It's interesting to read a Civil War book about a place that never experienced a battle during the war. Savannah remained far from the fighting until the end of Sherman's march through Georgia and, when he finally arrived, the mayor surrendered the city rather than have it suffer Atlanta's fate. And, yet, the war touched the city substantially. It is a port city and, before the war, a portal of escape for slaves seeking to reach the North...and for their return to the South under the Fugitive Slave Acts. Once the war got underway, the city's lifeblood of trade was slowly squeezed off by Union blockades and the white elite struggled to preserve their way of life as they slid toward bankruptcy. After the war's end, it lay in the heart of the large coastal plantations that were broken apart into homesteads for the newly freed from all over Georgia and even the Carolinas.

Where books like Battle Cry of Freedom or Team of Rivals give you a perspective from above, looking down upon the mass movements of armies and political currents, Saving Savannah brings you to the Civil War from the opposite direction. The stories are personal: a slave's attempts to escape to Boston, a blacksmith's family trying to make ends meet despite being stripped of possessions by both Southerners and Northerners, a teacher's attempts to provide education for the black children, the struggles of local politicians on either side of both the secession and the slavery debates. It gives immediacy to the conflict that is a refreshing change from the Grand Sweep of History approach.

Surprisingly, only half the book is devoted to the antebellum period and the Civil War, itself. The remainder of the book covers the aftermath of the war: both the determination of the ruling elite to perpetuate as much of the class imbalance as they could by any means up to and including violence, and the growing infidelity of the Federal government to the concept of racial equality that allowed that imbalance to continue.

Though this story is focused on a single city, it's a fascinating picture of a culture trying desperately to preserve its core even while its outward form is forced to change. From the poll taxes of the 1870s that kept blacks from voting to the 24th Amendment that (partially) abolished them in 1964, from attempts to bust segregated streetcars in the 1880s to Rosa Parks doing the same in 1955, Jones gives us a picture that shows our history to be a continuous stream, not a disjointed Then and Now. ( )