Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (review)

book reviews Black Confederates andAfro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia. By Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Pp. xviii, 447. $67.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.) Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., assistant professor and associate curator of the Special Collections Department at the University ofVirginia Library, exposes a painful and often-neglected side of the African American experience in Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia. Appearing as the second issue in the series A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History, Jordan's study enlarges our understanding of that conflict. Based exclusively upon primary documents, this work offers unparalleled insight into the war-torn lives of Virginia's slaves and free blacks. Not since James H. Brewer's The Confederate Negro: Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865 (1969) has anyone examined this difficult theme, yet Jordan provocatively and sympathetically considers the aberration of African Americans in the service of the Confederacy. The telling ofthis narrative reveals a heretofore concealed dimension of the Civil War's actual divisiveness. As residents of the most populous Confederate state, Virginians held 490,000 slaves in i860, and the state included a free black contingent of 59,000. The war's realities pressed hard upon both African American communities as Richmond became a strategic objective and Union forces advanced into the Old Dominion. For many Afro-Virginians (as Jordan terms them), self-preservation became the motivation for determining wartime attitudes and behavior. Some used the war's confusion as a subterfuge to provide a quick and easy means of escaping into the hands of Yankee liberators. Jordan posits that others, speculating on the assumption of how postwar whites might react to defeat and emancipation, strategically offered their support to the Confederate cause. Whether they became either Afro-Yankees or Black Confederates , the war exposed Afro-Virginians to Northern and Southern racism. Jordan arranges his study in two thematic parts titled "Uncertain Trumpet " and "Give Us a Flag." Part one is a perceptive analysis of the world that Virginia's slaves and free blacks experienced in the 1860s. In a lucid style reminiscent of Annales scholarship, Jordan depicts the mentalité in which Afro-Virginians toiled and endured, and he analyzes the perplexing specter of resistance engendered by centuries of institutional dehumanization. Here, BOOK REVIEWS155 the author examines the social and legal strictures that white Virginians established to preserve public order and notes the irony of a system that seemingly enslaved everyone it touched. Part two describes the world that AfroVirginians helped to create during the Civil War. Contrary to the limited scholarship on the subject, the participation and support offered by both slaves and free blacks proved invaluable to sustaining the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting. Recognizing the unacclaimed contributions of Afro-Virginians in this regard, Jordan characterizes the Confederacy as "an oxymoronic nation" in that it "systematically repressed blacks while insisting on their allegiance" (23). Jordan's work makes a fine contribution to Civil War scholarship by offering a history that is more inclusive than traditional studies and, thus, more legitimate . The author proves that in Civil War Virginia, slaves and free blacks were not merely passive participants who were acted upon by others, but, rather, that they were active, vital, contributing persons who offered much-needed services both on the homefront and the battlefield. While some may find this conclusion disturbing, none should question the enormous breadth of Jordan's research to support this thesis. Jordan's interpretations are revisionist in scope and should inspire others to investigate the roles that African Americans performed in different Confederate states. Scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Jordan's elegant prose that is generally more characteristic of literature than of a typical dry academic monograph. This work should appeal to students of Civil War, Virginia, and African American history, and the reasonable price of the paperback edition makes it suitable to use as an ancillary text in college-level courses. It is always a dangerous business to regard a work a classic so shortly after its release, but this ground-breaking study seems destined to bear that title. Jordan has mined archival depositories from across the...