Unlike my late father, who was fascinated by the Civil War, I’ve made no deep study of the conflict, so forgive me if the following is already well known. Recently, while looking for some other information, I stumbled across this page, which quotes material from a Charles Kelly Barrow stating that some 65,000 blacks enlisted for the South during the conflict, of which more than 13,000 saw combat. Granted, the bulk of the combat troops appear to have enlisted late in the war, when an army desperately short of manpower was offering freedom to any slaves willing to join up, but it also appears from the referenced text that both slaves and freedmen willingly fought for the South (albeit in small numbers) thoughout the war.
Two questions for debate: 1) how factually accurate is this material? 2) why would some blacks have willingly fought on behalf of a “country” that condoned a mostly-black slave workforce?
I found this side from an educational institution (umd.edu) that gives a Confederate General Order pursuant to an act of the Confederate Congress authorizing the recruitement of black soldiers into the Confederate Army.
It doesn’t look like many could have been enlisted and few in combat as a result of this because the Act is dated 13 March 1865 and the Order is dated 23 March 1865 and the war ended in mid April.
When I found this I stopped looking but I would assume that if such recruitment was authorized it was done. All of the previous sites I found on search were .com and I really don’t know whether to trust them very far in this case.
Battle Cry Of Freedom, the Oxford University text on the US Civil War disagrees.
A proposal was made for Black troops, but it was never passed.
Some Black slaves were promised freedom, if the worked in labor battalions, but they weren’t combat troops, & were never given weapons. Even the axes had to be checked out for use, & checked back in when not needed. No trust, and no guns.
The information presented is consistent with the history I have read. (There may be individual bullet points that contain errors, but the overall claims seem to be true.)
Why did black slaves fight for the colonies during the War for Independence? Why did blacks volunteer for WWI, at the height of the revulsion against lynchings? Why did Nisei Japanese volunteer in WWII, knowing that their fellow citizens were being kept in concentration camps?
Our culture spends a great deal of energy inculcating a Love of Country and people will respond to threats against that country with patriotism. In the Ken Burns Civil War series, in several of the episodes they played Shelby Foote’s comment about the response of a Southerner to a Yankee soldier who asked the Rebel why he was fighting, “You don’t own slaves, why are you here”, to which the Southerner replied, “Because you’re here.” The poorest of the whites in the South had no more “reason” to support an arrogant and life-draining aristocracy than did the slaves, yet they responded to an invasion of their land by taking up arms. (Failing to note this human response led the neo-cons to assume that they could invade and occupy Iraq with the complete support of its populace.)
Beyond the bullet points that appear in the link in the OP, Charles Kelly Barrow has written more than one volume of history on the subject. In a web page promoting his books, there is a quote from Edward Smith, Dean of Minority Affairs and Professor of History at American University
This page presents the speech of a black legislator, in 1890, supporting a war memorial to the Confederate soldiers, recalling his part in the war. (The overall web site is extremely slanted, but I have found no reason to doubt specific historical references to which it attests.)
The only Afican-Americans to fight in battle were on the Union side.
However, some of those units were organized on Confederate soil, from freed slaves.
But they were Union troops, sometimes refered to as “galvinized Negros”.
Both Lee and Davis issued standing orders forbidding African-Americans from fighting in Confederate forces, and Confederate Field Commanders were outraged when they discovered they were fighting Negro troops in US uniform, leading to numerous atrocities.
The whole idea is peculiar in the first place–it’s like saying the Nazis recruited Jews. :smack:
A good look at that is Bryan Mark Rigg’s “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers”. It looks at German racial laws, and presence of Jewish and part-Jewish soldiers in the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, as high up as Air Marshall Erhard Milch, whose father was Jewish.
No cite, but I heard an anecdote once about a Confederate office who formed some of his own slaves into an irregular guerilla force. He told them, “If we win the war, I’ll set you free. Of course, if the Yankees win, they’ll set you free anyway.” Some of them accepted his offer and followed him loyally until the end of the war. As I said, no cite – has anyone else ever heard this story?
So far, then, there appears to be some disagreement from Board members as to whether any blacks actually served as combatants on the Confederate side in the Civil War, but although this is the first I’ve heard of Barrow, it appears he’s done proper and documented research, so unless someone can point out any glaring errors in his claims, it appears there were in fact black combatants on the rebel side at various points during the war.
As to why this is not common knowledge, well, I think I can guess a reason or two. For one thing, it tends to undermine somewhat the generally accepted reasoning as to who was fighting for what in the conflict. For another, it screws up the nice linear historical narrative preferred for elementary-school textbooks.
In the former case, I could understand a motivation based on economic needs or a desire to potentially better oneself through military service, although I recognize that blacks were probably treated no better by the white majority in the Army than they were in civilian life at that time. In the second part, don’t know, but my speculation is that it was mainly out of a sense of patriotism, as Tomndebb mentioned, plus possibly revulsion over atrocities committed by Japanese troops, of which something was already known by the time the US entered the war.
So far we have a blurb for a book which is long on talk and short on specifics but does have a photo of what appears to be a middle aged Black man wearing some sort of uniform and is represented to be Stone wall Jackson’s cook. I don’t know anything about the authors or their research. The blurb doesn’t tell us much.
From a Sons of Confederate Veterans website we have a speech supposedly made in 1890 by a Black South Carolina State Legislator in which the speaker claimed to have been present at the Battle of Seven Pines during the Peninsular Campaign in 1862. Since Jim Crow was well intrenched in South Carolina, and through out the former Confederacy, in 1890, I have to question the legitimacy of this one. Further, the speech does not claim that the speaker was present as a Confederate soldier, only that he was there and saw terrible things.
On the same Sons of Confederate Veterans website as the item about the South Carolina legislator, there is a story about a memorial service for Black Confederate veterans. If you read the item however you will see that it is about a SCV quasi-funeral for three slaves, one of whom was a cook, one a teamster and one apparently conscripted to construct earthworks. Note, that the SCV have an agenda – they are invested in the idea that slavery and race had nothing to do with the Civil War and that it was all about the defense of Souther liberties and culture. This is neither a responsible nor scholarly source for the proposition that there were combat soldiers of color in the service of the Confederate States.
It is beyond argument that there were all sorts of Blacks in the Confederate service – but as personal servants of their own masters or as labor hired out voluntarily or involuntarily by their masters. Toward the end of the war there were proposals to arm slaves and organize them into fighting units. Those proposals were quickly and indigently rejected. Confederate Vice-President Stevens recognized that just as soon as the Confederacy gave the slave a musket, put bullets in his pouch and the brass letters CS on his person the whole philosophical basis for the Southern Confederacy was revealed as a fraud.
I doubt that there were large numbers of blacks in Confederate service. (65,000 total with “up to” 13,000 in combat is not a large number compared to the number of Confederate soldiers, the number of black males in the South, or the number of black troops in the North.) Still, to dismiss all evidence that they existed because it does not fit some preconceived notion of what they “should” have done seems inappropriate in a site devoted to fighting ignorance. I would not be at all surprised to learn that the overwhelming number of blacks in Confederate service were teamsters, cooks, and musicians, with a number of personal servants thrown in for good measure. Recognizing that some people would prefer to overstate their armed presence among Confederate units is not correctly fought by denying that any did.
How do you identify that the book is “short on specifics” when the extracted list of 22 bullets in the OP is exactly a collection of specifics? The list also provides a bibliography. The books listed might be so much hokum, of course, but I see no reason to dismiss them without providing evidence that they are false.
There are a number of other sites that offer information, including this bibliography.
What complicates matters, also, is that when a lot of people in this thread say “blacks”, they seem to be meaning “slaves”, but there were free blacks in the antebellum South and free blacks in the Confederacy. It never was a large number, but some of them might have had motive to support the Confederacy.