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Black combatants shot, killed, and captured Union troops. Loyal slaves were said to have fought with outstanding bravery alongside their masters.

Numbers.

Name the CSA black regiments that were mustered in. Give some contemporary accounts as to numbers. Despite anecdotal evidence of some blacks fighting, it had to have escaped the notice of Lee, Davis and the CSA congress. Their writings during the war make that plain.

But as President Lincoln observed, anyone who will fight to be a slave should be given every opportunity to be one.

Walt

The usual response of all the paperwork pushers!

First you assume that if any black served in CSA units they must have served in a segregated unit.

Then you assume that with it being illegal to enlist blacks, those who did so would have documented their breaking of regulations!

I was in the military in a maintenance function. According to regulation we were supposed to have X of item 'A' when we needed 3X of that item Y of item 'B' we never used an none of 'C' which was necessary. Needless to say we had 3X of A, non of 'B' except for the empty boxes and a sufficiency of 'C'. Of course there was an inventory every now and then but we were very good at counting what we did not have and not counting what we did!
According to the records we had X of 'A', Y of 'B' and none of 'C'. My CO was quite aware of the situation, and I have never heard of any other maintenance unit in the military, not even those of other branches, which functioned any different! Kept the bean counters happy!

If I had been in the CSA at that time I know how I would have dealt with the situation. The CSA always was short of men, and if someone wanted to fight, and I was forbidden to enlist him, I would have only two problems 1) how to get him a gun and food and 2) how to make sure he got paid. The easiest way would be to make him an "honorary white" and then enlist him as "white", enlisting him as an Indian would have been better - CSA units were not forbidden to enlist American Indians. Maybe I could have enlisted him as a teamster - might not have been authorized horses or wagons but we might need teamsters if we captured a Yankee supply train. There's all kinds of ways of doing things like that, limited only by the imagination of those needing men in the lines!

It was fairly easy for Lee, Davis and the whole CSA congress to not see something they really didn't WANT to see. Lee was a good CO, records DO make it plain he was loved by his men, and one of the traits of a good CO is knowing when to not officially see things! A trait of good NCOs is to conduct officers on inspections in such a manner they do not see anything they would object to and have to notice officially!

Now they have a bunch of bean counters posing as historians, who only accept physical records and ignore all anecdotal evidence (reports of people who saw something not shown to be true by the records)

However a rational person faced with anecdotal evidence of things contrary to that documentation merely figures that that is the tip of an iceberg and there are a whole lot more which are undocumented and unseen as well!

Bean counters are easy to get around by pencil whipping forms!
Yankees are dumb enough to believe that Southerners would DOCUMENT when they were violating regulations!