Saving Savannah
The City and the Civil War
By Jacqueline Jones
(Knopf, Hardcover, 9781400042937, 528pp.)
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: United States - Civil War, United States - State & Local - South
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A panoramic portrait of the city of Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War—a poignant story of the African American freedom struggle in this prosperous southern riverport, set against a backdrop of military conflict and political turmoil. Jacqueline Jones, prizewinning author of the groundbreaking Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, has written a masterpiece of time and place, transporting readers to the boisterous streets of this fascinating city.
Drawing on military records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Jones brings Savannah to life in all its diversity, weaving together the stories of individual men and women, bankers and dockworkers, planters and field hands, enslaved laborers and free people of color. The book captures in vivid detail the determination of former slaves to integrate themselves into the nation’s body politic and to control their own families, workplaces, churches, and schools. She explains how white elites, forestalling democracy and equality, created novel political and economic strategies to maintain their stranglehold on the machinery of power, and often found unexpected allies in northern missionaries and military officials.
Jones brilliantly describes life in the Georgia lowcountry—what it was like to be a slave toiling in the disease-ridden rice swamps; the strivings of black entrepreneurs, slaves and free blacks alike; and the bizarre intricacies of the slave-master relationship. Here are the stories of Thomas Simms, an enslaved brickmason who escapes to Boston only to be captured by white authorities; Charles Jones Jr., the scion of a prominent planter family, who remains convinced that Savannah is invincible even as the city’s defenses fall one after the other in the winter of 1861; his mother, Mary Jones, whose journal records her horror as the only world she knows vanishes before her; Nancy Johnson, an enslaved woman who loses her family’s stores of food and precious household belongings to rampaging Union troops; Aaron A. Bradley, a fugitive slave turned attorney and provocateur who defies whites in the courtroom, on the streets, and in the rice fields; and the Reverend Tunis G. Campbell, who travels from the North to establish self-sufficient black colonies on the Georgia coast.
Deeply researched and beautifully written, Saving Savannah is a powerful account of slavery’s long reach and the way the war transformed this southern city forever.
The author of seven previous books, Jacqueline Jones teaches American history at the University of Texas–Austin. Among her numerous awards are the Taft Prize, the Brown Memorial Prize, the Spruill Prize, the Bancroft Prize (for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow), and, in l999, a MacArthur Fellowship.
“[A] meticulous recreation of the Civil War in Georgia’s rice kingdom . . . Jones . . . traces this tragic story with thoroughness and sophistication.”
–Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review
“A compelling social and political history . . . The guiding insight of Jones’s work is an appreciation of how fully the various stories of the disinherited inform the American narrative.”
–Philip Dray, Washington Post Book World
“This is a history rich in social detail and written with deep insight, successfully using the life and times of one city and its people to convey the broader outlines of the political and social tensions during the quarter century that encapsulated the Civil War.”
–Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe
“A detailed, compelling portrait of Georgia’s port city from the decade that preceded the Civil War to the decade that followed it . . . [A] dramatic panorama of everyday life in Savannah . . . An intimate look at a city battered by the tides of history . . . Few historians have been able to offer such a comprehensive account of how the men and women of a single city could survive such stormy waters.”
–Michael A. Elliott, The Atlanta Journal Constitution
“Full of complex characters and sweeping drama, Saving Savannah is ready for prime time . . . Jones charges a familiar abstraction–the failures of Reconstruction–with specific, dramatic life.”
–Karen Olsson, Garden & Gun
“A fascinating narrative of the African American experience in the city of Savannah during the second half of the nineteenth century.”
–Library Journal
“An important addition to the literature of slavery and African-American history.”
--Kirkus
“Penetrating . . . Jones combines comprehensive research and evocative prose in this study of a Southern city where complex rules of social and economic hierarchy blurred the lines between slavery and freedom well before the Civil War.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An important book . . . [an] unusually clear, in-depth portrait . . . of a multi-ethnic, economically diverse and genuinely cosmopolitan Southern city swept up in the maelstrom of the Civil War.”
–Michael J. Bonafield, Star Tribune
“Rich in detail . . . Jacqueline Jones lays bare the lives of whites and the black slaves of the period.”
–Curled Up With A Good Book
“Savannah’s pivotal role in the course of the Civil War and emancipation is a familiar story. . . or so we thought. In this superb study, Jacqueline Jones mobilizes a remarkable cast of characters — black and white, rich and poor, men and women, military and civilian, insider and outsider — to provide a much bigger, richer, and more compelling saga than any we’ve seen before. Jones’s sharp focus on the human dimensions of Savannahians’ wartime and post-war experience ultimately transcends those particularities and allows us to see the larger freedom struggle in moving and meaningful new ways.”
--John C. Inscoe, Editor, The New Georgia Encyclopedia
"Magnificent in its scope, marvelous in its detail, moving in its telling, Saving Savannah is the art of history at its finest. It is a remarkable, wholly compelling study, one with which historians of the American Civil War simply must engage."
--Mark M. Smith, author of How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses
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