Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War
By Jacqueline Jones
(December 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, bibliography, index, 510 pp., 2008. Alfred A. Knopf, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, $30 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Blake A. Magner
Blake A. Magner is the Book Review Editor of Civil War News. He makes his living as an editor, writer, cartographer and photographer of Civil War history. He is author of At Peace With Honor: The Civil War Burials of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Review:
Though Savannah was, and still is, a beautiful city, around the time of the Civil War you were only able to enjoy the area if you were a member of the elite gentry. The city itself has an elegant downtown which in the 1850s and 1860s was surrounded by the hovels used as homes by the working poor.

Outside the city beautiful plantations owned by the rich and worked by slaves dotted the countryside. The area as a whole was the rice capital of the United States and Savannah itself was a busy port shipping rice and cotton overseas.

Civil War battle action is not part of this volume, in part because there was so little of it in the Savannah area. Early in the war Federal troops took over Fort Pulaski near the mouth of the Savannah River, remaining in the fort and shutting off access to the city from the sea.

Late in 1864 Sherman, in his March to the Sea, took over Savannah, sending Abraham Lincoln his famous telegram stating, “I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah,…”

 Saving Savannah mainly focuses on the African-American population of the city and surrounding plantations. Life for slaves was brutal, with men, women and children often working knee- and waist-deep in water tending the rice plantings. If they owned anything it was little, most of their subsistence coming from their masters.

This remained true until the end of the war when the former slaves began taking over the plantations deserted by their owners. At times the white slave masters returned, trying to start up where they left off, only to learn that the Old South of their former lives did not exist anymore.

Jones covers every conceivable story in her volume. Stories of yellow fever, escaped slaves, emancipated slaves, shipping former slaves to Liberia, city life, politics, violence, prostitution, filth and death abound.

However, don’t expect a description of the beautiful homes and squares of the city because that is not what this book is about. The author has done an excellent job of researching Savannah and its inhabitants. The story is well-written and flows smoothly.

 I strongly recommend this book for those readers interested in Savannah and the rice kingdom that surrounded it. It provides an excellent look at the area just prior to, during and after the Civil War. It should be on the bookshelf of every student of the Civil War South.