Ok, I don't doubt one bit he said it, but I would want to know how he came to have this information. I doubt he ever observed it himself since he was unlikely to be wandering around southern army camps. I'd still want to see some material that was conclusive. I am still perplexed because the Confederate government was so adamantly opposed to letting blacks, free or otherwise, wear the Confederate uniform. I don't know how they would not know this was going on.
Here is some more info:
Dr. Lewis Steiner, a Union Sanitary Commission employee who lived through the Confederate occupation of Frederick, Maryland said, "Most of the Negroes...were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy Army." Erwin L. Jordan's book "Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia" cites eyewitness accounts of the Antietam campaign of "armed blacks in rebel columns bearing rifles, sabers, and knives and carrying knapsacks and haversacks." After the Battle of Seven Pines in June 1862, Union soldiers said that "Two black Confederate regiments not only fought but showed no mercy to the Yankee dead or wounded whom they mutilated, murdered and robbed."
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Virginia newspaper proposed, "Three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg." after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Erwin L. Jordan cites one case where a captured group of white slave owners and blacks were offered freedom if they would take an oath of allegiance to the United States. One free black indignantly replied, "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave in the group upon learning that his master refused to take the oath said, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave said, "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." One of the slave owners took the oath but his slave, who didn't take the oath, returning to Virginia under a flag of truce, expressed disgust at his master's disloyalty saying, "Massa had no principles."
Horace Greeley, in pointing out some differences between the two warring armies said, "For more than two years, Negroes have been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They have been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union." General Nathan Bedford Forrest had both slaves and freemen serving in units under his command. After the war, General Forrest said of the black men who served under him "These boys stayed with me ... and better Confederates did not live."
It was not just Southern generals who owned slaves but northern generals owned them as well. General Ulysses Grant's slaves had to await the Thirteenth Amendment for freedom. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, General Grant said, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."
These are but a few examples of the important role that blacks served, both as slaves and freemen in the Confederacy during the War Between the States
The Confederate government had at least two good reasons to avoid officially doing it. 1) Fear that once armed, they could not be disarmed. thus not likely to return to slavery after the war. And possibly a bad situation with rebel black units running around. And, 2) officially signing up blacks could lead to an internal conflict between radical pro-slavery parties, and the rest of the South, as civil-war inside a civil-war as it were.
AND the CSA needed troops too badly to ask too many questions. that's the TRUTHFUL answer.
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