The Myth of Black Confederates
The Myth of Black Confederates
And the rise of fake racial tolerance
Benjamin Alpers — January 14, 2018
http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/01/the-myth-of-black-confederates/
This picture of the (Union) Louisiana Native Guard is frequently misrepresented as an image of Black Confederate troops.
One of the latest Confederate monument fights is currently brewing in South Carolina. State Representatives Bill Chumley and Mike Burns have proposed erecting a monument to black Confederate soldiers. The problem, of course, is that there were no black Confederate soldiers. The Confederate government refused to allow blacks to enlist until March 1865, when, desperate for manpower, the Confederate Congress passed a law allowing African Americans to serve in combat roles. Even with the war nearly lost, this move was extremely controversial, as it flew in the face of Confederate racial ideology. “In my opinion, the worst calamity that could befall us would be to gain our independence by the valor of our slaves, instead of own,” wrote Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state and a general in the Confederate army. “The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.” Two weeks after the law allowing their service was passed and before any black troops could be enlisted, the war was over.
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But in recent years, the myth of the black Confederates has grown. Early “Lost Cause” ideology was often frankly racist. Works like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and the Thomas Dixon novels on which it was based, depicted the Confederacy as explicitly a white man’s cause. While neo-Confederate accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction often displaced slavery as the cause of the conflict and depicted the South as fighting for “states’ rights” or even a lower tariff, there was at first no attempt to reimagine the Confederacy as a land of racial equality, especially since the vision of the Lost Cause was actively used as a defense of Jim Crow.
But after the rise of the modern civil rights movement, it became convenient to claim that the Confederate fight was an interracial one. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the myth grew. “The modern myth of black Confederate soldiers,” notes the Civil War Trust on their webpage devoted to this tale,
"is akin to a conspiracy theory—shoddy analysis has been presented, repeated, amplified, and twisted to such an extent that utterly baseless claims of as many as 80,000 black soldiers fighting for the Confederacy (which would roughly equal the size of Lee’s army at Gettysburg) have even made their way into classroom textbooks. It is right to study, discover, and share facts about the complex lives of nineteenth-century black Americans. It is wrong to exaggerate, obfuscate, and ignore those facts in order to suit twenty-first century opinions.
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The rest of the article is well worth reading.
= new reply since forum marked as read
from Tennessee fought for the Union. It is one of the things that comes to my mind when white people around here talk about the rebel flag not being about hate but being about their family history. It makes me mad because I don't think they know history, their ancestor didn't have to fight for the south they could have fought for the Union.
On the other hand, to say that there were no black folks, whether it was their choice or not, that fought for the south isn't true either. They served as slaves. I have seen the grave of two of them with my own eyes in Chattanooga. They were forced to do it but it doesn't mean they didn't, and they didn't have the choice that the white folks ancestor had. I've also seen the graves of German POWs.
