Posted on 05/02/2011 5:37:11 AM PDT by flowerplough
"This is a fiction," Fergus M. Bordewich, renowned historian and author of five nonfiction books, told The Root about the latest rancorous debate about black Confederates that comes as the nation's commemoration of the Civil War's 150th anniversary continues.
"It's a myth," continued Bordewich, author of Washington: The Making of the American Capital and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. "It is nonsense. I could be blunter than that, but you get the drift. It's a meaningless term, 'black Confederates.' There is no evidence whatsoever from any responsible source that there was more than the occasional slave who was forced to serve in the war."
Bordewich is not alone in his position. Top-ranking scholars have repeatedly torpedoed the myth, including Bruce Levine, the renowned professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service; and Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, editor-in-chief of The Root and chair of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Yet it persists.
Gates weighed in on the issue in a quote that appeared in a column by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor and blogger at Atlantic Magazine, several weeks ago. " 'I would worry if anything I wrote lent credence to the notion that tens of thousands of black men served as soldiers in the Confederate Army,' " Gates said of the bloody four-year battle, fought from 1861 to 1865. "No black rebel units ever fought Union forces, although many slaves fought alongside their owners, and thousands more were compelled to labor for the Confederacy, rebuilding rail lines or construction fortifications."
(Excerpt) Read more at theroot.com ...
There is nothing published by the two men you cited, either Ervin L Jordan Jr. or the late Arthur W. Bergeron, that suggests there were 100,000 black confederates, much less 10,000 armed fighters.
If you were familiar with either men's written work you'd know that.
Let them rave on that men shall know them mad....
This would actually be a decent argument if the newly elected government had actually performed some action that egregiously violated state equality, and this action had then caused secession.
In actual fact, of course, secession happened many months before the new government took office, much less took unfair action against some states, and was in response to the mere election of a president the seceding states did not like.
Nobody has ever claimed otherwise, AFAIK.
Indian regiments played a key role in the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, for instance.
The last Confederate general to surrender, Stand Watie, was a Cherokee.
On what actions or words of Lincoln's (in 1860 or before) do you base this extraordinary claim? What had he said or done that would have led southerners to believe this?
there you go pal incase you have not seen this
NY Herald July 19 1863
After the battle of Gettysburg several blacks in confederate uniform fully armed as soldiers.
Gone for a soldier p56
a white union soldier of the 5th NJ reported in his memoirs that he saw two black confederate snipers members of the Berdans sharpshooters
New bern weekly Aug 13th 1861
The war has dispelled any delusion of the abolitionists . The negroes regard them as the enemy They have jeered and insulted our troops and have enlisted in the rebel army , and on Sunday at Mannassas shot down our men
Dr Lewis steiner chief inspector of the US sanitary commission while observing Jacksons men occupy fredrick MD 1862
At 4.00 about 3,00 negroes must be included in the number , many had arms rifles, ammo, sabres and bowie knives.
fed official war records Lt Parkhurst report 9th MI
The forces attacking my camp were the 8th TX cavalry Terry TX rangers There were many negroes attached who were armed and equipped and who took part in the days engagements.
I could go on but that is enough typing for me,.
I have it on disk so if you can tell me how t copy and paste I will do that or send you a copy
much of it is from the congressional war records, newspapers and union officer accounts
I suppose the records of free Blacks actually OWNING slaves are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to rewrite history too?
And lest we forget the history of slavery in America - and where those slaves came from - many of which were captured and sold into slavery by their own people...
Actually, I have the book on my shelf at school, having cited “Afro-Yankees” many times and he most certainly does refer to 100,000 black soldiers, most of them drivers/teamsters/diggers, but estimated that 10,000 bore arms.
There was a federal effort to rewrite history about blacks working for the South going way back. Some background.
Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, made the assumption that after the war, there was going to be a ridiculous amount of litigation. Everyone was going to sue everyone else in court for damages.
So Stanton made an extraordinary directive, that official records be kept of everything, and that those records be very carefully stored. And also, that when the war was over, assuming the Union won, every available Confederate record would be added to the collection.
Though the lawsuits never came about to any great degree, this order has made Stanton the patron saint of Civil War historians and genealogists.
But it also preserved some truth that some agendas prefer was not preserved.
The first official effort to rewrite history came before the turn of the 20th Century, when the bulk of Civil War veterans on both sides began to apply for their pensions. But the rewriting of records was not carried out particularly well.
But the Confederate States varied considerably in their practices and records. In several of the States, blacks were specifically excluded from service, even if they were several generations manumitted freemen. Others were unspecific about race.
However, the State of Mississippi, for its own reasons, both kept detailed records, and carefully preserved them after the war. So it is the best State archive to divine the truth.
http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/articles/289/black-confederate-pensioners-after-the-civil-war
No one is ignoring them. But we do regard the reasons stated, solely and in their entirety, buy the weight or protest. And the chief protest among the southern states was slavery.
Go back and reread your own sources.
Which they did. Unfortunately for your case, the causes they declared were primarily associated with the protection of slavery.
I believe only one or two states (could be more, haven't counted recently) listed the tariff as a primary cause, the favorite argument of those who proclaim slavery had "nothing" to do with secession.
Why seceding and precipitating a war over a still very low level of taxation is morally superior to seceding over the protection of slavery is quite beyond me. But that's a common argument.
(Lincoln0: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
Palestinian Authority: “My way or the highway (or horse-and-buggy-way, or whatever it was back then) - quite diplomatic.”
You have a disturbing habit of imputing values, often without warrant, to people with whom you disagree. There are discussion sites on the ‘net wherein this tactic is employed, but typically not so much at conservative sites.
Yes, quite diplomatic, and no, not “My way or the highway” in any sense. He stated a truism that is indisputable but he did not impose a unilateral solution - like the southron fire-eaters chose to unilaterally impose just a few short years later. It would appear that “My way or the highway” is the southron way.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.
I love the echoing of the form of the Declaration of Independence while utterly rejecting its content.
Since you posted the link, do you seriously stand behind the notion that the above reasons justify secession and war?
I might also note that "all Christian nations" did NOT recognize African slavery as mutually beneficial to both bond and free. Quite the opposite. By the time this was written, almost all Christian nations recognized the exact opposite.
Okay, we seem to be having trouble communicating.
Your claim was that “states” were treated differently.
The Republican party platform said nothing about treating states differently, but rather about whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the territories, where the federal government, not the states, had authority.
Slavery had previously been outlawed, with minimal complaint, in some of the territories for decades until repealed at southern assistance. Yet the reinstitution (and possibly expansion) of this previous policy in your mind was somehow an example of treating states differently that justified secession and war?
Lincoln’s remarks about a house divided being unable to stand is actually a quote from the Bible. As he said at the time, if you wanted to argue the principle, you needed to take it up with a higher authority than him.
“They did so, of course, despite the official CSA policy banning them from doing so, ...”
Yes, that was “official” CSA policy, but remember that the Confederacy was just that, not a monolithic union of seceeding states. For example, some Tennessee units actively recruited and armed black soldiers and integrated them into combat units as early as 1861. Many people in the South volunteered to serve their state first, and only secondarily the “cause” of the Confederacy.
Diggers, drivers, liveries, cooks, orderlies, musicans, etc. were not soldiers. Nor did the Confederate army recognize them as such.
Quite agree. And there were various Home Guard, militia and state troop units throughout the war, most of them viewed by CSA soldiers as havens for draft-dodgers more than anything else.
My point is that banning blacks from serving as soldiers was explicit CSA policy, and any blacks that served did so in violation of this policy.
The Union itself, while more centralized in administration than the Confederacy, was not the monolithic system we have developed since. If most of the northern states had refused to support the Lincoln administration, there is little he could have done to coerce them, particularly during the early part of the war.
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