THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 20, 1995 TAG: 9502180029
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 140 lines
THE IMAGE STUNNED the boy.
Ervin L. Jordan Jr., a 9-year-old from the Bowling Park housing project in Norfolk, was reading his history book in 1964. And there was a picture of a black - a black! - Union soldier.
``Until that time,'' Jordan recalled last week, ``no one told me Negroes were Union soldiers. And I became intrigued by that.''
Thirty years later, Jordan has unearthed countless more images of black Civil War life. His new book, ``Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia,'' will be published Wednesday by the University Press of Virginia.
Jordan, now an associate curator and assistant professor at the University of Virginia, offers a rich account of the lives of hundreds of black Virginians - soldiers and spies, cooks and criminals, mothers and ministers.
Virginians like Sgt. William Carney of Norfolk, the first black to be awarded a Medal of Honor. Fighting with the Massachusetts regiment chronicled in the movie ``Glory,'' Carney refused to give up the Union flag, even with three bullets in his body.
Virginians like Miles James of Princess Anne County, who kept fighting with the Union side even after his left arm was amputated in battle. He reloaded his rifle with his left arm and advanced to within 30 yards of enemy lines.
Virginians like Amanda, a Richmond slave working as a school cook, who tried to kill five white girls by baking a cake laced with zinc.
``It's gorgeous stuff,'' John Y. Simon, editor of the Ulysses Grant Papers and history professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, said last week. ``Nobody else has given such details of what slavery is like. . . . He has been interested in going beyond generalities and letting us know these people as people, which other scholars have ignored.''
Jordan said his goal was to draw ``an extensive portrayal of African Americans during America's greatest internal crisis. We take it for granted that we know about this, but we don't.''
The discovery of the soldier's picture helped shape Jordan's future. He got his bachelor's in history from Norfolk State University in 1977 and his master's from Old Dominion in 1979. Since then, he's been at U.Va.
Jordan worked on the book for six years, tracking down correspondence at archives ranging from the Library of Congress in Washington to Rutgers University in New Jersey, reading every issue of every Richmond newspaper published from 1861 to 1866.
He assumes he'll get the most flak for his discussion of black support of the Confederacy. Jordan estimates that 25 percent of the 59,000 free blacks in Virginia and 10 percent of the 490,000 slaves felt loyal to the South.
Jordan writes: ``Afro-Confederate patriotism took many forms: slaves personally loyal to individual whites, free blacks who donated money and labor, Afro-Virginians who joined the Confederate army, and blacks who loyally supervised plantations of absentee owners.''
One of the leading marksmen during the Yorktown battle was an unidentified black, who, perched on top of a brick chimney, picked off several Union soldiers, rejecting their appeals to desert to the North.
Near Richmond, a black named Westley volunteered to replace a Confederate soldier who feared battle. Westley came through, supposedly killing a Yankee with every shot.
Keeping the historian's objectivity, Jordan refuses to brand them traitors to their race. ``My reaction was not disappointment, but excitement at having found the documentation to show that they existed,'' he said last week. ``I didn't sing their praises, but I didn't treat them with disgust, either.''
Why did some blacks side with those who had enslaved them and their ancestors?
For some, Jordan says, it was a question of loyalty to their native state, and not necessarily to the Confederacy. Others felt strong bonds to their owners. Burrell Barrett, a slave from Cold Harbor, slept on the floor outside his master's bedroom with an ax to protect him from Union intruders.
Some, not knowing the war's progress, just assumed the South was ahead and thought it best to stick with the winning side. Others figured their loyalty would win them freedom, or at least a few more privileges, after the war.
Jordan stresses that the Afro-Confederates were ``a minority within a minority'' and that plenty more blacks helped the Union side. Maria Lewis served with the 8th New York Cavalry Division in Alexandria. According to one eyewitness, she ``wore uniform & carried a sword & carbine & road & scouted & skirmished & fought like the rest.''
Most black Virginians, taking the safest route, just kept their opinions to themselves, Jordan said. One, badgered by whites to offer his convictions, said simply: ``I'm on the Lord's side.''
Lewis, the female soldier, personifies the strength of black women during this period. ``Much of the history talks about African-American women as if they were passive, docile persons,'' Jordan said, ``but I discovered several instances where they fought back.''
Columbia Anderson, a dishwasher at a Richmond hotel, took it out on any white man. ``Whenever she got paid, she got drunk and would beat up every white man she saw,'' Jordan said.
Some took it out on their owners' possessions. One Norfolk slave owner complained: ``That Nigger Mahala has broke another china plate and saucer. If she would only confine herself to destroying the stone china I could bear it better, but she always breaks my French china.''
Others became spies or soldiers. An unidentified laundress for a Confederate general eavesdropped on meetings and relayed plans for troop movements by the pattern she used to hang the clothes. Mary Louveste, who worked at the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, smuggled out plans for the Confederate ship the Virginia and went to Washington for a meeting with the secretary of the Navy. She later won a federal pension.
Jordan's book offers the ugly details of a slave's day-to-day existence. Many worked without shoes, going barefoot even in the snow. (``We just greased them with tallow when they cracked open,'' one slave, Peter Randolph, wrote, referring to his feet.) Their names were often changed when they were sold if their new owners didn't like the old ones.
They were whipped for almost any reason. A Portsmouth slave got 39 lashes for praying in his master's garden on Sunday. (State law forbade more than 39 lashes at one time, but that didn't stop some owners from meting out hundreds of lashes over several days.)
A Norfolk slave summed up her heartache: ``I had twenty children. My Master and Missus sold them all; one of my girls was sold to buy my Missus' daughter a piano. I used to stop my ears when I heard her play it. I thought I heard my child crying out that it was brought with her blood.''
But through it all, black families took tremendous pains to stick together, Jordan said. After the war, Jordan said, ``thousands of people took to all roads of Virginia trying to find long-lost family members.''
Even a simple encouraging letter from husband to wife showed to Jordan the resiliency of the black family. Rosette Hill of Petersburg tried to buck up her husband, John Henry, who was giving up hope of finding work. ``You must try and bare with things, thare will be a better day not fare distant when thare will be a change and one for the better,'' she wrote him.
``I felt very grateful and honored,'' Jordan said, ``to tell Rosette Hill's story and the stories of countless other Afro-Virginians.''
And he hopes to tell more - a book on black Virginians or one on the women of the Confederacy. Maybe after that, a 9-year-old boy won't be so surprised when he sees a picture of a black soldier during the Civil War. JUST THE FACTS
WHAT: Ervin L. Jordan Jr. will be speaking on ``Freedom's Orphans: African Americans and Civil War Virginia'' at Old Dominion University. The speech is free and open to the public.
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
WHERE: Batten Arts and Letters Building, Room 921
BOOK: ``Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia''; cloth cover, $67.50; paperback, $18.95. ILLUSTRATION: Associated press color photo
Ervin L. Jordan Jr.
by CNB