It's B.S., wishful thinking." - Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus, NPS
They were never mustered into the Confederate Army," – James Hollandsworth, Associate Provost at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
It's mostly moonshine They've taken a core of true information and ballooned it all out of proportion.” - James McPherson, Princeton professor emeritus and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom. -
If I were rewriting Battle Cry of Freedom, I would mention that [the participation of black Rebel soldiers] happened on an unofficial and limited basis, but it was not a regular, sizable component of the Confederate army." - James McPherson
There were a few black Confederate [combatants] nobody knows how many. There may have even been several hundred, but it was entirely unofficial, unsanctioned, irregular, and sporadic" - James McPherson
Of course If I documented 12 [black Confederates out of 150,000 CSA soldiers researched] someone would start adding zeros," - Robert Krick, author of 10 books on the Confederacy
Ervin Jordan Jr. - a black archivist and assistant professor from the University of Virginia. In Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, were he proved there were black confederates, he admits that he hasn't uncovered tens of thousands of black Confederates in wartime Virginia - in fact, he's found barely a fraction of that.
There was no black Confederate unit in Mobile, it was a Creole unit. It would be a long, long stretch to say that it was a black unit. There was no counterpart to the black divisions that fought on the Union side." - Sheila Flanagan, assistant director of the Museum of Mobile. - Mobile Register, August 23, 1998
"Many thousands of Jews did slave labor in military production factories in Nazi Germany - but that certainly didn't make them "thousands of Jewish soldiers fighting for Germany.”” Truman R. Clark, professor of history, Tomball College. - The Houston Chronicle, Aug 29, 1999
Howell Cobb, GA State Legislator - "you cannot make soldiers of slaves . . . . The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." - Cobb to James A. Seddon, 8 Jan. 1865, in O.R., ser. 4, 3: 1009-
"Yet there were other quite different signs of black attitudes, ones more comforting if puzzling. From all across the new Confederacy there came stories of blacks, free and slave, who wanted to do their bit for the new nation. Even as the first elements of the new government reached Richmond, they could see a South Carolina slave who had come north with a Carolina regiment to defend the Virginia frontier, marching about the city wearing a sword with which he swore he would shave Lincoln's head.
"A free black descended from one of George Washington's slaves, now the owner of a small farm near Mt. Vernon, offered twenty-eight acres, one-sixth of his property to be sold at auction to raise money for Virginia's defense.
"More active efforts in Virginia came form other quarters, like the fifty free blacks in Amelia County, and two-hundred more in Petersburg who offered themselves to the government to perform labor or even to fight under white officers. Slaves like a Tennessee barber named Jim donated money from their small savings to help raise companies; a Montgomery slave subscribed $150 of his own to the first call for loans from Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Memminger; not far from Mobile sixty slaves on one plantation practiced drilling every night after a full days' work, expressing their hope to fight the "damned buckram abolitionists" who had caused the crisis that now led to the fear of slave uprisings and the consequent curtailment of their few little freedoms."
-Look Away! William C. Davis
Davis goes on to say their motives and support varied. Some freedmen were in it for the business, using their skills as blacksmiths and masons, to earn money. Others were caught up in the excitement of the times, looking for adventure. Still others realized that although the might be near the bottom of the social order, it was still their state and they ought to defend it. Others had hopes of freedom if their patriotism was displayed during this time of crisis.
There are many good accounts of blacks and Jews in the Confederacy - lots of research is being done. North & South magazine ran a great article "Black Confederates: Myth or Reality?" (vol. 5 no.3) with many good sources and accounts.
And what do we have in it all?
- A couple "experts" to each of whom one could cite another expert with opposing viewpoints
- The usual drivel of McPherson quotes
- and to cap it all off, a quote from a guy at Tomball College, the official two year junior college and auto mechanic training center of the most suburbanized hick town in America.
Sounds like quite an argument to me...