Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
...in the “Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,” a collection of military records from both sides which spans more than 50 volumes and more than 50,000 pages, there are a total of seven Union eyewitness reports of black Confederates. Three of these reports mention black men shooting at Union soldiers, one report mentions capturing a handful of armed black men along with some soldiers, and the other three reports mention seeing unarmed black laborers.
There were enough people on both sides of the Civil War who were simply mercenaries. Entire regiments of; Irish, German, and Scottish were made up of men who came to the US to fight for pay. Even if irrefutable documentation existed of black confederates, you would have to also prove they were not just mercenaries who didn't care what side they fought on as it was not uncommon for a soldier to change sides based on pay and rations. The myth of the black Confederate only exist to give credence to the myth that the Civil War was not about slavery.
The Civil War was about slavery.
The documented cases, as few as there are, make no mention of the black confederates motivation.
Life is messy. Life is complex.
Deal. With. It.
Finnish Jews aided the Nazis because the Soviets were their longtime nemesis. Sort of a "lesser of two evils" paradigm.
You statists know something about that. You're always talking about how you vote for the "lesser of two evils".
"And as far as I know personally, there were none in the Confederacy PERIOD"
We get this a lot on these thread.
Because someone does NOT KNOW, they ASSUME it did not exist.
" A few thousand blacks did indeed fight for the Confederacy. Significantly, African-American scholars from Ervin Jordan and Joseph Reidy to Juliet Walker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor-in-chief of The Root, have stood outside this impasse, acknowledging that a few blacks, slave and free, supported the Confederacy."
"With the onset of war, their patriotic displays were especially strident. In early 1861 a group of wealthy, light-skinned, free blacks in Charlestonexpressed common cause with the planter class: “In our veins flows the blood of the white race, in some half, in others much more than half white blood. … Our attachments are with you, our hopes and safety and protection from you. … Our allegiance is due to South Carolina and in her defense, we will offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.” In their show of support for the Confederacy, they were “race traitors.”"
This link is worthless. The Root is wrong, and provides zero documentation in contravention of official Confederate policy.
Official Confederate policy prevailed. That’s all there is to it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank DeForrest
Certainly not out of the question as we see the effects of Stockholm syndrome here everyday i.e. americans going off to fight and die for causes that are contrary to their own well being.
True, and that’s likely the best case for sightings of blacks fighting for the Confederacy. Some Slaves were loyal to their masters and fought their way out of an engagement with their dead master’s rifle, or something akin to that. But no black Confederate was ever given training and handed a rifle with the intent of having him soldier.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GotHereQuickAsICould
The Civil War is well documented. If slaves took up arms and fought against the Union, where are the photographs, the documents, the journals?
Non existent. At most, there’s scant anecdotal evidence.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quick Enough
Look t up like I did.
It was NOT the only story.
There’s really nothing of substance to look up.
Look, my link is from Newsweek. They have some of the best investigative journalists in the game. They aren’t likely to be sloppy on a story like this and give license to a few hams in the S.C. legislature to have a free fire target to be put on Newsweek’s back. The claims of black Confederate troops is simply dubious and too easily debunked for Newsweek to go out like a sucker.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,814 posts, read 34,698,410 times
Reputation: 10256
Quote:
Originally Posted by desertdetroiter
Ok...let’s start at Douglass....
He never offered anything more than anecdotal evidence of black troops fighting for the South. At the time, Douglass was impassionately petitioning the Union to allow black troops to fight for their freedom. In his mind, it would help solidify African American’s right to full citizenship, and as an addendum, no one could say that they were simply GIVEN their freedom without fighting for it themselves.
So it isn’t far fetched to believe that Douglass would’ve stretched the truth in order to make Lincoln see the light. However, when one really looks at the case, Douglass is right on the mark even if inadvertently so. Why? Because Douglass knew that 4 million slaves were the South’s best resource and a wellspring of endless military reserves should the South be wise enough to wake up and use it. That said, I’m pretty sure that Douglass, being a former slave himself, knew better because he knew the mentality of the average white southerners of the period. It was a trigger that they’d never pull so long as they didn’t absolutely have to, and even then they’d be highly reluctant to put rifles in the hands of slaves for obvious reasons.
This brings me to the figure of Confederate General Patrick Cleburne...a man who I’ve brought up several times in these threads only to have my mentions be ignored or dismissed. Cleburne singlehandedly kills any argument that the South ever enlisted black soldiers for anything more than manservants...a point that I’ll address later in this post.
In late 1863, Cleburne (being a native Irishman, and therefore more worldly than his American born counterparts) realized that the South was gonna lose, due mostly to manpower shortages. To boot, Cleburne didn’t give a damn about slavery...probably only one of a few Confederate generals who held such a stance. His sympathies lay with the South for no other reason than he loved his adopted homeland and its people. So when he drafted a proposal for the South to arm slaves and put them in battle, his colleagues and superiors were flummoxed. It was simply beyond their comprehension.
Cleburne offered a simple reason for his proposal: the South needed the manpower and had an advantage over the North even with the Emancipation Proclamation because the South was the black man’s home and he knew no other one, added to the fact that the South could free the black soldier’s family...which was a very strong incentive for blacks to fight their asses off. He also reasoned that even if blacks were poorly trained, they were trained at least as well as the worst trained Union soldier.
Cleburne also states emphatically (and correctly) that the South can have its independence or slavery, but not both. This proves him to be among the most perspicacious men of the Confederacy and yet, his proposition was furtively tabled and ignored although it did manage to reach the highest levels of the Confederacy. All who read it were gobsmacked and utterly dismissive of it. Widespread knowledge of the memo didn’t even become public until after the war.
This was the gist of his proposal:
Now to your point about pensions, yes...there were black pensioners from the Confederacy, but again, that’s no proof that they were official combatants. My Newsweek piece makes it clear that OFFICIAL Confederate policy banned such contracts and arrangements.
However, there ARE things that I’m willing to concede. Why? Well, because common sense dictates that I do so.
Since Confederate soldiers (I’d imagine of a certain rank) were allowed to take a slave as a manservant, one must conclude that tens of thousands of such men traveled with the Confederate troops. Being that Confederate casualties were so astronomically high, one has to assume that on many occasions, slaves picked up their master’s rifles and took part in battles. There are countless stories of slaves kindly taking their dead masters home to their families to be buried. I’ve read many of these touching accounts of some slave that felt obligated to take “Young Marse” home to his native plantation for burial. So it’s not inconceivable that these same men took up arms in battle on an intermittent basis. But on a regular or even a semi-regular basis as a matter of official policy? No! And no evidence exists to support such a claim.
These South Carolina lawmakers simply did what so many others like to do and propagate convenient myths that are easily debunked when researched. In fact, the idea that the Confederacy would enlist blacks and put rifles in their hands should cause one to be very skeptical on its face! The same people who have beat you mercilessly, worked you from dusk til dawn, sells away your family, has sex with your womenfolk with total caprice in the face of your powerlessness, and humiliates you at every turn will all of a sudden put a rifle in your hand and say “shoot THAT guy?” LOL...really?
Why would anyone just take such a story like that with any seriousness without fact checking it first? It simply defies logic.
I thought of Pat Cleburne right away. He horrified his fellow officers in the Army of Tennessee.
There was a Louisiana regiment of mixed race men who offered their services to the Confederacy. They later offered their services & were accepted by the Federal army.
Pretty much the clincher on the topic of black soldiers was the fact that women, who were equally banned, did fight. If found within the ranks, a woman was less likely to be sent away in the Confederate ranks because of manpower shortages. There are pictures of some of the women. The names of some are known. In the Official Records, the officer's report of the burial detail after Gettysburg lists one female Confederate. A female POW was buried at the POW stockade in Florence, SC.
I've seen some reports of manservants picking up rifles during battles. That's self-preservation.
I thought of Pat Cleburne right away. He horrified his fellow officers in the Army of Tennessee.
There was a Louisiana regiment of mixed race men who offered their services to the Confederacy. They later offered their services & were accepted by the Federal army.
Pretty much the clincher on the topic of black soldiers was the fact that women, who were equally banned did fight. If found within the ranks, a woman was less likely to be sent away in the Confederate ranks because of manpower shortages. There are pictures of some of the women. The names of some are known. In the Official Records, the officer's report of the burial detail after Gettysburg lists one female Confederate. A female POW was buried at the POW stockade in Florence, SC.
I've seen some reports of manservants picking up rifles during battles. That's self-preservation.
History is one crazy ball of wax.
Don't burn books. Don't tear down statues (though don't put them up either).
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,814 posts, read 34,698,410 times
Reputation: 10256
Quote:
Originally Posted by No_Recess
History is one crazy ball of wax.
Don't burn books. Don't tear down statues (though don't put them up either).
Never knew about the women. Cool side note.
The deaths of female combatants & POWS is documented, on both sides. There is no question or doubt. Had there been black combatants in the Confederate ranks there would be documentation in after-battle reports of a uniformed black soldier found dead on the field, unless it was a slave who could pass as white. There are mentions of man-servants picking up rifles.
It's speculated that over 1000 women fought. There will never be an exact number. Makes the modern-day ban on women in combat pretty pathetic. It's right that that was done away with.
Maybe the black Confederates were hunting rabbits and the Union soldiers just got in the way.
I'm not going through 50,000 pages to find three eyewitness acounts. Perhaps you could narrow it a bit since you have read through it, and give us some insight into which units they may have served with so that we can research Confederate pay records to find their status. Thanks in advance.
Also from your link, BTW:
Some black Southerners aided the Confederacy. Most of these were forced to accompany their masters or were forced to toil behind the lines. Black men were not legally allowed to serve as combat soldiers in the Confederate Army--they were cooks, teamsters, and manual laborers. There were no black Confederate combat units in service during the war and no documentation whatsoever exists for any black man being paid or pensioned as a Confederate soldier, although some did receive pensions for their work as laborers. Nevertheless, the black servants and the Confederate soldiers formed bonds in the shared crucible of conflict, and many servants later attended regimental reunions with their wartime comrades.
There are countless stories of slaves kindly taking their dead masters home to their families to be buried. I’ve read many of these touching accounts of some slave that felt obligated to take “Young Marse” home to his native plantation for burial.
Getting the eff away from the frontline as well - smart move.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
