On Nov 24, 6:06*pm, "PJ O'D" wrote:
Black Confederates in the Civil War

"Black Confederates? Why haven’t we heard more about them? National
Park Service historian, Ed Bearrs, stated, “I don’t want to call it a
conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks both above and below the Mason-
Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910”
Historian, Erwin L. Jordan, Jr., calls it a “cover-up” which started
back in 1865.

..It has been estimated that over 65,000 Southern blacks were in the
Confederate ranks. Over 13,000 of these, “saw the elephant” also known
as meeting the enemy in combat. These Black Confederates included both
slave and free. The Confederate Congress did not approve blacks to be
officially enlisted as soldiers (except as musicians), until late in
the war. But in the ranks it was a different story. Many Confederate
officers did not obey the mandates of politicians, they frequently
enlisted blacks with the simple criteria, “Will you fight?” Historian
Ervin Jordan, explains that “biracial units” were frequently organized
“by local Confederate and State militia Commanders in response to
immediate threats in the form of Union raids…”. Dr. Leonard Haynes, a
African-American professor at Southern University, stated, “When you
eliminate the black Confederate soldier, you’ve eliminated the history
of the South.”

google any portion of the above to retrieve the source

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...-confederates/

Even 150 years after it started, the Civil War is still the
battleground for controversial ideas. One of them is the notion that
thousands of Southern slaves and freedmen fought willingly and loyally
on the side of the Confederacy.

The idea of “black Confederates” appeals to present-day neo-
Confederates, who are eager to find ways to defend the principles of
the Confederate States of America. They say the Civil War was about
states’ rights, and they wish to minimize the role of slavery in a
vanished and romantic antebellum South.

But most historians of the past 50 years hold that the root cause of
the Civil War was slavery. They bristle at the idea of black
Confederates, which they say robs the war of its moral coin as the
crucible of black emancipation.

Stepping into this controversy is Harvard historian John Stauffer, who
studies antislavery movements, the Civil War, and American social
protest. (He is chair of the History of American Civilization Program,
and a professor of both English and African-American studies.) At the
Harvard Faculty Club on Wednesday (Aug. 31), Stauffer opened the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute’s Fall Colloquium Series with a lecture on
black Confederates. He acknowledged that critics of the concept now
dominate the academic arena, including one scholar who called it “a
fiction, a myth, utter nonsense.”

Still, Stauffer acknowledged the seeming popularity of neo-Confederate
ideas in general. He cited a recent poll showing that 70 percent of
white Southerners believe that the cause of the Civil War was not
slavery, but a deep divide over states’ rights. Stauffer also outlined
evidence that the notion of black Confederates is at least partly true
— an assertion that he said got him “beaten up” in a discussion at a
Washington, D.C., history event months ago.

Though no one knows for sure, the number of slaves who fought and
labored for the South was modest, estimated Stauffer. Blacks who
shouldered arms for the Confederacy numbered more than 3,000 but fewer
than 10,000, he said, among the hundreds of thousands of whites who
served. Black laborers for the cause numbered from 20,000 to 50,000.

Those are not big numbers, said Stauffer. Black Confederate soldiers
likely represented less than 1 percent of Southern black men of
military age during that period, and less than 1 percent of
Confederate soldiers. And their motivation for serving isn’t taken
into account by the numbers, since some may have been forced into
service, and others may have seen fighting as a way out of privation.
But even those small numbers of black soldiers carry immense symbolic
meaning for neo-Confederates, who are pressing their case for the
central idea that the South was a bastion of states’ rights and not a
viper pit of slavery, even though slavery was central to its economy.

Just 50 years ago, many authorities on the Civil War asserted that
Southerners knew at the time that slavery was wrong, and would soon
give it up. Stauffer quoted Robert Penn Warren, who wrote in 1961 that
“the greatest danger to slavery was the Southern heart.”

In arguing that there were some black Confederates, Stauffer draws on
at least one ironic source: 19th-century social reformer Frederick
Douglass, whose life Stauffer studied for his 2008 book “Giants: The
Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.” In August
1861, Douglass published an account of the First Battle of Bull Run,
which noted that there were blacks in the Confederate ranks. A few
weeks later, Douglass brought the subject up again, quoting a witness
to the battle who said they saw black Confederates “with muskets on
their shoulders and bullets in their pockets.”

Douglass also talked to a fugitive slave from Virginia, another
witness to Bull Run, who asserted that black units were forming in
Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. It is well known that in
Louisiana and Tennessee, Stauffer added, Confederate units were
organized by elite, light-skinned freedmen who identified with the
slave-owning white plantation culture. (The Tennessee troops were
never issued arms, though, and the black unit known as the Louisiana
Native Guards never saw action — and quickly switched sides as soon as
Union forces appeared.)

But unless readers think that black Confederates were truly enamored
of the South’s cause, Stauffer related the case of John Parker, a
slave forced to build Confederate barricades and later to join the
crew of a cannon firing grapeshot at Union troops at the First Battle
of Bull Run. All the while, recalled Parker, he worried about dying,
prayed for a Union victory, and dreamed of escaping to the other side.

“His case can be seen as representative,” said Stauffer. “Masters put
guns to (the heads of slaves) to make them shoot Yankees.”

Freedmen in the Confederacy faced re-enslavement in Virginia and
elsewhere, said Stauffer, so they made displays of loyalty that were
really gestures of self-protection — a “hope for better treatment, a
hope not to be enslaved.”

Loyalty among the few black Confederates was at least ambiguous, said
Stauffer. It was further undermined by the Confiscation Act of Aug. 6,
1861, which allowed Union forces to “confiscate” slaves and other
“property” used to support the Confederacy. Under the act — the first
of two — the freedom of such slaves was left ambiguous, said Stauffer,
but it foreshadowed black emancipation and gave slaves even more
reason to flee northward.

Scholars and social critics will continue to fight over the concept of
black Confederates. Meanwhile, what should the public believe about
the conflicting loyalties they may have felt or the decisions —
however brief — some made to serve the Confederacy?

From the lecture audience, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., director of
the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, had one answer: “Black people are just
as complex as anybody else.”