Posted on 06/13/2003 6:22:01 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
After attending the Confederate Memorial Day service on June 1 in Higginsville, I found myself believing our nation should be ashamed for not giving more respect and recognition to our ancestors.
I understand that some find the Confederate flag offensive because they feel it represents slavery and oppression. Well, here are the facts: The Confederate flag flew over the South from 1861 to 1865. That's a total of four years. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in April 1789, and that document protected and condoned the institution of slavery from 1789 to 1861. In other words, if we denigrate the Confederate flag for representing slavery for four years, shouldn't we also vilify the U.S. flag for representing slavery for 72 years? Unless we're hypocrites, it is clear that one flag is no less pure than the other.
A fascinating aspect of studying the Civil War is researching the issues that led to the confrontation. The more you read, the less black-and-white the issues become. President Abraham Lincoln said he would do anything to save the union, even if that meant preserving the institution of slavery. Lincoln's focus was obviously on the union, not slavery.
In another case, historians William McFeely and Gene Smith write that Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant threatened to "throw down his sword" if he thought he was fighting to end slavery.
Closer to home, in 1864, Col. William Switzler, one of the most respected Union men in Boone County, purchased a slave named Dick for $126. What makes this transaction interesting is not only the fact that Switzler was a Union man but that he bought the slave one year after the issuance of the Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Of course, history students know the proclamation did not include slaves living in the North or in border states such as Missouri.
So if this war was fought strictly over slavery, why were so many Unionists reluctant to act like that was the issue?
In reviewing the motives that led to the Civil War, one should read the letters soldiers wrote home to their loved ones. Historian John Perry, who studied the soldier's correspondence, says in his three years of research, he failed to find one letter that referred to slavery from Confederate or Union soldiers.
Perry says that Yankees tended to write about preserving the Union and Confederates wrote about protecting their rights from a too-powerful federal government. The numerous letters failed to specifically say soldiers were fighting either to destroy or protect the institution of slavery. Shelby Foote, in his three-volume Civil War history, recounts an incident in which a Union soldier asks a Confederate prisoner captured in Tennessee why he was fighting. The rebel responded, "Because you're down here."
History tends to overlook the South's efforts to resolve the issue of slavery. For example, in 1863, because of a shortage of manpower, Lincoln permitted the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Army. Battlefield documents bear out the fact that these units were composed of some of the finest fighting men in the war. Unfortunately for these brave soldiers, the Union used them as cannon fodder, preferring to sacrifice black lives instead of whites.
These courageous black Union soldiers experienced a Pyrrhic victory for their right to engage in combat. However, history has little to say about the South's same effort in 1865. The Confederacy, its own troop strength depleted, offered slaves freedom if they volunteered for the army.
We know that between 75,000 and 100,000 blacks responded to this call, causing Frederick Douglass to bemoan the fact that blacks were joining the Confederacy. But the assimilation of black slaves into the Confederate army was short-lived as the war came to an end before the government's policy could be fully implemented.
It's tragic that Missouri does not do more to recognize the bravery of the men who fought in the Missouri Confederate brigades who fought valiantly in every battle they were engaged in. To many Confederate generals, the Missouri brigades were considered the best fighting units in the South.
The courage these boys from Missouri demonstrated at Port Gibson and Champion Hill, Miss., Franklin, Tenn., and Fort Blakely, Ala., represent just a few of the incredible sacrifices they withstood on the battlefield. Missouri should celebrate their struggles instead of damning them.
For the real story about the Missouri Confederate brigades, one should read Phil Gottschalk and Philip Tucker's excellent books about these units. The amount of blood spilled by these Missouri boys on the field of battle will make you cry.
Our Confederate ancestors deserve better from this nation. They fought for what they believed in and lost. Most important, we should remember that when they surrendered, they gave up the fight completely. Defeated Confederate soldiers did not resort to guerrilla warfare or form renegade bands that refused to surrender. These men simply laid down their arms, went home and lived peacefully under the U.S. flag. When these ex-Confederates died, they died Americans.
During the postwar period, ex-Confederates overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party. This party, led in Missouri by Rep. Dick Gephardt and Gov. Bob Holden, has chosen to turn its back on its fallen sons.
The act of pulling down Confederate flags at two obscure Confederate cemeteries for the sake of promoting Gephardt's hopeless quest for the presidency was a cowardly decision. I pray these men will rethink their decision.
The reality is, when it comes to slavery, the Confederate and United States flags drip with an equal amount of blood.
Actually, documentation of the black confederates is indeed known. There are black members of the SCV, which requires geneological documentation of ancestors to join. Myself and others have previously posted muster and pension lists of some of these. The Tennessee list is the most extensive and has several hundred on it.
As for documenting confederate ancestors, it is much harder than you may think. Union records often list the names, ages, birthdates, hometowns, and service details of the soldier. Many of the roles for confederate soldiers have nothing but a name, date of muster, and location of muster. This makes documentation extremely time consuming and requires confirmation in other sources. If you have a muster role that lists "Joe W. Smith, May 1st 1861, Farmville, VA" and nothing else the best way to determine who Joe W. Smith was is to pull the 1860 census from Prince Edward County, VA and look for a Joe W. Smith between the ages of about 15 and 60. If there is one that fits this description, chances are you've found him.
Black confederates are significantly more difficult because this method doesn't always work for them. Free blacks may be verified the same way in the census, but slaves were not listed by name in 1860 so you can't cross reference them. Those who have been identified are normally done in three ways:
1st, if they recieved a pension in 1890 or later a pension record exists and records their race as black. In these cases you can cross reference them with the muster role names.
2nd, a few of the muster roles and documents such as some from Tennessee record them as "colored" or "mulatto."
3rd, in some cases the names of the soldiers and an identification of them as black appeared in newspapers, letters, and other documents detailing the events of a given battle or of discharge from service. These can also be cross referenced with the muster role names.
Because of all this it is extremely difficult to find and estimate numbers of black confederates. From time to time there will be an account that gives numbers. The largest I have seen for a single incident is one from Chickamauga that talks about 44 black wagon drivers and cooks who volunteered to go to the line and fill a gap during the battle.
It also should be noted that a likely yet largely unexplored source of black confederates is in the CSA navy. Among the CSA army regulars (non-militia), the blacks were musicians, cooks, and wagon drivers. This is extensively documented and known. But in the navy, the line between a combat soldier and a support worker is inescapably less defined because naval warfare involved practically every job onboard the ship, including the laborers who make up most of the crew. Blacks sailors are certainly known to have existed before the war and this also seems to be the case on the CSA commerce raiders. There were black crewmen found onboard the Shenandoah, which surrendered several months after the war ended. Thus it is likely that sailors were among the first black confederates to see combat and were continuously involved in naval engagements throughout the war.
I have yet to find any! My family members arrived mostly in Maryland and Virginia and spread out southward from there.
No, those are the articles of secession. He means these , the declarations of the causes of secession.
The first authorizing order I can find is dated March 15.
http://www.ehistory.com/uscw/library/or/096/1318.cfm
By the time Richmond fell, a total of two (2) companies of black rebel soldiers had been raised, and were being drilled but had not been armed.
That would be Chambliss' Winder-Jackson Battallion and Turner's Richmond Brigade. The Richmond Dispatch on March 23rd described them as "a squad of Major Turner's colored troops, neatly uniformed, and showing a good soldierly carriage"
I can find no references to your claim that they had not been armed, and what does exist indicates the opposite is true. The March 21st Richmond Sentinal reported that Chambliss' Winder-Jackson Battallion had "served on the lines during the recent Sheridan raid." The March 23rd Richmond Enquirer documents them bearing arms while in town: "While on the Square, they went through the manual of arms in a manner which would have done credit to veteran soldiers"
Tellingly, the week before, when those black soldiers had marched through Richmond in rebel uniforms, white Richmonders taunted and threw mud at them.
If such incidents occurred at all, they appear to have been few. All of the newspapers covering the black troop's parade through town said the exact opposite of what you claim and one even reported that the women of the city were sewing banners together for them to carry. Here are some newspaper accounts of the event, not one of which says anything about taunts or mud and all of which report the reception as favorable:
"The appearance of the battalion of colored troops on the Square, yesterday afternoon, attracted thousands of our citizens to the spot, all eager to catch a glimpse of the sable soldiers. The bearing of the negroes elicited universal commendation." - Richmond Enquirer, 3/23/65
"PARADE. – Dr. Chambliss’ battalion, from the Winder and Jackson hospitals, paraded on the Capitol Square last evening, in the presence of several thousand persons. The two negro companies of the battalion were the feature of the occasion, and attracted universal attention and commendation." - Richmond Sentinal, 3/23/65
"These regulars had gone up to look at their colored brethren. Volunteering would be much encouraged by the parade of Major Turner's men, which will, we hope, soon take place." - Richmond Dispatch, 3/23/65
Hey, those weren't my words, those were the actual words from the Senate Report as entered into the Congressional Record.
I think those Senators, who BTW displayed a LOT of guts to broach this issue, knew a little bit more about it than the Sunday quarterbacks inflating their egos on this forum...no matter either way though, the historical precedent was set so that ANY president following Lincoln could (and have) assume tyrannical powers not enumerated by the Constitution, making it all but null & void.
Don't believe me? Here's a statement JFK made at Columbia University 10 days before he was assassinated :
"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the Americans' freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the Citizen of his plight!"
Hey Walt, I have another proverb for you...
Though technically possible, the acceptance of that explanation without any substantiation violates Ockham's razor (i.e. it is unnecessarily complex to conclude, based on the existing evidence, that they would have engaged in a practice outside of the ordinary and expected use of firearms in a wartime military presentation). Further, even if one were to accept that assumption about the display, they were reported to have gone to the lines during a raid a few days earlier (which would have served no purpose had they not been armed, not to mention the Richmond brigade's known combat before Sailor's Creek.
The newspapers you cite, in the CSA capital a couple of weeks before the fall of the city, were doubtless propaganda outlets for a desparate rebel government and cannot be relied upon as confirmation of anything.
Nonsense. Dismissing them on your own arbitrary assumption that they all just must have been propaganda outlets is not a valid logical exercise. As it stands, those newspaper reports are the only eyewitness accounts entered into the material of this discussion to date. All of them say that the reception was favorable and, barring any account that you have to offer suggesting anything otherwise, they are the only primary material we have to go by.
In other words, if your claim is true you need to support it with some evidence that counters my evidence that it is not true. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Much more indicative of the attitude of blacks in Richmond was their reception to President Lincoln a few days later, yelling "Glory to God", calling him "Father Abraham", and falling to their knees to thank him.
You are confusing the subject by altering it from Richmond's reception of the black troops to the reception of Lincoln given by non-soldier blacks in Richmond. That is a different subject entirely and bears little relevance upon the former issue.
If there really were units of black rebels fighting the Union forces at the end of the war, where are the accounts from astonished Union troops?
Considering that the yankees had reported encountering black confederates dating all the way back to Manassas, no reason exists for them to have been astonished. As for the accounts, like I previously noted, one is quoted on the historical marker at the battle site. They are almost certainly others somewhere in either the official records (which represent about 10% of the government documents) or in the union provost marshall records (where most of the other 90% are). The problem is finding it. With time, I will try to find something in the official records if I can but there are about 100 lightly indexed volumes of them to go through. If they aren't there and are instead in the provost marshall records, that task will be significantly harder without a specific call number because the provost marshall records are on almost entirely unindexed microfilm that probably exceeds a thousand rolls.
Surely, such raw recruits would have been smashed immediately by the battle-hardened Union forces.
The markers on site say that they held off the first cavalry assault but fell to the second one. Would a more experienced group have lasted longer? Who knows. But then again, this is also the civil war where 40 confederate dockworkers once held off a battle-hardened northern navy flotilla of over 20 ships and several thousand men. So experience as a speculative device isn't indicative of much of anything.
Why are there no accounts of Union forces taking black rebel prisoners?
If I recall correctly, there actually were. But again, it's a matter of finding them in the records and i'll happily keep an eye out. There is at least one I can verify without having to search. The CSS Shenandoah surrendered in november 1865 after several months at sea and among them was Edward Weeks, a black confederate sailor.
As for the white commanders of the black rebel regiments (you were talking about there being many, remember?), seemingly every former rebel and his brother wrote about their Civil War experiences. Why did no one write the sure-fire bestseller "I Commanded a Regiment of Black Rebel Troops"? Etc.
What on earth are you talking about, Partisan? Several accounts saying exactly that existed. Robert Waitt, a commander in the Winder-Jackson battallion, documented it as follows: "I had the pleasure in turning over to Dr. Major Chambliss a portion of my Negro companty to be attached to his command. Allow me to state, Sir, that they behaved in an extraordinary suitable manner." Turner wrote of the blacks in his brigade that "The knowledge of the military art they already exhibit was something remarkable. They move with evident pride and satisfaction to themselves." Captain J.B. Briggs also wrote of the Chickamauga incident I mentioned earlier (he was the officer who took them to the line).
The south began secession before Lincoln assumed the presidency. All one has to do is read the Declaration of Causes to know the real reason for secession was slavery, so spare me the regurgitated pap about states rights and tariffs..
The only American tyrant in the 1860s was a crossdresser named Jefferson Davis, who attempted to create a slave empire, and failed.
Here's a question for you: If you were Lincoln...
If I were Lincoln, I would have stormed the port of Charleston and hung every Confederate I caught from the nearest tree. Then I would have sailed for New Orleans...
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