If you add up personal servants, cooks, blacksmiths, other labor, people passing as white, and the odd actual black soldier, you might have as many as 5,000 black confederates, maybe. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the 160,000 plus US Colored Troops and other black regiments raised from free blacks and former slaves.
There were a lot more black faces in the confederate camps than that. Teamsters, drovers, cooks and other non-combatants were needed in large numbers. The confederate army tended to rely on contracted civilian laborers, many black (since young white men of military age were subject to conscription), and among the blacks, some free and some slave, who were contracted out by their owners.
This is an issue that comes up from time to time when the experts start getting down into the weeds about numbers present in various engagements. The Union armies had the same needs for non-combatant labor, but the Yankees tended to detail soldiers for ancillary duties. When the hard core types start getting sticky about how many men were actually on the firing line, a substantial fraction of the Union troops nominally present were likely on detached duty. I’ve heard eminent historians at various battlefields adjust the federal numbers downward by as much as 25 percent to account for this. I’ve also heard it asserted by solid historians that if you visited union and confederate camps in the first three years of the war, before the USCT started to show up, you would see far more black faces in the confederate camps.
Most of the blacks in the confederate camps were noncombatants. Frederick Douglas estimated that around 5,000 served in the ranks as combatants. That’s not a large number in the broad context of the war, but it’s enough to upset The Narrative.
Who these guys were is an interesting question, and it is closely related to where they were. Broad swaths of the confederacy were not suitable for plantation agriculture, and the peculiar institution had a very different texture to it than in the plantation belt.
The best discussion I can report on this occurred on a picturesque, highly evocative hilltop in central Tennessee, on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. This was on an organized tour. We were doing the Tullahoma campaign, the early stages of which consisted of a fight for the mountain passes as the federals came up out of Nashville, which sits in a great basin; you go uphill out of Nashville in any direction, unless you are taking a boat down the river. We were discussing the fight for one of the passes. The scene was completely rural except for the interstate highway running through the pass, and therefore right through the middle of the battlefield, but we were a half mile east up on a hilltop.
Somehow the subject of black confederates came up. Our guide was one of those amazing local historians with an encyclopedic knowledge of the region, including long acquaintance with many of the families whose ancestors had served in the war. He rose to the occasion, acknowledged that he didn’t have as much information as he would like, and allowed that it was a good subject for someone to tackle seriously, if willing to take the risk of such a study being career ending in modern academia.
He said, and I paraphrase: “I can tell you where to start. I’ve worked with the muster rolls of the confederate regiments from this part of the state. They’re right there, in plain view, all listed the same way: NAME, followed by ‘free man of color,’ followed by date of enlistment. They are scattered around — three in one regiment, seven in another, 15 over there. But they are not differentiated in any other way in the muster rolls; they’re just entered in the list with everyone else, in the order that they enlisted.”
So who were these guys? My guess is that some of them were the descendants of slaves who had escaped, slipped out into the mountain wilderness, and had been left alone. (During the American Revolution, for example, a third of the slaves in the colonies ran away; all it took was a sufficient breakdown of the slave patrols when the British marched through, and they were gone. Most of them were never recaptured.)
But I will venture a guess that the majority of them were the descendants of slaves who had been manumitted, and one of the most common reasons for manumission is that they were the children of their owner. The reason that most American “blacks” today have 20 percent or more white ancestry is that a lot of those fine aristocratic southern gentlemen were slipping around the slave cabins at night, and some of them, while accepting the institution of slavery, were unwilling to inflict it on their own children. In that lonely Cumberland Plateau setting, we’re not talking plantation agriculture; we’re talking hillbillies and tiny little mountain hamlets. The black family’s shack back up in the holler was indistinguishable from the white families’ shacks in the surrounding area — and they were all kin, and knew it. They all knew who their granddaddy was, and that he was sowing his oats on both sides of the color line. Most of these young men of mixed race would have been anxious to be accepted in white society, and under hillbilly conditions, by and large they were (though a mixed marriage was still explosive). When the war came, at least some of them enlisted along with their white cousins and second cousins.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough photographs to form a fair impression of what they looked like. Mixed race runs the gamut in skin tone. How dark were they?
We do know that Sally Hemmings was three quarters white. There are no portraits or photographs of her or her children. We do know, however, that she had six children who lived to adulthood. Let’s go with the TJ parentage theory (likely true, but there’s disputed dating that complicates one of the children). We know that Jefferson saw that all six were well trained in skilled trades. We know that Jefferson had promised Sally Hemmings that he would free her children when they reached age 21. (She was legally free in France when she was in Jefferson’s household there when he was ambassador, and she returned voluntarily with him to Virginia. We know that she and Jefferson had an agreement; we just don’t know exactly what it was.) Jefferson kept his promise to free the children when they turned 21 — these were the only slaves he ever freed — except for the two who ran off early, and he apparently sent these two money to help them on their way. And last but not least, we know that four of these six children passed into white society.
Who were the black confederate soldiers? Young men like TJ’s kids, I imagine. Free men of color. Some pretty black. Some close to passing as white. All “free men of color.”