Posted on 08/31/2006 9:07:31 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
On Sunday afternoon at Old Union Cemetery in southern White County, over 180 people gathered to pay a debt owed nearly 80 years. The group included members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans, family and friends, all there to memorialize the service of Pvt. Henry Henderson, a black Confederate soldier.
Henderson was born in 1849 in Davidson County, NC. He was 11 years old when he entered service with the Confederate States of America as a cook and servant to Colonel William F. Henderson, a medical doctor. Records show Henry was wounded during his service, but he continued to serve until the war's end in 1865. He was discharged in Salem, NC, age 16.
After the war, Henry married Miranda Shockley, of White County, TN. The couple raised five children.
"We're here to honor him," said his great-grandson, Oscar Fingers, of Evansville, IN. "I think he would be proud his family has come this far and to know all we have done." Several other family members made the trip with Fingers from Indiana for Sunday's ceremony.
Sons Dalton and Lee received Henderson's first and last Tennessee Colored Confederate pension check upon their father's death in September 1926. The check provided enough funds to bury their father, but not enough to buy a headstone for his grave.
The 60,000-90,000 black Confederate soldiers are often called "the forgotten Confederates," but through the concerted efforts of the Capt. Sally Tompkins Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy along with the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, several graves have been found in the Upper Cumberland and have been or will be marked.
Pvt. Henry Henderson's service was finally recognized and his grave officially marked on Sunday, all to the snap of salutes from the grandsons of fellow Confederates, volleys of gunfire and cannons shot toward the distant hillsides of his final resting place.
Official U.S. government grave markers are available to all Confederate veterans. For additional information, contact Barbara Parsons, 484-5501.
Don't know offhand. How many confederates were conscripts? Do they not count? Do the two-thirds of American soldiers from WW2 who were draftees not count in some way?
Are you going to give another of those great soundbites again, like "Your ancestors were nothing more than a horde of avarice driven lice who infested the Southern states under the auspices of war to line their own pockets."?
Enticements like the following ad in the Vicksburg Herald newspaper advertising for Southerners to fill the Massachusetts troop quota might have played a role.
RECRUITS FOR MASSACHUSETTS QUOTA
$625.00 Bounty
$425.00 CASH DOWN
The same bounty and pay to
WHITE OR COLORED RECRUITS.
All get sixteen dollars per month.
Choose your own Regiment or Company.
Liberal pay to agents for bringing recruits to me.
Lieut. Col. E. C. Kinsley
Ass’t Provost Marshall of Massachusetts for the District of Mississippi
Headquarters at Vicksburg – Office on Washington Street near Clay, over Col. Saunders & Co.’s store.
The bounty was equivalent to 39 months of pay.
"Eliza, Dan, Julia, and John belonged to me up to the time of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. When I visited the General during the war, I nearly always had Julia with me a nurse. She came near being captured at Holly Springs"
That's what you posted. The Emancipation Proclamation became effective January 1, 1863. Grant wintered in Holly Springs in 1862. According to Missouri records the Dent family slaves, including those mentioned by Mrs. Grant, were freed shortly there after.
You sarcastically suggest I do my leg work when your post is filled with contradictions. The fact of the matter is that neither Grant or his wife or his wife's family owned any slaves after January or February of 1863. In any event it would have been impossible for any of them to own any after January 1865. Dr. Williams' claim is wrong and you are mistaken if you believe it.
None. The U.S. Conscription laws applied only to whites.
Why do you find it so hard to believe that black Union soldiers wouldn't fight for the same reason?
I was wondering the same thing.
abolitionists never quit , huh?
who would have thunk it....
goes to show , never let the tyrants win !
Dixie Bump
Yeah. Things died down over on the other thread, so they just had to toddle on over to this one and see how much more trouble could be stirred up...
Waler Williams, who is right about most things, is completely wrong in perpetuating the hoax about there being black Confederate soldiers. He thereby does great harm to the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
More like y'all ran off.
I would think that if this is in fact a hoax, then Walter Willams would have been reamed a new one by the black liberal establishment.
You will excuse me, but Mr. Williams reputation for veracity is well known and long established. I will take his word over that of an unknown entity.
Then you better report the following to the Ministry of Truth where you work, eh, Grand Old Partisan? Harper's Weekly. Perhaps they can excise it from history.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Dr. Williams is a liar. But he is an economist and not an historian, and he has fallen victim to the well entrenched southron myth-machine. Take this quote from the article you posted the link to, "After the Battle of Seven Pines in June 1862, Union soldiers said that "two black Confederate regiments not only fought but showed no mercy to the Yankee dead or wounded whom they mutilated, murdered and robbed." Very straight forward, two black regiments among the rebel army. OK, here is a link to a source listing the confederate order of battle for Seven Pines. Every regiment, every brigade, every commander. Which were the two black regiments? It's a simple question and one which should be easy to answer. Go for it.
No.
Uhhhhhhh - THE NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS ring a bell?!
Wrong answer Chuck, ex-slaves in the South were forcibly conscripted into the Federal army! It's all in the US Army records from the war.
Confederate Negro pickets? Never happened.
Yes it does, but I suggest that you go back and watch Gangs of New York again. Blacks weren't the ones rioting.
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