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Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War. By Jacqueline Jones. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. [xii], 510. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4000-4293-7.)
The evaluation of this book depends on what one is looking for. If a reader seeks something above the standard Civil War fare at chain bookstores, then this book succeeds. The narrative flows nicely, and it is well researched; the author's viewpoint seems sensible. Some popular works ignore how African Americans influenced the conflict, but no one could make that claim here. The work effectively brings the motivations of black and white southerners into the same interpretive space to interact with each other. However, if one is looking for reflective scholarship and engagement with the literature, this is not the apparent goal of Jacqueline Jones's Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.
The somewhat misleading title suggests these tensions, perhaps reflecting the quest for a wider market. The Civil War occupies only about a quarter of the book, and the actual capture of the city by the Union army zips by in five pages or so. The real topic is Savannah and the surrounding Lowcountry in the decades after the mid-nineteenth century, with African American agency as the main focus. Identifying a thesis is difficult, but Jones does highlight the "surprisingly strong validation" racist local whites got from "northern missionaries and U.S. government agents and military officials who . . ....