Video: Glenn David Brasher talks to The Civil War Monitor

“In antebellum times, no one knew the geography, no one knew the hidden trails, no one knew the backwoods places where you could hide and slip away into better than the slaves, because they had this long history of slipping off plantations to meet with other slaves deep in the woods for religious meetings, for social gatherings. . . . So when the Union army was coming up the Peninsula, that kind of knowledge of the geography and hidden trails becomes incredibly important to the Union army.”—Glenn David Brasher

The Civil War Monitor magazine has a great video series of interviews with Civil War authors. In the following interview, Glenn David Brasher, author of The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom, talks about his book and his research and the decisive role that African Americans played in the strategy and tactics of Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. (running time: 25:01)