[Main Street]

"It's not hard to believe that some slaves stood by their masters. But such loyalty didn't add up to what the author wants to make out of it: a vote of confidence in the Confederacy."

My Italian great grandfather Carlo Victorio Lombardi was Officer in the 39TH U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops) and was killed in the mine explosion right after the Battle of Ft. Fisher (A Confederate Fort) in 1865. So I'm no Rebel Flag waver. But if that article is more accurate, than your above statement. Much is made today in black history of the few black slave rebellions in the South prior to the Civil War. Yet, during the Civil War, a prime time for the Southern black population to rise up in rebellion against their masters. They did not.

I know that there was much hope and expectations in the North that the Southern blacks would violently rise up against the South, as it would greatly speed the end of the war. But, again, they did not, despite the Federal governments attempts both in the Northern papers and by Northern plants in the South to agitate such an uprising.

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Newspapers aren't always the best guides to policy. An editor might expect that slave revolts would end the war quickly, but the Federal government didn't encourage uprisings. At the beginning of the war, it wasn't clear what to do about escaped slaves. By the end, slaves could runaway, stay put and wait for the Union Army, or join it and fight.

Revolts weren't promoted, because it was clear how uncontrollable they could become. Many people had learned of the violent slave revolution in Haiti seventy years before and dreaded a recurrence of such horrors. And if race war began between Blacks and Whites, many unionists would leave the ranks, and take up with the other side. Though we talk about "total war," there were some things that weren't resorted to in the Civil War.

Would slaves have revolted if there'd been more energy put into agitation? Probably not, but loyalty to masters, fear of recriminations, and acceptance of existing conditions shouldn't be assumed to imply an ideological support for the Confederacy. People who live and work in a given country don't necessarily assent to the policies of its government simply because they go on living and working there.

There are different questions here that may not have the same answer. One concerns the degree to which slaves accepted their condition. The other involves whether Blacks took up arms for the Confederacy. Yet another would be what African-Americans thought about the Confederacy. Certainly numbers of slaves accepted their condition because they knew no other, feared change, or were loyal to their masters, but whether this translates into support for the Confederacy is less clear.

The way we define terms also matters. There may not have been a bloody slave insurrection, but there were plenty of small scale, even individual revolts, if leaving the plantation or disobeying orders count as acts of revolt. And surface impressions may be deceiving. Slaves wouldn't always inform masters of their true sentiments.

BTW, you may be able to find your ancestor here.