Today in 1865 the confederacy voted to recruit black soldiers
Less than four weeks later, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant in Wilmer McLean's parlor at Appomattox Court House
The actual text of the 13 March 1865 Act can be found here: The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That .. the President .. is .. authorized to .. accept from the owners of slaves, the services of .. able-bodied negro men .. to perform military service ... That the General-in-Chief be authorized to organize the said slaves into companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades ... That if .. the President shall not be able to raise a sufficient number of troops .. he is .. authorized to call on each State .. for her quota of 300,000 troops .. Provided, That not more than twenty-five per cent. of the male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, in any State, shall be called for ... <and> That nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear toward their owners ...
Some history of the 13 March 1865 Act can be found here: In December 1863, Confederate general .. Cleburne wrote a memorandum advocating the emancipation and enlistment of black men as Confederate soldiers ... The Davis administration .. ordered Cleburne .. to cease .. discussion of the subject ... On February 10, 1865 .. Congressman .. Barksdale .. introduced a bill granting Davis the power to accept black men as soldiers, but only with their masters' permission ... After strenuous debate .. the House of Representatives narrowly passed this bill .. and sent it to the Senate ... The Senate, by a one-vote margin, approved a slightly amended version of the Barksdale bill ... The War Department .. acted .. upon the .. legislation ... Only two units were ever created, both in Richmond. The first enrolled approximately sixty orderlies and nurses from Winder and Jackson Hospitals; the second .. never numbered more than ten recruits. The first company was hastily put into the trenches outside Richmond for a day in mid-March, but the unit canceled a parade scheduled for the end of the month due to the fact that the men lacked uniforms and rifles. Based on this, it is unclear how much fighting they could have done. The second unit was housed in a former prison and carefully watched by military police, suggesting that white Confederate officers did not trust these new black soldiers ...
That bears repeating: the confederacy did not allow any black soldiers at all until the last month of the war, at which point at most seventy were enlisted, sixty of whom were nurses or orderlies and were not issued either uniforms or rifles, with the remaining ten or so kept under armed guard in a prison building
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Posted in African Americans, Memory by Andy Hall on July 27, 2010
David Woodbury of Battlefields and Bibliophiles and Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory highlighted a story in the San Fransisco Chronicle, about Samuel Brown, an African American Civil War veteran whose grave in Vallejo, California, was recently marked with a stone commemorating his service with the 137th United States Colored Troops. The event came about because the original stone, which had been on Brown’s gravesite since shortly after his death, designated him as a Confederate veteran. Via the CBS teevee affiliate in San Fransisco, Brown’s grave had originally been marked with a stone that read, contradictorily,
So it was a fnckup at the engravers, simple as that. Someone assumed that a Civil War soldier from Georgia must’ve been a Confederate ...
http://deadconfederates.com/2010/07/27/how-to-make-a-black-confederate-from-nothing-at-all/
