LOL - So, once again, your only defense is to call Dr. Steiner a liar. He was there, watched the troops pass for hours, but he lied about what he saw, according to your belief. What about the other union officers and solidiers and newspapers that wrote of blacks with the Confederate Army. Maybe they were all part of the same "conspiracy" within the Union ranks to tell such "lies". Maybe Frederick Douglass was the 'Grand Poobah' of that conspiracy and they had a secret handshake and everything. Maybe they all told their "lies" just to antagonize you, Walt. Maybe their ghosts are watching you squirm now, pointing at you and slapping each other's backs as they guffaw and snicker.
I am not calling Dr. Steiner a liar. He says there are 3,000 negroes among the 64,000 rebel troops. But other reports say there were closer to 45,000 rebels. Should we rachet down Dr. Steiner's estimate on that basis?
Up to 1/4 of Lee's army on this campaign was straggling.
But consider this, from an account of Fort Pillow:
"However, another Confederate soldier, Samuel H. Caldwell, wrote to his wife a few days after the massacre "If General Forrest had not run between our men & the Yanks with his pistol and sabre drawn not a man would have been spared." To support this, Brigadier General James R. Chalmers, CSA, who was Forrest's second-in-command "similarly claimed to a Federal officer on April 13 that he and Forrest had `stopped the massacre as soon as [we] were able to do so'. He further explained that their men `had such a hatred toward the armed negro that they could not be restrained from killing the negroes after they had captured them.'"
So it was okay for the rebels to use slaves in arms, but wrong for the Union to do so?
There is no credible evidence of more than a handful of black rebel soldiers.
Walt