By Karen Olsson | Sept/Oct 08 | 

Southern Drama

Finally, a history of Savannah as rich as the city itself

Attention, HBO executives: May I propose for your next big historical serial a show called Savannah, based on Jacqueline Jones’s remarkably vivid and nuanced book Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War? Although she’s a professor of history at Brandeis University, Jones apparently missed the memo that said academic historians are supposed to produce obscure, narrowly focused tomes destined to molder unread in university libraries. Full of complex characters and sweeping drama, Saving Savannah (Knopf) is ready for prime time.

Its setting and subject is mid-nineteenth-century Savannah, a lush, gas-lit port city fond of pageantry and traveling entertainers, bordered by labyrinthine rice swamps with their own creole culture. From the 1850s to the 1870s, the city endured yellow fever, hurricane, economic downturn, and of course the Civil War and its aftermath. For the roughly half of the population of African descent, this period marked the end of slavery but also the thwarting of their efforts to achieve parity with whites. Those efforts and just how and why they were impeded—not merely by Southern whites, but by Northerners and federal authorities—make up the book’s central drama.

Jones follows a number of all-too-human personages through all of this. There’s Aaron Bradley, for instance, a fifty-year-old freckle-faced, top-hat-wearing, speechifying black lawyer who, after three decades in the North, returned to Georgia in 1865 “utterly contemptuous of U.S. and southern officials” and came to be known by whites as “the old negro Wahoo.” There’s Frances Butler, daughter of the British Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble and the Southern aristocrat Pierce Butler, who moved after the war from Philadelphia to the family’s cotton plantation and tried desperately to manage it herself. There’s Susie Baker King, who as a young black girl before the war attended a secret school, then opened a school of her own at the age of fourteen. There’s James Waring, a white physician accused of wartime cowardice, who later became an advocate for blacks and a quasi-Marxist critic of local government. There are the brothers Thomas and James Simms, one a celebrity fugitive slave captured and sent back from Boston in 1851, the other a leader in the black community after the war.

While no part of the book is uninteresting, the second half, which chronicles the Reconstruction period in Savannah, is especially good at capturing the particulars of this chaotic time, from the misery of destitute war widows to battles over the segregation of streetcars to the rise of vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise the institutional conflicts: Jones draws upon her earlier research into Northern missionary teachers and Georgia blacks, for instance, to show how even well-intentioned efforts by white educators could stymie black self-determination.

Marshaling materials that are academic history’s stock-in-trade, like census data and archival correspondence, Jones charges a familiar abstraction—the failures of Reconstruction—with specific, dramatic life.

From Our Contributors

Also new this fall are two books by G&G regulars: