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.
You have proof, I presume?
Then you can point me to some?
The New York draft rioters were white Democrats, who on the first day attacked Republican-owned newspapers and other businesses, and then killed perhaps 1,500 blacks on the second and third days.
Back at ya! But I do have a book documenting the forcible conscription of ex-slaves by Union soldiers on Sherman's March.
"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."?
Yeah its called Sherman's March to the Sea and Reconstruction.
And a third of the CSA army were conscripts.
After April 1862, ALL Confederate soldiers were conscripts, since the rebel conscription law kept all soldiers in the ranks indefintely, regardless of when their terms of service were supposed to expire. Union troops, on the other hand, where free to go home when their 3-year enlistment terms expired. Three-quarters re-upped voluntarily.
... the major- general commanding ([Union] General Foster) ordered an indiscriminate conscription of every able-bodied colored man in the department. As the special representative of the Government in its relation to them, I had given them earnest and repeated assurances that no force would be used in recruiting the black regiments. I say nothing of this order, in reference to my special duties and jurisdiction and the authority of the major-general commanding to issue it; but as an apparent violation of faith pledged to the freedmen, it could not but shake their confidence in our just intentions, and make them the more unwilling to serve the Government.
The order spread universal confusion and terror. The negroes fled to the woods and swamps, visiting their cabins only by stealth and in darkness. They were hunted to their hiding places by armed parties of their own people, and, if found, compelled to enlist. This conscription order is still in force. Men have been seized and forced to enlist who had large families of young children dependent upon them for support and fine crops of cotton and corn nearly ready for harvest, without an opportunity of making provision for the one or securing the other.
Three boys, one only fourteen years of age, were seized in a field where they were at work and sent to a regiment serving in a distant part of the department without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
From the OR.
There is ample photographic evidence that Blacks participated in the War on both sides, some willingly, some not.
It is not a question of if, it is a question of how many.
Same with the Irish, they fought on both sides and for a variety of reasons, most of which had nothing to do with slavery.
Find me a single factual mention of a dead black rebel soldier or a black rebel POW or a pension paid to a black rebel soldier. Just one. Ready, set, go!
return of wlat ping
You could also provide a link to a Confederate order of battle listing even a single regiment of black soldiers.
See it didn't take long for the south haters to show up. We in the south are on this site too honor our fore-fathers brothers in arms , We have no prejudices on what color their skin is like some of the d'yakees that come to bash their memory.
Some of this people I put in the same case as : cindy sheehan,jesse jackson,Hillery clinton,and ted Kennedy
they are the one that go out of their way to play the race card . they want to keep the hatied going between the blacks and whites.
they are the one that go out of their way to play the race card
We've got nothin' on Watie on that score. He'll hysterically scream that anyone who disagrees with him is anti-Indian.
Then why not leave it at that, the truth? Why embellish it with nonsense about whole black confederate regiments and lies about Grant owning slaves until the ratification of the 13th Amendment? Aren't there enough facts about the confederate side to present without resorting to fabrications?
Not if you're trying to advance a larger agenda...
Traveller was more respected then any slave or black man that wore a confederate uniform and was buried with more military honor.
I am confident that if you wrote him in a polite manner he would answer you in the same vein.
"This failure is owing to several causes. When first invited to enlist the negroes had hardly learned to realize the promised change in their condition - to comprehend as a possibility that they had been so suddnely lifted out of the utter degradation of chattelism to the dignity of the right of bearing arms. They were far from being sure of their freedom.
Several occurences had led them to doubt our good faith, who had professed to come as their deliverers. They were fully aware of the contempt, oftentimes amounting to hatred, of their ostensible liberators. They felt the bitter derision, even from officers of high rank, with which the idea of their being transformed into available soldiers was met, and they saw it was extended to those who were laboring for their benefit. When their own good conduct had won them a portion of respect, there still remained widespread distrust of the ultimate intentions of the government.
A large number was required as laborers in the various departments of Governmetn service. But one of the chief causes of failure is the fact that a comparative few of the negroes are physically fit for soldiers; many suffer under some visible or concealed infirmity, produced by the rigor, cruelty, and barbarity of their treatment, and the evidences of the most unsanitary conditions of life on the plantations. In these circumstances the recruiting went slowly, when the major general commanding (Genreal Foster) ordered the indiscriminate conscription of every man in the department." And then you continue.
Taken in context, something unknown amongst the southron contingent, it's clear that the blacks in your quote were being conscripted for laborers and not as soldiers. General Saxton's report is very interesting in that it details the abuses that the average white soldier heaped on the local black population. Given that it's really amazing that upwards of 200,000 would volunteer for military service. But serve as volunteers they did, not as conscripts as you would have us believe. And their service in combat units was encouraged by the government and officially recognized. Unlike the blacks in the confederate ranks who were there without government saction and not as combat soldiers. Careers of those who suggested blacks be recruited as combat soldiers, men General Cleburne, were damaged by such suggestions because virtually all the southern leadership believed, as General Lee did, that blacks were best left in slavery and nowhere else. And when the south, with everything crumbling around them, finally broke down and authorized black combat troops they still could not be made to take the next step and offer those slaves who served their freedom. Had they served and had the south won they would have gone from the battlefield to the cotton field. As the southern leadership believed was the right and proper place for them.
It bothers you not at all that you stand fore-square behind complete fabrications? Have you people no shame whatsoever? No lie is too big, no whopper is too outrageous for you all to swallow hook, line and sinker? So long as it paints the Union and Lincoln in the worst possible light that is. You people are unbelievable.
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