Bitter Fruits Of Bondage: The Demise Of Slavery And The Collapse Of The Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Carter G Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies)

The late Armstead Robinson was a gifted, committed scholar. Writing apparently did not come easily to him; his mountain of data, painstaking methods and final illness delayed this book's appearance til after his passing. This long-awaited posthumous revision of his PhD thesis took years to complete, but is worth the wait. A wealth of detail supports his findings on the scope of resistance and internal dissent in the Confederacy. While it is not the last word on this subject, it advances debate in numerous ways. African American participants in the Southern cause mostly contributed under duress, had close social ties to white neighbors or were wealthy slaveowners themselves. This important issue deserves fuller treatment. Black rebels were an interesting phenomenon, but the tiny percentages of willing volunteers made them statistically insignificant, and most of the book focuses on Southern whites anyway. Neo-Confederate reviewers dishonor the memory of a dedicated historian who cannot defend his work against distortions. 25 years ago L. Litwack's "Been In The Storm So Long" revealed slaves' hatred of the Confederacy and welcome of freedom. W. Jordan, "Tumult & Silence at Second Creek" tells how Mississippi planters brutally crushed a major wartime slave conspiracy. W. Freehling, "The South Vs. the South" is a concise survey of divisions in the Confederacy.

In 1861, the Washington Artillery left New Orleans to join the Confederacy in Richmond. This elite company, whose ranks included members of some of the Crescent City's most prominent slaveholding families, did not travel alongside other Louisiana volunteers. Instead, they rode to Richmond aboard a special train that "carried a chest of gold donated by doting relatives." In Virginia, they dined separately from poor enlisted men on delicacies prepared by Edouard, a cook borrowed from a fine New Orleans restaurant. "Ah! He was magnifique," unit member William Miller Owen remembered. "His dishes were superb, the object of adoration of all the visitors who did not enjoy the luxury of French cuisine in their own camps." In "Bitter Fruits of Bondage," Armstead Robinson notes that the members of the Washington Artillery were not alone. Other slaveholders claimed similar privileges. Some also dined in separate mess tents where their slaves prepared meals with ingredients paid for by the mess tents' "members". Many brought personal servants who attended to laundry and other chores. And slaveholders were far more likely to made officers than non-slaveholders. But rather than being "the object of adoration" of those who did not enjoy such perks, the slaveholders' privileges caused dissension. In an army where poor yeoman farmers did most of the fighting, Robinson asserts, the slaveholders' inegalitarian behavior fatefully undermined the army's esprit de corps. By 1862, according to Robinson, animosity between slaveholders and yeoman increased exponentially. The Confederate congress instituted a draft that exempted overseers on plantations with twenty or more slaves from service. The draft law also allowed wealthy men to buy their way out of the war by paying for a substitute to fight in their stead. Confederate leaders justified these measures by citing the need to maintain order and discipline on plantations. Some planters and overseers, they claimed, needed to man the homefront or chaos would ensue. But many non-slaveholders remained unconvinced. They began to view the conflict as a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." These yeoman joined up initially, Robinson argues, to defend their homes and because they feared the results of emancipation. But as the war ground on and wealthy planters appeared not to be carrying their share of the burden, many poor farmers began to feel that they had been duped into fighting a slaveholders' war. As class fissures grew, Robinson maintains, support for the Confederacy waned. "Bitter Fruits of Bondage" is Robinson's magnum opus, a book he had been researching and writing for over twenty years. A legendary figure in the field of African-American Studies, Robinson died unexpectedly in 1995. His widow Mildred brought the unfinished 1,200 page manuscript to the University of Virginia Press. Enlisting the editorial acumen of Barbara Fields, Eugene Genovese, and other leading scholars, the press has now