pillow, among the many acts of atrocities, was used by Radical Republicans to galvanize northern anger and why that incident captured the popular mind. Because Confederates predicted black retaliation, Southern fear and anxiety did not end when the last rebel soldier surrendered. Instead, as Chad Williams persuasively demonstrates, the symbolic presence of Colored Troops in Southern cities reinforced the ungrounded but widely believed fear that a black insurrection would take place across the South on...