African American author Thulani Davis explores the family of her white great-grandfather, William Campbell, in My Confederate Kinfolk. Davis states that “this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character.” Most of the book focuses on William Campbell and his immediate family – mother, siblings, and niece - during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Campbell family had extensive land holdings and business interests in Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas. The Campbells were cotton planters, slave owners, and loyal Confederates. Davis thoroughly researched the Campbell family and discovered some interesting facts and connections to prominent American families like the Polks and the Danforths. However, the writing has a stilted, impersonal feel, and I was never quite comfortable while reading it. I think the author's conflicted feelings about her relationship to this family comes across in her writing. It was difficult for me to maintain an interest in people the author clearly seemed to dislike.

I was curious about the relationship between William Campbell and Davis's African American great-grandmother, a former slave. Was their relationship consensual or coerced? Were they married? I didn't learn the answers to these questions until about three quarters of the way through. What did her grandmother feel and experience as a biracial child in Mississippi and Alabama? Davis's grandmother, Georgia, left an unpublished memoir, and Davis knew her grandmother, yet her grandmother is a peripheral figure in this story. The book has quite a few grammatical errors that should have been caught before publication. I checked more than once to make sure I wasn't reading an uncorrected proof copy. While the author doesn't claim to be a genealogist, she does use the types of records and repositories that genealogists use. However, the bibliographical references, particularly those for census and vital records, are not detailed enough for other researchers to follow her trail.

The book was worth reading just for the first chapter, where Davis reflects on her research, American history (both white and African American), and how her discoveries affected her. I've read a lot about the Civil War, but not much about Reconstruction, and I learned quite a bit about that era from this book. A few months ago, I read a novel about the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, so the references to that battle in Davis's book captured my attention. Davis read widely as she prepared to write this book, following recommendations from subject experts. I added a few items from her bibliography to my reading list.

Readers with a connection to the Campbell family will find much to interest them in this book, but other readers may struggle to maintain their interest all the way to the end. ( )

Thulani Davis was familiar with the history of her father's side of the family, but not of her mother's who died young. Starting out with remembrances from her grandmother, and her grandmother's written ac count of her own mother's trip from Arkansas to Mississippi, she went in search of her history. The whole was complicated by the fact that her grandmother was the child of a white landowner, Will Campbell, and his Black housekeeper, Chloe Curry. Nothing is simple in the story, and it reflects the complexities and contradictions of US history. Will and Chloe's story is not a simple case of the sexual exploitation of black women: the relationship was lifelong, Will doted on their daughter, and left his estate to Chloe. Neither was it a simple love story: Chloe was already married and ended up divorcing her freedman husband to stay with Will. But her lack of wifely fidelity is balanced by her fierce loyalty to her family: she used her inheritance to provide land and education for her own children and the children of her siblings. Again, family relations aren't simple. Four of Will's brothers fought for the Confederacy, and one of them joined in the vicious struggle to overturn Black gains during the Reconstruction, and even had a lynching on his property. Davis goes beyond the direct story of her relatives to tell the history of their times. In the end, her story is a microcosm of the complexities of history that every American must deal with. ( )