Book Review: Justice for Ourselves: Black Virginians Claim Their Freedom After Slavery
Justice for Ourselves: Black Virginians Claim Their Freedom After Slavery. By John G. Deal, Marianne E. Julienne, and Brent Tarter. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024. Hardcover, 324 pp. $35.00.
Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
On February 1, 1865, the day after Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, a newspaper correspondent in Portland, Maine, as journalists who supported slavery’s Constitutional death had done throughout the country, proclaimed it “THE GREAT TRIUMPH OF LIBERTY.”[1] While undeniably one of the most significant legislative moments in American history, this thoughtful volume reminds us that in Virginia, as was the case elsewhere, that while the Thirteenth Amendment might have ended slavery, the struggle for Black people to realize freedom’s entirety was ongoing.
Drawing on the powerful stories of enslaved and free Black people, the authors, all three of whom serve as the editors of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography at the Library of Virginia, have crafted a compelling volume that examines freedom’s elusiveness during the Civil War era, the difficulties that enslaved people confronted when fleeing enslavers, the significant roles Black Virginians played during the conflict, and how Black people navigated life in the Old Dominion in the years before, during, and after the Civil War.
Unsurprisingly, the book highlights the litany of mechanisms that whites employed to make life difficult for Black people during the Civil War era. While the authors explore measures with which readers will undoubtedly be familiar—political disenfranchisement, vagrancy laws, violent attacks, and other methods of intimidation—they also highlight other restrictive measures whites utilized intended to remind Black people of their subservient place in the Old Dominion. For example, in the book’s first chapter, which focuses on life for free Blacks before the conflict, the authors discuss laws prohibiting a Black person from carrying a cane, unless medically necessary, or smoking tobacco in public.
As important as those discussions are, this outstanding volume does more than recount obstacles Black people, regardless of status, encountered. The book reveals how Black people contested barriers and navigated a complex world. In addition to discussing the vital role Black people played in Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1867-1868 or the efforts of the ninety-two men who served in Virginia’s Senate or House of Delegates in the conflict’s aftermath, the authors explore other means that Black people employed to integrate into a world that rejected their status as free and trembled at the thought of political equality. For example, the authors’ analysis of a ballot for John Brown, a delegate elected to represent Southampton County at Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1867-1868, demonstrates how Black people utilized rhetoric to attempt to assuage white angst. The authors assert, reasonably so, that the phrase printed at the bottom of the ballot, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ “may have been intended to reassure white men that the freedman held no grudges against white men who had enslaved Black men.” (97)
Not all Black people, the authors rightfully claim, believed that integrating into white Virginia was the best course to achieve freedom’s totality. For example, L. Clarence Miller urged Black fraternal organizations, of which many were established throughout the commonwealth to advance freedom’s cause in the Civil War’s aftermath, to patronize printing establishments owned by Black people only. Doing business with whites would, as Miller noted, “feed the lion of prejudice and make him stronger and stronger so that he could more easily devour us.” (202)
This book’s value is enhanced by discussions of how Black people pushed back, albeit unsuccessfully, against efforts by the commonwealth to lionize iconic figures such as Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. For instance, in 1871 Black legislators opposed a $600 appropriation for a portrait of Lee to be displayed in the capitol. Four years later Senator Frank Moss, a black legislator from Buckingham County, led an effort to stonewall funding for a monument to Jackson in Capitol Square.
Deeply researched and smartly written, this is a noteworthy volume that deserves much acclaim and warrants little criticism. Those interested in a deeper understanding of the complexities of life for Black people during the Civil War era and how Black people responded to those challenges during our nation’s defining moment will find this study essential.
[1] The Portland Daily Press, February 1, 1865.
Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute and a professor in the history department at Shenandoah. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including most recently Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era (University Press of Florida, 2021) and “The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah”: The 1864 Valley Campaign’s Battle of Cool Spring (Savas Beatie, 2024).
