Posted on 01/05/2018 12:07:18 PM PST by DoodleDawg
Two South Carolina lawmakers want to erect a monument on the State House grounds to African-Americans who served the state as Confederate soldiers. But records show the state never accepted nor recognized armed African-American soldiers during the Civil War.
“In all my years of research, I can say I have seen no documentation of black South Carolina soldiers fighting for the Confederacy,” said Walter Edgar, who for 32 years was director of the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies and is author of “South Carolina: A History.”
“In fact, when secession came, the state turned down free (blacks) who wanted to volunteer because they didn’t want armed persons of color,” he said.
Pension records gleaned from the S.C. Department of History and Archives show no black Confederate soldiers received payment for combat service. And of the more than 300 blacks who did receive pensions after they were allowed in 1923, all served as body servants or cooks, the records show.
Confederate law prohibited blacks from bearing arms in the war, records show, until that edict was repealed in 1865 at the very end of the conflict.
That repeal resulted in a handful of African-American units in states such as Virginia and Texas. But there were none in South Carolina, which prohibited African-Americans from carrying guns in the state’s service throughout the war for fear of insurrection, according to the archives.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestate.com ...
Corrected. Sherman was the crazy one. It fits. Just ask the Roswell Mill women.
Lincoln didn’t fire on Confederate property, like Davis did on Federal property.
Really? You know who “Pete” Longstreet was? You are also aware that Stonewall Jackson, taught the slaves issued to him by VMI to read and held Sunday school classes with them.
At least Sherman could plan an execute a campaign exactly like he planned. Something Lee had a hard time doing.
LOL. Comparing Sherman to Lee. Lee had honor, Sherman had none.
Sherman won, Lee surrendered.
Neither did Lincoln.
Lincoln’s call for troops came after davis’s call for 100,000 troops. And committed two dozen acts of sedition.
Lee betrayed his oath to his country. Some honor.
Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops was on April 15, 1861. Davis’s call for 100,000 troops was made on May 6, 1861
I have several sources that list March 6, 1861 as the date that the con-feds authorized 100,000 troops, not May 6th.
That (and other claims on that SCV site) smells like BS.
The US Army had African-Americans on the rolls as enlisted troops, and there was originally a gap in pay between White and Black troops.
I believe that was to a large degree remedied in 1864.
Free African-Americans were rarely -- if at all -- officially enlisted in the Confederate Army, so how do we really know how much they were paid when they worked as musicians, cooks, teamsters, porters, or soldiers?
I suspect the SCV is just making wild guesses here that support their own agenda, though I'd be interested in more exact information.
No more so than any other US wartime president, and less than some.
For example, Republican Lincoln never set up civilian internment camps of the types that Democrats Wilson and Roosevelt did in WWI & WWII.
As for property confiscations, remember hundreds of thousands of Loyalists to Britain (about 15% of population) during the American Revolution were subject to confiscations, prison & other punishments and about 70,000 fled the USA after the war.
So Lincoln's actions were not unusual.
TallahasseeConservative: "Sherman was a war criminal."
Rubbish, certainly no more so than Confederate leaders like Jubal Early (Chambersburg PA), William Quantrill (Lawrence KS) or Henry Heth (Shelton Laurel, NC).
Indeed every Confederate leader in Union regions practiced confiscations or destruction of "enemy contraband", including any freed-blacks they could kidnap for resale in the Confederacy.
But Sherman's specific orders in Georgia & beyond were for humane treatment of any civilian who did not oppose them.
TallahasseeConservative: "Buchanan stood by and did nothing when the first states seceded, because he knew the federal government had no legal right to retain them by force."
Right, and this is the Big Lie which all pro-Confederates practice: you claim the war was caused by secession, it wasn't, it was caused by Fort Sumter and the aftermath.
TallahasseeConservative: "If South Carolina’s secession meant anything, they could not allow the federal presence sitting in their harbor to remain."
But our Founders did allow dozens of British forts and trading posts to remain on US territory after the Revolutionary War in western New York, Ohio and Michigan.
Some remained, manned, resupplied and reinforced at will by the Brits for over 12 years.
And yet our Founders never made those forts a casus belli, instead sent their best negotiator (John Jay) to patiently work out British withdrawals, in 1796.
Point is: in such cases, those who wish peace can achieve it peacefully.
TallahasseeConservative: "Maj. Anderson should have simply struck the colors and departed along with his men."
Then Confederates would simply have started war elsewhere, Fort Pickens near Pensacola, FL, for example.
TallahasseeConservative: "Lincoln wanted war and he got it."
Nonsense, what Lincoln really wanted was to hold the Union Fort Sumter until exchanged for something valuable, such as Virginia remaining in the Union.
Civil War was Jefferson Davis' choice, about which he was warned by his Secretary of State Toombs:
Toombs was right, but Davis paid him no heed.
TallahasseeConservative: "Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was nothing but a publicity stunt to provoke a slave rebellion in the South, thereby drawing resources away from the battlefield, where the Union had been getting it ass kicked for two years."
Well... one year, after Union victory at Antietam/Sharpsburg in 1862.
As for "publicity stunt", hardly, since it eventually freed millions of slaves and helped enlist nearly 200,000 freedmen in the Union army, enough to make up for every Union soldier killed by Confederates!
So the Emancipation Proclamation was a big deal, a dagger into the heart of the Confederacy and one from which it never recovered.
TallahasseeConservative: "To the victor, goes the history. "
And the losers get your mythology & fantasies about what did happen and what shoulda, woulda, coulda happened, if only, if only...
TallahasseeConservative: "Please continue to deify the man, who gave you what we have now, an overbearing and bloated federal government."
Nobody here "deifies" Lincoln.
All we work to do is keep y'all from spreading too many d*mn lies about him.
As for our "bloated Federal government" those are nearly 100% the fault of you Democrats, including you Southern Democrats.
Lincoln had nothing to do with what you people did under your Progressive Southern Democrat President Wilson and your New Deal Democrat Roosevelt, and God help us, your Great Society's Pedernalis Cowpoke LBJ.
Look at it this way: in 1858, before the Civil war Doughfaced Democrat President Buchanan's US Federal government spent 2.5% of US GDP for national defense, lighthouses, etc.
In 1870, after the Civil War, under Republican President Grant, aside from national debt repayments, Federal government spent 2.5% of US GDP.
The increase from 2.5% then to today's 25%+ did not really begin until FDR's New Deal in the 1930s first raised peacetime spending to 15% of GDP.
Lincoln is not to blame for what you Democrats did.
Look in the mirror, point your finger: there's the one.
Here’s just one example:
https://civilwargazette.wordpress.com/timeline/
It shows:
March 6 – The new Confederate Congress authorizes the use of 100,000 volunteer soldiers for twelve months.
April 15 – President Abraham Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers to serve a 90-day term in the U.S. Army to quell the rebellion. In December 1860 there were barely 16,000 men in the Army, most positioned in the Western region of the United States.
May 8 – President Jefferson Davis calls for 400,000 volunteers to serve in the rebellion for three years or till end of the war. The response by Southerners was overwhelming.
Thanks, appreciate that.
What everyone needs to understand is, there were several call-ups on both sides:
So, by May 9, 1861 Confederates called up 500,000 troops, the Union, all told, about 133,000.
Eventually, of course, Union troops would outnumber Confederates over two-to-one, but in the early months, that was not the case.
Leaving aside the fact that the quote in the address bears only a casual resemblance to the quote you originally posted, you also posted the actual quote out of context. If someone read that one would think that the tariff was all Lincoln was interested in. But if you look at the entire quote the meaning is different:
"It sought only to hold the public places and property not already wrested from the Government and to collect the revenue, relying for the rest on time, discussion, and the ballot box. It promised a continuance of the mails at Government expense to the very people who were resisting the Government, and it gave repeated pledges against any disturbance to any of the people or any of their rights."
Lincoln listed the basic functions of government. Collecting revenue was only one part of it. You would have us believe that revenue was all he was interested in. That would certainly be incorrect.
It’s useless to point out, again, that the Confederate government did not consider slaves and freed blacks used by the army to be soldiers. I’m at a loss to understand why that is so hard for you to comprehend. Blacks were not enlisted as soldiers in the Confederate army until March of 1865.
Was he enlisted as a soldier? Then he was a soldier. Was he not enlisted as a solider? Then he wasn't.
The way to tell who was considered a soldier and who was not is to look at the pension files. If they awarded a pension to your or your family, you were a soldier.
That would be incorrect. Some of those who served as cooks, servants, and the like were awarded pensions.
Why?
I have seen Civil war photos of Black units (unknown configuration), from VA, GA and TN. They were fed and paid same as the Whites (for the most part).
Can you direct me to some? I have never seen anything documenting a single black unit in the Confederate army prior to March 1865.
Big difference between “authorized” and called up. Authorizing is not the same as mobilizing.
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