Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Library of Congress

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, historians have the benefit of a perspective not accessible in earlier remembrances. One interesting angle is to look at older histories of the war, tracing its place in our national consciousness and rediscovering details that take on new relevance today.

Fifty years ago, as the Civil War centennial got underway, Robert Penn Warren wrote of the struggle as if it were an ancient epic, one that “affords a dazzling array of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as if in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythic that they move us in a way no mere consideration of ‘historical importance’ ever could.”

It seems impossible that voices from what Warren calls our “Homeric period” could survive into the age of audio recording, yet a small number have. The perspective on the Civil War that might seem most elusive is in fact the most tangible: that of enslaved children. Thanks to the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and the careful stewardship of the Library of Congress, voices of onetime slaves who lived well into the 1930s are now just a few clicks away.

Collection of the Maryland State Archives

It is surely a figure “caught out of Time” whose voice jolts a crackling, rudimentary audiotape. Leaning into the obviously foreign recording device, he says, “My name is Fountain Hughes … My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Hughes then begins a wily standoff with his white interviewer, Hermond Norwood, digressing into his opinions about babies wearing shoes (-22:00) and buying things “on time [credit],” decrying the Yankees throwing flour into the river (-11:10) and, finally, declaring he would shoot himself rather than go back to slavery, where “you are nothing but a dog.” (-10:00)



Who was this spry elder captured in these scratchy recordings? As Monticello’s Cinder Stanton has documented, Hughes was most likely descended from Wormley Hughes, Monticello’s head gardener and stableman, who was a grandson of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. His is one of seven voices that can transport the listener to a 1930s or ‘40s front porch and, from there, to the Civil War as seen through the eyes of a child.

The Slave Narrative Project emerged from a growing interest in documentary, what William Stott called a “radically democratic genre.” Documentary was particularly suited to the agenda of an administration that justified its enormous program of relief by focusing on the human dimension of social problems and holding the government — rather than jobless individuals — accountable for high unemployment. (An agenda not lost on the interview subjects, many of whom juxtaposed their contemporary social needs with their memories of slavery.)

In 1935, at F.D.R.’s request, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, providing for the establishment of the Works Progress Administration, under which millions were transferred from relief rolls to government jobs. The F.W.P., headed by former newspaperman Harry Alsberg, was part of this initiative, employing writers to work on cultural projects. Reflecting a new trend towards grassroots history, Alsberg wanted the F.W.P. to have an “emphasis on folklore; the speech and mores of the common people; stress upon the contributions of minorities (like the American Negro) to the creation of a genuinely native culture; and an accent upon regional, sectional, and local characteristics.”

The idea that the federal government should sponsor a collection of memories of ex-slaves was originally forwarded by the black academic Lawrence Reddick, who submitted a proposal to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s director, Harry Hopkins, in 1934. But his vision — which stipulated that black writers conduct the interviews — was doomed by FERA’s lack of organization and, of course, by endemic racism.

Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston (who conducted some of the earliest interviews in her native Florida) successfully pushed for a fulfillment of Reddick’s idea through the F.W.P. But personnel policies were determined by individual states, resulting in almost all white interviewers and administrators who were “extremely sensitive to local white public opinion and were reluctant to take any action that might endanger their already tenuous status in the eyes of the white community,” according to Norman Yetman, a historian of the project. This reflected the larger “gentleman’s agreement” between a Roosevelt administration rapidly winning over blacks to the Democratic Party and the white Southern politicians it could not afford to alienate.

In the end, the Slave Narrative Project consisted of approximately 2,000 interviews from over 17 states. Only 27 interviews of this vast collection were tape recorded, and of those, only a handful specifically recall the Civil War. There are many other non-audio records of slaves’ memories of the conflict; in “The Slaves’ War,” Andrew Ward has distilled all of them — W.P.A. and otherwise, written and oral — providing insightful analysis of the war through the “voices of the people it so imperfectly freed.”

Of course, the W.P.A. narratives are dubious historical sources for a comprehensive study of slavery or the war. For one thing, almost all the interviewers were white, and many of them lived in the same community as their subjects. Fountain Hughes is “Uncle Fountain” to Norwood. “Didn’t Daddy get you that divorce,” John Henry Faulk asks Harriet (“Aunt Hat”) Smith in Hempsted, Tex., in 1941, and then, after asking her opinion of a minister, “He’s a good friend of mine, I was just wondering what you thought of him. (-2:26, Part 4 of 4)

Although some interviewers do attempt to draw their subjects out on the darker side of slavery, many more of them ask leading questions: “They treat you pretty good?” To which the answers too easily follow: “Yes sir, they treat me nice, they treat me nice as they could treat me,” Alice Gaston told Robert Sorkin in Gee’s Bend, Ala., in 1941. “No,” replied Harriet Smith when asked if there were any “quarrels or fusses” between the races, and then qualified that answer in a way seemingly calculated to exonerate present company: “Well, the people that killed my husband and his brother were poor white folks.” (-9:00, Part 4 of 4)

Regardless of the personal connection between interviewer and subject, the atmosphere of the New Deal South was hardly conducive to honest expression regarding race relations from blacks. The subjects of these interviews had lived through the worst years of lynching, which still loomed large, and faced the force of the law if they stepped over the color line. “These aren’t good times for a Negro man to be proud, step too high,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in The Nation in 1930, “There are a lot of white men out of work. They won’t be wanting to see a big, proud black man getting along. They’ll be lynchings now.” After a total of 10 confirmed lynchings in 1928 and seven in 1929, the number rose to 21 in 1930. Adherence to racial subordination was a matter of survival in the Jim Crow south of the F.W.P.

Some white Southerners warned that the project itself might be out of line. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a New Dealer, was incensed after a F.W.P. social event in Washington where Ellen S. Woodward, a white woman from his state, had been exposed to the presence of blacks. In a speech recorded in the Congressional Record, he attacked the project for thus offending “the flower of Mississippi womanhood,” adding that “if this had happened in Mississippi, long before the sounds of revelry had died, the perpetrator of this crime would be hanging from the highest magnolia tree.” The slaves were “imperfectly freed” indeed.

This goes a long way to explain why expressions of resentment towards Yankee soldiers dominate the subjects’ responses to questions about the Civil War: they instantly established camaraderie with the interviewers. Fountain Hughes describes Yankees destroying his master’s plantation (11:00) and concludes that it is better not to discuss the war: “I don’t like to talk about it. It makes people feel bad.” (-11:15)

In reality, slaves began to seek out and embrace the Union army as soon as it became clear that, despite previous deference to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the general policy was not to turn them away. The Army of the Tennessee, the first to penetrate the deep South, struggled with what to do with the “Negroes coming by the wagon loads,” as Grant wrote in November 1862. “Humanity forbade allowing them to starve.”

However, some slaves’ disapproval of the Northern army was genuine. Ward writes of “astonishing empathy” for masters and mistresses and documents touching and deeply humane instances of slaves acting beyond the constraints of bondage, like carrying their masters’ bodies over long distances to be buried at home. Furthermore, in the immediate human context of war, slaves’ interests overlapped with those of slaveholders; they wanted to protect food and livestock from incoming troops not only because they had been ordered to, but because their own sustenance was at stake. Not to mention the fact that, however cruel and twisted, intimate family bonds existed between black and white throughout the South. Adam Goodheart points out that at the dawn of the war, mixed-race slaves were more likely to join the Confederate effort (technically, the Confederacy never accepted them as enlisted troops but gladly put them to work): ”Human nature is a complicated thing.”

Another reason to question the narratives’ completeness, is the fact that the subjects were old. First, the perspective of children is often skewed from adult reality, not only developmentally, but also because in most cases parents tried to shield their children from perilous truths. “Adult slaves rarely took their own offspring into their confidence,” explains Ward, “as a matter of self protection” against whites who would try to get information from them.

Second, those who lived that long were most likely not those who personally lived through the worst brutality of the slavery. And third, the recollection of something that happened some 70 years before might have faded to suit a more gentle life narrative. Anyone interviewed about the past contends not only with the awareness of what they want the interviewer to hear, but also with their own self-image.

Finally, there is evidence that some of the most damning recollections of ex-slaves were edited or censored by state administrators. General editor George Rawick suspected as much when he received a small number of narratives from one of the largest slave states, Mississippi. “I surmised,” he wrote, “either that the project had been deliberately curtailed by those who did not want such material in existence or that the bulk of the material had never been sent to the national offices of the Federal Writer’s Project in Washington, as they should have been, and might still be somewhere in Mississippi. Both guesses turned out to be correct.”

All of that said, there are glittering moments of candor in these narratives, and the effect of hearing rather than seeing or reading is a heightened contact with history. There is a priceless intimacy to tuning into the cadence and tone of someone recounting childhood memories punctuated by overseers and Yankees, surreptitious mistresses and cannon shots in the distance. Alice Gaston recalls the Federal army arriving on her plantation: “I can remember when the Yankees come through and they carried my father … Missus told me not say anything. They all hiding in the woods and I didn’t tell them anything.” Samuel Polite, speaking in Gullah dialect in St. Helena Island, SC, remembers his cruel overseer — “the devil” — making his mother plow, and Northern troops telling him to run away: “The Yankees come across on the old Giddy Main. They tell us to run away up in Bonrad.”

Harriet Smith’s soft, melodic voice conjures up the image of her as a girl, sitting atop a white fence watching the troops go by, surprised by the sight of “colored soldiers in droves,” and filled with wonder when a black orphan girl neighbor (who had had her arm cut off while operating a molasses mill) ran off with one of them. (-:55) (Part 2 of 4, -4:00) Approximately 300,000 black men would serve in the Union army (and thousands would also join the Confederate effort, including Fountain Hughes’s father, who was killed at Gettysburg) but the sight was particularly shocking to all Southerners in the early days of the war.

Library of Congress

The extraordinary recording of Zora Neale Hurston (among others) interviewing Wallace Quarterman in St. Simon’s Island, GA, in 1935 focuses on the war’s aftermath, “after the sword was down.” His Gullah dialect is beautiful to hear but difficult to understand. However, one portion of it is transcribed, including the words to a song about the Civil War.

These narratives are as poetic as they are complex, tendentious and subtle; they spotlight the voices of those who had the most at stake in the war and lived to see it from the longest view. Voices like Fountain’s (who died July 4, 1957) add considerable dimension to Robert Penn Warren’s Homeric frieze.

Scholars of the ‘60s looked to the Civil War for an understanding of the American epic, while New Dealers looked to it in search of hidden, grass-roots narratives, capturing the last vestiges of a great American oral tradition. In the Internet age, we can experience it all as a sort of oral kaleidoscope, with both races remembering and reflecting each other through their own lenses. As Hurston would later write in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

Sources: Library of Congress: Voices From Slavery;William Stott, “Documentary Expression and Thirties America”; Jerre Mangione, “The Dream and the Deal”; Charles L. Perdue, Jr., introduction, “Weevils in the Wheat”; George Rawick, general editor, “The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography”; Norman Yetman, “Voices From Slavery”; Andrew Ward, “The Slave’s War”; Harvard Sitkoff, “A New Deal for Blacks”; Stephen Woodworth, “Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865″; Adam Goodheart, “1861, The Civil War Awakening”; John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The Journal of Southern History Vol. XLI, No. 4 (Nov 1975) “Conversation with Cinder Stanton,” September 7, 2011; //www2.monticello.org/gettingword/index.html

Karenna Gore Schiff is the author of “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America.”