Nonsense, several were in my gggrandfathers company, and there were nine loyal blacks in one with another ancestor from Georgia. I have one book on the subject which documents numerous cases (as does the Official Records), there are others. The CSA might have prohibited their service, but numerous states did not.
The only two regiments of southern blacks raised for the Confederacy were of free blacks in New Orleans. The rebels refused to accept them and left them behind when they retreated, whereupon these blacks enlisted in the U.S. Army (same one soon to kick Saddam's ass).
I hope they kick Sadaams butt, but the state of Tennessee allowed blacks into service the 1st year of the war, Virginia raised several regiments at the end of the war, and other states allowed their service as well. The vast majority of blacks that served volunteered to accompany their masters and were with them in battle. In the existing records, it is readily apparent that "soldier" was crossed out on enlistment records, so many are listed as cooks, musicians, sutlers, nurses etc. There are numerous documented accounts of black sharpshooters wreaking havoc among union forces, and blacks returning from battle alone with union prisioners. Just as there are documented cases of captured blacks refusing to pledge loyalty to union forces in return for there freedom.
The four million blacks in the South who remained under CSA control were SLAVES.
So? The choose to stay, very few fled or deserted the homeland. Do you really think that slaves were such wusses that they couldn't escape a bunch of women and children if they wanted too?
So?
Slavery is wrong.
"There seems to be no evidence that the Negro soldiers authorized by the Confederate Government (March 13, 1865) ever went into battle. This gives rise to the question as to whether or not any Negroes ever fought in the Confederate ranks. It is possible that some of the free Negro companies organized in Louisiana and Tennessee in the early part of the war took part in local engagements; but evidence seems to the contrary.
(Authors note: If they did, their action was not authorized by the Confederate Government.) A company of "Creoles," some of whom had Negro blood, may have been accepted in the Confederate service at Mobile. Secretary Seddon conditioned his authorization of the acceptance of the company on the ability of those "Creoles" to be naturally and properly distinguished from Negroes. If persons with Negro Blood served in Confederate ranks as full-fledged soldiers, the per cent of Negro blood was sufficiently low for them to pass as whites."
(Authors note: Henry Clay Warmoth said that many Louisiana mulattoes were in Confederate service but they were "not registered as Negroes." War Politics and Reconstruction, p. 56)
--p. 160-61, SOUTHERN NEGROES, Wiley
"The slave's alleged contentment in slavery and loyalty to the Confederacy, so elaborately celebrated on the political stump during the years after the overthrow of Reconstruction, had not quite convinced their masters during the war."
Genovese, "Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made", 1974,p. 128
"Under prodding from General Lee, President Davis and his government finally decided to face up to a hopeless situation and to reach fro the dreaded expedient (authorizing black soldiers). But the decision came too late for implementation and for the historic test it would have created. The howls of rage from Davis's opponents, even faced with the annihilation of their dreams, remain revealing both for their implicit fears and for the tenacity of the dying order's central myth.
Roared Howell Cobb: I think that the proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. . . You cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers. . . The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.
The Richmond Examiner joined the assault:
"We have been accustomed to think in this Southern country that the best friends of the Negroes were their own masters. . . But now the President of the Confederate States opens quite another view of the matter. According to his message it is a rich reward for faithful services to turn a Negro wild. Slavery, then, in the eyes of Mr. Davis, keeps the Negro out of something which he has the capacity to enjoy. . . If the case be so, then slavery is originally, radically, incurably wrong and sinful, and the sum of barbarism."
ibid, p. 129
Ask yourself why these folks were so upset, if as you say Negroes had been fighting as soldiers in the armies of the CSA all along? They were there, how did they miss it? -- From the ACW moderated newsgroup
There is no credible evidence of more than a handful of black rebel soldiers.
Walt