The best thing about this book (by Virginia archivist Ervin L. Jordan) is that it calls attention to the fact that some black southerners did see themselves as having a personal stake in the success of the Confederacy. Generally this was because of personal attachments or felt obligations to white Confederates. Jordan, an African American author, acknowledges that these “Afro-Confederates” (his term) were quite a small group, resented by other “Afro-Virginians.”

Some of the book’s flaws spring from Jordan’s manifest Virginia patriotism; he assumes that black Virginians of the 1860s felt the same love for the Old Dominion that he does. Jordan also tends to overinterpret his evidence to support his quixotic thesis of a “biracial” Confederacy.

Jordan is not naive, and he doesn’t intend to say that white and black Confederates had the same politics, or that white Confederates were not racist defenders of chattel slavery. But the book is all too amenable to selective quoting by neo-Confederates willing to ignore these qualifications. (An effective rejoinder is Confederate Emancipation by Bruce Levine, a rigorous study of Confederate recruitment of slave soldiers, with none of the eccentricities of Jordan’s book.)