Freedom's Comet: Signs

The protagonist of this trilogy, Bill Gresham, says it best. "All the histories of the war I’ve read have been written by the Northern victors or Southerners trying to rewrite the Northerners accounts to save face. Not one has told what it was like to live through the war as a black slave. Not one has told what it was like to be your father and brother’s slave. Not one has told what it was like to have the war crush and dismember a city as cosmopolitan, wealthy, and important as Macon, Georgia. Not one has told about the fratricidal war, a civil war within the Civil War, that consumed Georgia. Georgia was hardly a united front! But every account has portrayed us slaves as being dimwitted and lacking any God-given intelligence. Yes, nearly all of us were uneducated--most whites demanded that we be kept that way keep--but few of us lacked intelligence. What we lacked was schooling. The writers of all these histories ignore the fact that despite not having maps to guide us, and lacking the ability to read or write, thousands of us slaves successfully navigated across hundreds of miles of enemy lands, with bounties on our heads and hounds on our heels and achieved freedom. Everyone ignores the fact that in the end we all did achieve our freedom--and it was six hundred thousands whites who died."