Re: "If you have evidence of that, post it."
and Re: "Again, if you have evidence of Union troops coming upon Blacks and being fired upon them, then post it."
From post #28 please see it for more details. Hear is a snip:
There is a good book on the subject written by a black professor at the University of Virginia by the name of Jordan. His book is Afro Americans and Black Confederates in Civil War Virginia. I am pretty sure it is still in print. His book was limited to the 4 years of the war and just in Virgina but what a gold mine. Lot of fascinating stories dealing with all aspects of slave life. He was trying to figure out why a slave would fight for the South.
His conclusion? It was their country same as the white man.
I just bought this book a few weeks ago. It's excellent. Fairly scholarly and well-researched, but not tedious. He is a black scholar himself, so he didn't have some League-of-the-South ax to grind.
People don't seem to understand this. Whether you're black or white, slave or free, you love the land in which you were born. You see an invading army burning and pillaging its way across the countryside, threatening to destroy your home, and you may well pick up a gun and fight, even if your position has not been wonderful.
Remember also that not all black slaves were suffering in the forests of Georgia. In northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley, for instance, some of them had relatively light work (by the standards for all rural people of the period) and in many cases even farmed their own acreage or ran their own side businesses, without having to worry about where their clothing or food would come from, because the master would always provide it. That's not a bad deal, especially if you haven't been raised on ideas of equality and freedom, and it's not surprising that a lot of blacks didn't want to rock the boat. Some of them even objected to emancipation, as it required initiative, independence, and a willingness to take care of onesself in an age that offered no social safety net.
So in some respects it's not surprising that certain blacks may have taken arms against the Union.
I don't think anyone would argue that no slave or servant or laborer ever picked up a gun. That probably happened, especially when it was a case of kill or be killed, but the notion of hundreds or thousands of African-Americans signing up because of Southern patriotism and being mustered into service is unproven and untrue, though it is true that in the last desperate days of the war Black troops were being drilled in Richmond and Petersburg. Some New Orleans free Blacks, mostly mixed race Creoles, who had wanted to fight in 1861 weren't allowed to. They were quite atypical of the Black South, though the response to their petition was quite typical of Confederate officialdom for most of the war.
Reviews of the book you mentioned, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia by Ervin L. Jordan Jr., have pointed up its incongruities. Jordan jumps on every possible scrap of evidence that might support what he wants to believe and assumes his view is proven. He doesn't show the skepticism about wartime rumors and postwar legends that a good historian has to have. Apparently Jordan finds Black regiments in action at Manassas and Seven Pines. Nobody else has ever noticed them before, nor has anybody ever been able to confirm their existence since his book was written.