Reviewed by: Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era by Jonathan A. Noyalas Daniel B. Thorp Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era. By Jonathan A. Noyalas. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xx, 226. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6686-8.) Jonathan A. Noyalas's Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era provides a solidly researched and well-written addition to the literature concerning slavery and the Civil War and furthers the effort to make more widely known a number of important aspects of the African American experience. Noyalas makes extensive use of newspapers, military records, memoirs, and records of the Freedmen's Bureau to capture [End Page 397] the experiences of African Americans, especially enslaved African Americans, in a region that Union and Confederate armies took turns controlling for the first three years of the Civil War and was close to Union territory throughout the war. Most fundamentally, the book provides additional evidence that slavery was well entrenched in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley by the middle of the nineteenth century. Though many of the region's original German and Ulster-Scot settlers may have lacked the desire or the wealth to acquire slaves, by the early nineteenth century those impediments had been erased, and slavery was widespread in most parts of the valley. More important, Noyalas also demonstrates that men and women enslaved in the Shenandoah Valley did not simply wait passively for Union troops to liberate them. Hundreds joined the Union army once they were permitted to do so; many more fled slavery and weakened the productive capacity of their enslavers; and some of those who remained in bondage still managed to provide intelligence to aid the Union effort or took steps to undermine the Confederacy. Finally, Noyalas makes clear that throughout the years of war and Reconstruction, Black Virginians calculated what was in their best interest and acted accordingly—even if those actions seem counterintuitive to modern historians. They may, for example, have remained with their enslavers in spite of what seem to have been frequent opportunities to escape during the war. However, they did so not out of ignorance or because they accepted enslavement but because they believed the long-term risk to themselves or their families of trying to escape at that particular time outweighed the possible benefits of such an escape. As good as the book is, it does have its weaknesses. The author rarely, for example, acknowledges the significant variations that existed among regions and conditions in the Shenandoah Valley. Slavery was much more common in some counties than in others, and those enslaved in the region lived in a variety of circumstances—on small holdings, on plantations, and on industrial sites. Noyalas, however, treats the valley as a single locale and rarely distinguishes among different varieties of slavery. Similarly, the author reports that more than six hundred Black men with connections to the Shenandoah Valley joined the United States Colored Troops during the war but offers little detail about who they were, where exactly they came from, and when they joined the Union army. The book's treatment of Reconstruction shows the same pattern of strengths that could be even stronger. Noyalas does an excellent job discussing schools, churches, and employment among the freedpeople but says less about their political activity and almost nothing about their success or failure in acquiring land. Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era may leave some readers wanting more, but it is an excellent start. The research supporting it is impressive in its breadth and its depth, the prose is enjoyable and easy to read, and the author demonstrates clearly that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley made calculated decisions and took deliberate actions to advance their well-being in the midst of a chaotic situation over which they had little control. [End Page 398] Daniel B. Thorp Virginia Tech Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association