The neo-rebs on their websites have posted figures of 65,000 or 90,000 or even more black rebel soldiers. Those numbers are a fantasy. This whole thing is a fantasy and you'll show it for nothing else, no matter what Dr. Steiner, Frederick Douglass or anyone else said. Many other people said otherwise, or failed to note any black soldiers at all -- and it would surely have been something to remark on.
"It's pure fantasy,' contends James McPherson, a Princeton historian and one of the nation's leading Civil War scholars. Adds Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service: 'It's b.s., wishful thinking.' Robert Krick, author of 10 books on the Confederacy, has studied the records of 150,000 Southern soldiers and found fewer than a dozen were black. 'Of course, if I documented 12, someone would start adding zeros,' he says.
"These and other scholars say claims about black rebels derive from unreliable anecdotes, a blurring of soldiers and laborers, and the rapid spread on the Internet of what Mr. McPherson calls 'pseudohistory.' Thousands of blacks did accompany rebel troops -- as servants, cooks, teamsters and musicians. Most were slaves who served involuntarily; until the final days of the war, the Confederacy staunchly refused to enlist black soldiers.
"Some blacks carried guns for their masters and wore spare or cast-off uniforms, which may help explain eyewitness accounts of blacks units. But any blacks who actually fought did so unofficially, either out of personal loyalty or self-defense, many historians say.
"They also bristle at what they see as the disingenuous twist on political correctness fueling the black Confederate fad. 'It's a search for a multicultural Confederacy, a desperate desire to feel better about your ancestors,' says Leslie Rowland, a University of Maryland historian. 'If you suggest that some blacks supported the South, then you can deny that the Confederacy was about slavery and white supremacy.'
"David Blight, an Amherst College historian, likens the trend to bygone notions about happy plantation darkies.' Confederate groups invited devoted ex-slaves to reunions and even won Senate approval in 1923 for a "mammy" monument in Washington (it was never built). Black Confederates, Mr. Blight says, are a new and more palatable way to 'legitimize the Confederacy.'"
-- Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1997
These professional historians don't accept the notion of black rebel soldiers and you look silly putting it forward.
Walt
These professional historians don't accept the notion of black rebel soldiers and you look silly putting it forward.
You look silly denying history and calling all those union soldiers and newspaper reporters liars. Read the regimental history of Berdan's Sharpshooters, for example. There are at least two stories in there about black Confederate sharpshooters they contended with. I guess you think they lied. Read through the Northern newspapers. You will find stories that mention black Confederates. What the revisionists you quoted are talking about is the idea that the Confederacy was a multicultural Army where all races were equal and so forth. That was no more true for the Confederacy than it was for the Union. That is not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is whether or not blacks served in the Confederate Army, and the answer is yes. True, most were support personnel, either servants or hired blacks, but many served as soldiers as well. Some commanders allowed it, some didn't. No, black Confederates were not treated as equals. Blacks up North or in the Union army were not treated as equals, either. AMERICA, NORTH AND SOUTH, was a plethora of race prejudice in the 1800's. That is the simple truth, Walt. There were black Confederates, Frederick Douglass knew it, Horace Greeley knew it, the union soldiers knew it, the northern newspapers knew it, Dr. Steiner knew it. Anyone who would doubt it would also have to believe that blacks did not participate in the American Revolution, because they could have run off and joined the British to gain their freedom.