Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment

This 1964 study (reprinted in 1994) was the first notable venture into the history of African American civilians during the Civil War. The great majority of such studies have focused on the much better documented experience of black soldiers in the Union army.

This book analyzes the documentary record of white northern missionaries to plantation slaves in the occupied Sea Islands near Beaufort, S.C. It finds that the former slaves on the Sea Islands were not just passive recipients of emancipation, aid, and education from paternalistic whites. Their isolation, ignorance of the wider world, and lack of resources certainly told against the Sea Islanders, and postwar policy was destined to reduce many of them to a kind of tenancy by show more restoring confiscated land to prewar owners. Nevertheless, Rose finds that the Sea Islanders were sound judges of their own interests who guarded their independence and “became, in their own way, as self-governing as many a small New England town.”

This book is also notable for being one of the first studies to consider how Civil War experiences transformed American slavery during its last four years. To the best of my knowledge, nothing else comparable to Rehearsal for Reconstruction was published until the mid-1980s, when state-level emancipation studies finally began to appear. show less