Reading the South

Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.
By Jacqueline Jones.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
528 pages. $30.00 cloth.


Jacqueline Jones’s 2008 Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War is a seamless account of life in late 19th-century Georgia, incorporating well-known events, snapshots of culture, analysis of politics and economics, and richly evocative descriptions of the landscape of the city and surrounding Lowcountry. Saving Savannah is a confrontation of a past most often remembered with an acute sense of injury by the city’s residents, who share a collective memory defined by the mythology of the Lost Cause and stories of suffering during Sherman’s occupation. These attitudes obscure the violent reality of slavery and its legacy of inequality. Jones presents a complicated view of the city, drawing the reader through bustling streets where a desire for order clashes with an uncontrollable environment, ambitious citizens, and the trauma of war.

Jones sets out to explore the “larger African-American freedom struggle that shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia,” skillfully situating this struggle within the context of the complex social structure of Savannah. Jones’s expansive and inclusive work provides a comprehensive analysis of Savannah that is not limited to African American residents, free or enslaved. Her focus on the struggle for equality allows for a revealing analysis of the power dynamics of a rapidly changing city. Her close reading of letters, diaries, and newspapers from the period is exhaustive, and the conclusions drawn from the materials are insightful. Jones presents incisive commentary on a wide range of subjects, including a fascinating discussion of the politics of performance and display of the frequent parades of the city, analysis of the conflict between white elites and laborers encamped at Fort Pulaski in the opening days of the war, and ideas about the social status of white overseers on remote rice plantations.

Jones examines a world that “defie[s] urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinction” and by doing so provides an incisive analysis of urban slavery in which movement through space is constantly negotiated. For this reason, Jones’s attention to the landscape is particularly compelling. The city of Savannah is most often thought of as a place of awe-inspiring beauty, but Saving Savannah redirects our gaze, creating images of a city that foreground illness, slavery, and multiple wars in what has throughout its history been a highly contested space. Within Jones’s frame, she brings into focus ordered squares surrounded by dustfilled streets, fetid swamps, and bustling docks lining the riverfront. Her rendering of the landscape is visceral, and appropriate as the setting for an unstable and rapidly changing society. Jones’s attention to elements such as the prevalence of wooden homes and the humid and bacteria-laden marshes provides fascinating points of departure for larger discussions. What role do enslaved firefighters play in a city dominated by wooden structures and constantly threatened by fire? How can elite young Confederate soldiers function while stationed on sea islands, long conceived as uninhabitable by whites during the summer months?

A central question for Jones is what threatens the city—from what does it need to be saved? For the African American community, the demise of slavery signaled the redemption of the city, the saving of their right to self-assertion and protection of their families. For white leaders of the city, however, emancipation troubled the already shaky hierarchy dividing white and black, free and enslaved, and rich and poor. To save Savannah from the scourge of “freedom and equality” white elites acted “creatively and violently” to maintain white supremacy. As saviors, elites were forced to appeal to whites of the laboring class in a way that further disrupted the social hierarchy. This “larger project of white supremacy” had important implications for politics in the city, evident in Jones’s analysis of the evolution of the local and national Democratic parties.

The complex economy of Savannah, formed at the juncture of slavery and free enterprise, was one of the greatest challenges to ordered hierarchy. Jones provides a valuable examination of urban slavery in a city where some slaves were able to hire themselves and participate in an economy in which the “commercial spirit” blurred racial distinctions and those between the free and enslaved. Jones presents a particularly fascinating analysis of the role of enslaved fire companies, which were essential to protect the wooden city from the constant threat of fire. In addition to legitimate trade as skilled laborers, slaves and free blacks participated in a profitable underground economy that had the tacit or explicit sanction of white city leaders. This economy in combination with loosely segregated housing, Jones contends, attested to elites largely unsuccessful efforts to maintain a caste system.

The book is divided into three sections—antebellum, in bello, and postbellum. Saving Savannah begins on the docks of the Savannah River in 1851, as the enslaved mason Thomas Simms stows away on a ship bound for New York. Jones frames her work through the personalities of Savannahians such as Simms, who move through a richly described city where one is made to feel the heaviness of oppressive humidity and the rhythm of streets entwined around Oglethorpe’s famed squares. By telling the story of Simms, who is ultimately seized in Boston and returned to Savannah under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jones is able to connect Savannah to events of national importance.

Jones also follows the life of Charles C. Jones Jr., an attorney and son of a minister and slaveowner. Charles Jones served as mayor in the prewar years and as an officer in the Confederate army. In the Jones family, one sees the evolution from paternalistic slaveholding to the tensions underlying tenancy and sharecropping in the 1870s. Readers first encounter Susie Baker King as she walks to a clandestine school for black children run by free woman Mary Woodhouse in downtown Savannah, and follow her progression as a 14-year-old teacher in the independent black settlement on St. Simon’s Island in 1862. King worked as a teacher, laundress, and domestic servant and later moved to Boston. By following persons such as Simms, Jones, and King, Jones creates a narrative thread that brings to life the history of the Georgia Lowcountry and illuminates the challenges faced by each before, during, and after the war.

The postwar section of Saving Savannah follows the black struggle for self-determination as the lands of the barrier islands are at first claimed by recently freed slaves as part of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. Black families staked claims on land and began to reunite families long separated, actively engaging in politics and building schools, churches, and strengthening mutual aid societies. When these lands again come under the control of planters, freedmen and women were faced with the prospect of tenancy, tightening segregation, and the continual threat of violence. This book by Jones, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, appeals both to a general audience and a more scholarly one. Her cast of characters, such as Simms, the nurse and schoolteacher Susie Baker King, and lawyer Charles C. Jones Jr. privileges individual experience in a way that illuminates the lives of many and their place within the complex social structure of the city. Though her work is highly localized, Jones employs contemporary Savannah newspapers and personal correspondence to great effect as a screen through which to understand national and international events such as the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the anniversary of Liberian independence. Jones is successful in providing a clear and approachable view into the complex political and social atmosphere of Savannah while also placing scholars in conversation with each other. The work of Maurie McInnis on the politics of taste and urban slavery, Peter Kolchin’s analysis of specific labor systems intrinsic to rice culture, Michael Gomez on the resilience of Islam in some coastal slave communities, and Richard Slotkin’s work on the regeneration of violence resonate through the work without being off-putting to a more casual reader.

Jones, at the conclusion of Saving Savannah, turns to the present-day landscape of the city, searching for the imprint of slavery and emancipation on streets more often wandered in search of beautiful homes and eccentric residents made known through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The tourism industry has in many ways created a city that is all surface, and Jones notes that the city’s poverty and persistent crime are confronted by preservationists and business leaders as a problem of “aesthetics.” Such an attitude indicates a resistance to the exploration of deeper causes of historic inequality. The city is the victim of an exclusive and selective history that willfully obscures the lives of many persons who have walked on the famed squares. Saving Savannah is an antidote to these selective views and should serve as a guide for educational institutions in the city as they seek to understand the lives of all Savannahians.

Becca Walton-Evans