I can definitely relate to that sentiment.
Posted on 11/04/2010 3:13:46 AM PDT by markomalley
One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That’s true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence.
Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an article “Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers,” (Oct. 20, 2010). The textbook says that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy. Sieff claims that “Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history.” William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff said, “It is disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship.” Let’s examine that accepted scholarship.
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Va., 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. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, “There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government.”
Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from 1891 to 1987, wrote “The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army,” in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He says, “Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia.”
Wesley cites Horace Greeley’s “American Conflict” (1866) saying, “For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had 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.”
Wesley goes on to say, “An observer in Charleston at the outbreak of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees.”
One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in order to preserve slavery. What’s untaught in most history classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think of ourselves as citizens of United States. For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia, citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we resided.
Wesley says, “To the majority of the Negroes, as to all the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be ruthlessly attacking independent States, invading the beloved homeland and trampling upon all that these men held dear.” Blacks have fought in all of our wars both before and after slavery, in hopes of better treatment afterwards.
Denying the role, and thereby cheapening the memory, of the Confederacy’s slaves and freemen who fought in a failed war of independence is part of the agenda to cover up Abraham Lincoln’s unconstitutional acts to prevent Southern secession. Did states have a right to secede?
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. He said, “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
Accurate but very one-sided history.
Lincoln said the war was about whether a government of, by and for the people could “long endure.”
It seems indisputable that any consensual government that can be broken up by any sufficiently strong minority can indeed not endure very long. Such governments would probably split and resplit till the small units left became a prey to despotic governments subject to no such challenge. To expand on the words of Franklin, if the states didn’t hang together, in the long run they would assuredly hang separately.
It is the second greatest tragedy of American history that we fought our greatest war against ourselves, but the responsibility for that war lies with those who precipitated it, the fire-eaters of the South who worked for a generation to exacerbate tensions between the sections. They also managed to convince (white) southerners that slavery was not an evil to be put in the way of eventual extinction, as the southern Founders believed, but rather a positive good to be protected and spread.
Disgraceful article. Shame on Williams. The Confederate democrats absolutely were fighting to destroy the rule of law and to deny United States citizens equal rights to representation for all. Their succesors (the progressive democrats) continued to do the same. Next maybe Williams could write an article about how blacks served in the KKK. Absolutely pathetic and shameful article.
I can definitely relate to that sentiment.
Pardon me for asking, but exactly how is truth ever to be considered “disgraceful” or “pathetic and shameful”?
Skipping the question of accuracy and just calling something "shameful" and wishing it would be suppressed or go away is itself shameful - the desire to erase uncomfortable truth in the interest of ideology is the m.o. of authoritarians everywhere.
Good for Mr Williams.
Apparently we are going to have to fight that damnable war all over again. The wrong side won the first time. We will make it right the second time.
He is certainly right about one thing. There were black Confederate soldiers. Even Ken Burns showed such photos, and that must have hurt him sincerely to have to show such a thing.
In seems to me I read somewhere that there were free blacks who owned slaves in those days. I'd have to search my archives, but I suppose if I found such to be true I would be considered revisionist.
....Williams is correct...1861-1865 was not a civil war...it was a war of secession and partition....we’ve had three of those so far: 1776,1832,1861...those were based on politics...the coming one will be tribal, and if I were betting on it; the Southwest will be where it will start.
mark,
I was taught in school that a white man in the south could send one or two slaves to represent him in the case he was drafted in to the army.
When it's only half the truth. What Williams neglects to say is that had the confederacy won then all those slaves who served the rebel army would have gone back to being slaves. And had any of their owners decided to free them for their service then according to the Virginia constitution they would have had 12 months to leave the state or else be returned to slavery. In short, Williams wants us to believe that the service to the confederate cause by any black person was respected was respected by the white populace. That is ridiculous.
And there were jews who helped the Nazis.
A handful of deluded people doesn’t erase the millions who fought on the Right side.
It is amazing how you and others that follow your post think that every word uttered in this article by Willaims is simply a truth. It is laced with opinion. The opinions of Willaims that the war was not about upholding slavery and was not a Civil war are what are disgraceful. The Confederate democrats sought to uphold slavery and to usurp the power delegated by the Constitution for their own anti-freedom purposes.
But his further argument, at the end, about a supposed "states' right to secede," is bogus to the max.
Sure, anyone can carefully select a quote from Madison or another founder, but there are as many or more other quotes saying legitimate secession can only be by mutual consent, or in the event of "usurpations" and "abuses" of Federal power.
Secession was not legitimate "at pleasure."
And yet in 1860 there had been no "usurpations" or "abuses," and the Deep South did secede "at pleasure."
This made their secession unconstitutional.
Then seizing Federal properties and shooting at Federal forces made it "insurrection" and "rebellion."
The rest is history...
It's that history that Lost Causers insist on ignoring.
Col. Parkhurst’s (Northern) Account of Forrest’s Black Confederates:
"The forces attacking my camp were the First Regiment Texas Rangers, a battalion of the First Georgia Rangers … and quite a number of Negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, and took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day"
(Lieutenant Colonel Parkhurst's Report (Ninth Michigan Infantry) on General Forrest's attack at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, July 13, 1862, in Official Records, Series I, Vol XVI, Part I, page 805).
The brother against brother part of the war was not just brothers across enemy lines. There is a very good reason the South still flew the Confederate flag with pride until these last few years and it was not because they were proud of slavery but of the real reasons the war started and what they were fighting for. Ask yourself why murdering outlaw man like Jesse James became a hero and their exploits followed with such zeal if the South was so wrong.
So the real shame is the revisionist history that says the war was started and fought over slavery.
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