Ward is to be commended for transforming slave testimony into a readable narrative. Still, they represent the single best source of the thoughts of former slaves in their own words ever published, and remain vital in understanding their experiences. These accounts were collected nearly three quarters of a century after the events chronicled by white interviewers with which many interviewees were likely reluctant to be completely candid.
These accounts are notoriously fraught with problems for historians, which Ward, to his credit, addresses head-on. His research took him through hundreds of individual stories collected in a variety of postwar accounts, especially the interviews found within the pages of the publications of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Ward sorted through an enormous amount of material for the volume, including a great many sources which are inherently difficult with which to work.
The book is a long-overdue account of the war told exclusively from the perspective of enslaved individuals. Andrew Ward’s recent book, The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves, reminds us that even in this most-chronicled of eras in our nation’s past, there is always a new angle to be taken and something new to learn. So many veritable mountains of books continue to be published about America’s Civil War that it sometimes seems there cannot possibly be a topic associated with it that has not been covered.
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