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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.

Something else to consider also. The whole world had just come out of a period of serfdom in which, essentially, everyone other than the "nobility" were slaves.

That slavery existed in the aftermath of that concept might have been considered a step upward.

Many of the people fighting, on both sides of the War Between The States, were the Irish and Scots. Why were they here? Because they were treated like property where they had been. Unwelcome property, at that!

Glad you like the book. I have to say it is the book I most often recommend (outside the Bible). Some of the stories I was dying to know more. Two of my favorite:

The slave woman who was an overseer for her white master living in Virginia. She was sent to run his plantations in Alabama. A slave woman, literate, no white master or boss for a thousand miles. Yet she had to interact with everyone that a typical plantation manager has to deal with in the middle of a Civil War. Transportation of crops, markets, supplies, budgets, I doubt these things could have been effectively managed by her master so far away in the 1860's. What a great move that could be made into if Hollywood wasn't so PC.

The other story was about a slave with a reputation for a temper. It seems the overseer ordered him to do something to which the slave attacked him. The other slaves had to pull him off the man to save the overseer's life. When it was brought to the master's attention he fired the overseer and made the slave who attacked him overseer.

It seems overseers were not liked by anyone slave or master. It seems to have attacked the worst sort. Neither Washington nor Jefferson ever had an overseer who lasted more than a year.