by Andrew Ward
The Slaves' War does two very important things; firstly, it takes the Civil War and shatters any romanticism surrounding it. It wasn't romantic, it was an apocalypse. Secondly, it takes the institution of slavery and personalizes it. In this book slavery is not background to the Civil War. Inste...
A complex portrait of slavery arises from the accounts Ward gathers. We hear the voices of field slaves, who are viciously worked on the plantations; slaves from the manor houses who have internalized the mores and habits of aristocracy; and urban slaves who have a strange and attenuated sort of lib...