The predominant narrative of the Civil War era regarding the Shenandoah Valley is that the Valley had comparatively little slavery, especially compared with the Tidewater area of Virginia, hence it was not as important as in other areas of Virginia, with the exception of what become West Virginia. Additionally, the Valley had little in common with the Tidewater and consisted of small family farms and religious groups. “One effect of casting the Shenandoah as a region of ethnic and religious diversity and farms, and unlike the Tidewater and other settled areas of ‘the South’ where English and plantation culture ruled, was, paradoxically, to miss or ignore the extent to which that diversity included Africans and then African Americans who made up a significant part of the population in some areas of the region and lived and worked to some degree in all of it. As the story went for years, the Scots-Irish, German-speakers, and other immigrants and migrants who settled in the valley did not want or need African slave to work their farms; for reasons of culture, conscience, and circumstance they supposedly kept slavery, and blacks, out. Such views of the Shenandoah dominated scholarship–until recently.” [pp. xiii-xiv]
This excellent book by Professor Jonathan Noyalas begins with a look at the Shenandoah Valley in general, especially during the Civil War. “Not only was the conflict omnipresent in the Shenandoah due to its importance as a source of provender for the Army of Northern Virginia, but also because of its strategic significance to Union and Confederate forces. For Confederates, the Shenandoah Valley served the role of diversionary theater of war and avenue of invasion. For the Union, the Valley served as a place from which to guard Washington, DC, and block invasion. By the summer of 1864, Union war planners recognized the necessity of seizing the Shenandoah Valley as an important step in crushing the Army of Northern Virginia. Caught in the midst of invading armies, tramping soldiers, occupations, destruction, and incessant fighting were the Shenandoah Valley’s enslaved and free blacks. Studying the African American experience in the Shenandoah Valley bings greater clarity to how enslaved and free blacks during our nation’s most tumultuous moment navigated life in an incessantly unsettled world where one day they could be in Union territory, the next Confederate, and the following in no-man’s land. The lives of African Americans in the Shenandoah Valley sharply highlights the fact that emancipation was a contingent, individual process. That history also stresses that freedom was, and still is, extremely fragile.” [p. 2]
Professor Noyalas tells us how writers such as former slave owner Joseph Waddell, John Walter Wayland, and Julia Davis began and perpetrated the myth that the white denizens of the Valley had no love of or use for slavery, and how scholars such as Fitzhugh Brundage dismantled that myth. “In the early 1980s W. Fitzhugh Brundage, then a PhD candidate at Harvard University, spent his time as the Mary Moody Northern Fellow at the Stonewall Jackson House in Lexington, Virginia, investigating attitudes toward slavery in antebellum Rockbridge County. Among the issues Brundage investigated wa the myth of the Scots-Irish possessing an aversion to slavery. Brundage’s careful analysis exposed a world vastly different from the ones described by Waddell, Wayland, and Davis. In Rockbridge, a place that boasted a minimum of two-thirds of its white inhabitants claiming Scots-Irish descent, Brundage discovered a vibrant slave economy, one that began to boom during the American Revolution as a result of the Continental Army’s need for hemp. Similarly, Waddell’s and Wayland’s claims that few enslaved people lived and worked in the Shenandoah Valley echo through much of the literature. Davis mimicked Waddell and Wayland when she wrote that there ‘were comparatively few slaves along the Shenandoah … the Germans had never considered it economical to own Negroes.’ Slightly more than two decades later Laura Virginia Hale, a local historian from Front Royal, Virginia, compiled a massive chronicle, Four Valiant Years in the Lower Shenandoah Valley. Her volume, which appears in many bibliographies of books published since its release in 1968, not only claims a lack of importance for slavery in the Valley, but makes broad statements that the relationship between enslaver and enslaved was always genial.” [p. 4]
Similarly, “Robert Tanner’s Stonewall in the Valley, published eight years after Hale’s tome, also dismisses slavery’s importance in the region and notes that by the time of the Civil War’s outbreak ‘slavery had long been declining throughout the Valley, and what few slaves remained were among the best treated of the South.” [p. 5] Professor Noyalas then sets the record straight on this. “First and foremost, there were hardly ‘a few slaves’ living in the Valley by the time the Civil War began, as Tanner suggests. Enslaved people comprised approximately 25 percent of the total population of the Shenandoah Valley’s ten counties at the Civil War’s outset, including Berkeley and Jefferson, which in 1863 officially became part of West Virginia. … From the time of the first federal census in 1790 until 1860 the number of enslaved people steadily increased, with slight dips between 1830 and 1840 and 1850 and 1860. These declines … might partially be a response to heightened anxieties in the wake of Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831 and John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry twenty-eight years later.” [p. 5]
Professor Noyalas tells us about this book and his purpose. “This study aims to examine the various ways enslaved people in the years leading up to and during four years of war resisted their enslavement. Sometimes that resistance took rather overt forms, from arson in the wake of John Brown’s raid, a moment that various historians contend elicited little response from the Valley’s enslaved population, to planning insurrection against Confederate forces that occupied Winchester in the war’s opening months or fleeing bondage. At other times this book reveals that some enslaved people chose more passive options during the era, such as gambling or killing an enslaver’s livestock. Additionally, this work illuminates the uncertain nature of freedom and how the region’s African Americans navigated that ambiguity in a region that experienced numerous battles, occupations, skirmishes, and raids–326, by one accounting. This study illustrates that uncertainties about freedom appeared not only during Confederate occupations but Union ones as well, particularly General Robert Patterson’s presence in the Valley in the spring and summer of 1861. Collaterally, this study offers insight into not only how enslaved people viewed Union troops, but traces the evolution of Union policy toward African Americans in a region war-planners in Washington, DC, deemed important to the capital’s safety as well as the broader Union war effort.” [p. 8]
Additionally, the book shows African Americans continued to flock to United States Army lines in taking the initiative to grab their freedom, viewing US Army personnel as allies. As Professor Noyalas tells us, “Whether fleeing bondage to enlist in United States Colored Troop regiments, serving as spies for Union officers in the Valley, working as laborers, teaching in Freedmen’s Schools after the war, raising money to support those schools, or organizing Emancipation Day celebrations, the region’s African Americans were active participants in their quest for liberty.” [p. 9]
The book is very well written, and solidly grounded in primary sources. It’s an example of what good scholarship should look like. Professor Noyalas also makes use of prime secondary scholarship, and the book is loaded with great information. I can highly recommend it for students of the Civil War as well a students of slavery.
Student of the American Civil War 