Black Flag over Dixie
Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War. Edited by Gregory J.W. Urwin. (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois UP, 2004).
In his introduction to this anthology, editor Gregory J.W. Urwin explains how into the mid-twentieth century groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and United Daughters of the Confederacy “lobbied to ensure that only pro-Confederate history was taught in Southern schools. Educators who did not justify secession or who dared suggest that slavery had something to do with the Civil War ran the risk of censure, ostracism, and even termination” (2). The result has been the historiographic mythification of a violent, blood-drenched conflict, which falsely remembers the ravages of war as an “ennobling experience,” a “brothers’ war” wherein kin killed kin and friend killed friend; and, when the smoke finally cleared, a celebrated contest from whose ashes emerged a “stronger and purer” white America. As an antidote to the South’s scripting of this “comforting national myth consistent with the tenets of American exceptionalism” (3-4) and which betokens our “collective amnesia,” Black Flag over Dixie, writes Urwin, “attempts to highlight the central role that race played in the Civil War by examining some of the most ugly incidents that stained its battlefields” (6).
Of these eleven essays—most of which analyze several war campaigns in which black Union soldiers became the favored targets of the Confederacy’s vicious reprisals, including the Battle of the Crater, the Fort Pillow Massacre, and the Battle of Poison Spring; and which seek to measure the range of these and some less infamous Civil War atrocities—David J. Coles’s “‘Shooting Niggers Sir’: Confederate Mistreatment of Union Black Soldiers at the Battle of Olustee” will be of particular interest to FHQ readers. Like the other authors in Urwin’s collection, Coles recognizes that the Union’s use of black regiments “contributed to the Rebels’ postbattle brutality” toward captive African American soldiers (75). Some wounded blacks were given no medical treatment, while some who were treated “suffered from unnecessary or brutally performed amputations after the battle” (76). But African Americans were not the only victims of the South’s racist wrath; some “Confederate officials refused to care for the captured white officers of African American regiments” in the same way they would for officers of all-white units, or to care for them at all (80). And although due to the remoteness of the Olustee Battlefield some Union officials were unaware of the atrocities that African American soldiers endured, even those who knew downplayed the abuses because “such information might restrict black enlistment and turn Northern public opinion against the continued recruitment of black soldiers” (84).
Because this anthology’s book jacket declares that “military history regularly takes precedence over social history, and the contemporary Civil War community too often ignores an integral part of the conflict: African Americans,” one might assume (at least this reviewer did initially) that Black Flag over Dixie explores the hearts and minds of those too-long-ignored African American soldiers; however, throughout the book’s narratives, the black voice remains conspicuously silent. These essays about Civil War battles, though welcome retellings (or, to some degree, first tellings), are primarily about the white Confederacy’s reactions to, or the white Union’s exploitation of, Northern black soldiers, not about the agency of nor about the lived histories of African American soldiers themselves. This does not necessarily detract from the value of the well-documented reports compiled for this collection; by focusing on the torture that black Union soldiers suffered at the hands of white Confederate soldiers, Urwin achieves his primary objective, which is to demonstrate that race, and therefore racism, fueled not only those supremacist reprisals, but had ignited the flames of an uncivil battle from the very start. There are other common themes that thread through and connect most of these essays: 1) The presence of black Union soldiers in the South enraged white Confederate soldiers; 2) Some African American Union soldiers inevitably became Confederate captives; 3) Confederates were typically more vicious toward black than to white Union captives; 4) The abuse of black Union soldiers at the hands of Confederates is a subject historians tend to ignore; 6) These abuses were not isolated outbursts, but were part of a campaign of racial intimidation that sprang from an Antebellum mythos which defined racio-social hierarchies; and 7) It was not unusual for black Union soldiers to be exploited by Northern officials and troops, demonstrating that the Confederacy held no monopoly on the theory and practice of white supremacy.
For social historians less schooled in military maneuverings, the book’s most theoretically comprehensive article is Chad L. Williams’s “Symbols of Freedom and Defeat: African American Soldiers, White Southerners, and the Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865.” In contrast to many of the essays in this collection, by examining the “symbolic power of African American troops and their role in fueling the fear of white Southerners during the closing months"(emphasis added) of 1865, Williams’s work addresses racism as a cultural, social, and political phenomenon—not by gauging the scope of reprisals in certain military campaigns but by examining a black insurrection that, like Gabriel’s Rebellion, never happened, but unlike Gabriel’s Rebellion, was never planned at all. Addressing the Confederacy’s perception of black Union troops as a “disgrace and insult to white Southern manhood and womanhood” (215); the fact that decades before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter “all holidays, particularly Christmas and New Year’s, generated significant apprehension among white people for fear of slave insurrections” (219); and “the question of Union-controlled lands and distribution to the freed people [which] became an explosive political issue well before hostilities ceased” (215), Williams skillfully illustrates how “the rumored insurrection hastened the disarmament and ultimate removal of African American troops and set the tone for the social and political acrimony of Reconstruction” (226).
In a thoughtfully argued summative article, “A Very Long Shadow: Race, Atrocity, and the American Civil War,” by identifying white racism as an ideological/cultural construct, a system of exploitation, and a psychological phenomenon (233), Mark Grimsley contextualizes the book’s essays by placing them inside a wider historiographic frame. Though his theoretical conclusion that during the earliest period of English colonization family or origin, religion, and wealth contributed to socio-economic and racio-social status but “skin did not” (234) is in conflict with prevailing evidence that color prejudice existed centuries before colonization of the American continent, Grimsley ably demonstrates that “race and racism is not something remote in time and place,” but is instead “part of the living present and therefore very much contested terrain” (232). All these issues are especially relevant today when some Americans, in the South and the North, view outside populations, Urwin writes, “as bloodthirsty fanatics who operate outside the rules of war.” Only the coming years, indeed the coming months, will reveal “if fear, anger, hatred, and a desire for revenge will stampede Americans into embracing the savage excesses that represents the most painful memories of their great Civil War” (12). If this type of compassionate intelligence is representative of the new Civil War historicism, Gregory Urwin and his Black Flag over Dixie is a gift to us all.
Reviewed for the Florida Historical Quarterly (scheduled for Vol. 83, No. 4, Spring 2006).
Of these eleven essays—most of which analyze several war campaigns in which black Union soldiers became the favored targets of the Confederacy’s vicious reprisals, including the Battle of the Crater, the Fort Pillow Massacre, and the Battle of Poison Spring; and which seek to measure the range of these and some less infamous Civil War atrocities—David J. Coles’s “‘Shooting Niggers Sir’: Confederate Mistreatment of Union Black Soldiers at the Battle of Olustee” will be of particular interest to FHQ readers. Like the other authors in Urwin’s collection, Coles recognizes that the Union’s use of black regiments “contributed to the Rebels’ postbattle brutality” toward captive African American soldiers (75). Some wounded blacks were given no medical treatment, while some who were treated “suffered from unnecessary or brutally performed amputations after the battle” (76). But African Americans were not the only victims of the South’s racist wrath; some “Confederate officials refused to care for the captured white officers of African American regiments” in the same way they would for officers of all-white units, or to care for them at all (80). And although due to the remoteness of the Olustee Battlefield some Union officials were unaware of the atrocities that African American soldiers endured, even those who knew downplayed the abuses because “such information might restrict black enlistment and turn Northern public opinion against the continued recruitment of black soldiers” (84).
Because this anthology’s book jacket declares that “military history regularly takes precedence over social history, and the contemporary Civil War community too often ignores an integral part of the conflict: African Americans,” one might assume (at least this reviewer did initially) that Black Flag over Dixie explores the hearts and minds of those too-long-ignored African American soldiers; however, throughout the book’s narratives, the black voice remains conspicuously silent. These essays about Civil War battles, though welcome retellings (or, to some degree, first tellings), are primarily about the white Confederacy’s reactions to, or the white Union’s exploitation of, Northern black soldiers, not about the agency of nor about the lived histories of African American soldiers themselves. This does not necessarily detract from the value of the well-documented reports compiled for this collection; by focusing on the torture that black Union soldiers suffered at the hands of white Confederate soldiers, Urwin achieves his primary objective, which is to demonstrate that race, and therefore racism, fueled not only those supremacist reprisals, but had ignited the flames of an uncivil battle from the very start. There are other common themes that thread through and connect most of these essays: 1) The presence of black Union soldiers in the South enraged white Confederate soldiers; 2) Some African American Union soldiers inevitably became Confederate captives; 3) Confederates were typically more vicious toward black than to white Union captives; 4) The abuse of black Union soldiers at the hands of Confederates is a subject historians tend to ignore; 6) These abuses were not isolated outbursts, but were part of a campaign of racial intimidation that sprang from an Antebellum mythos which defined racio-social hierarchies; and 7) It was not unusual for black Union soldiers to be exploited by Northern officials and troops, demonstrating that the Confederacy held no monopoly on the theory and practice of white supremacy.
For social historians less schooled in military maneuverings, the book’s most theoretically comprehensive article is Chad L. Williams’s “Symbols of Freedom and Defeat: African American Soldiers, White Southerners, and the Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865.” In contrast to many of the essays in this collection, by examining the “symbolic power of African American troops and their role in fueling the fear of white Southerners during the closing months"(emphasis added) of 1865, Williams’s work addresses racism as a cultural, social, and political phenomenon—not by gauging the scope of reprisals in certain military campaigns but by examining a black insurrection that, like Gabriel’s Rebellion, never happened, but unlike Gabriel’s Rebellion, was never planned at all. Addressing the Confederacy’s perception of black Union troops as a “disgrace and insult to white Southern manhood and womanhood” (215); the fact that decades before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter “all holidays, particularly Christmas and New Year’s, generated significant apprehension among white people for fear of slave insurrections” (219); and “the question of Union-controlled lands and distribution to the freed people [which] became an explosive political issue well before hostilities ceased” (215), Williams skillfully illustrates how “the rumored insurrection hastened the disarmament and ultimate removal of African American troops and set the tone for the social and political acrimony of Reconstruction” (226).
In a thoughtfully argued summative article, “A Very Long Shadow: Race, Atrocity, and the American Civil War,” by identifying white racism as an ideological/cultural construct, a system of exploitation, and a psychological phenomenon (233), Mark Grimsley contextualizes the book’s essays by placing them inside a wider historiographic frame. Though his theoretical conclusion that during the earliest period of English colonization family or origin, religion, and wealth contributed to socio-economic and racio-social status but “skin did not” (234) is in conflict with prevailing evidence that color prejudice existed centuries before colonization of the American continent, Grimsley ably demonstrates that “race and racism is not something remote in time and place,” but is instead “part of the living present and therefore very much contested terrain” (232). All these issues are especially relevant today when some Americans, in the South and the North, view outside populations, Urwin writes, “as bloodthirsty fanatics who operate outside the rules of war.” Only the coming years, indeed the coming months, will reveal “if fear, anger, hatred, and a desire for revenge will stampede Americans into embracing the savage excesses that represents the most painful memories of their great Civil War” (12). If this type of compassionate intelligence is representative of the new Civil War historicism, Gregory Urwin and his Black Flag over Dixie is a gift to us all.
Reviewed for the Florida Historical Quarterly (scheduled for Vol. 83, No. 4, Spring 2006).