What to you make of this quote from Dr. Steiner's report?
"The fact was patent, and rather, interesting when considered in connection with the horror the rebels expressed at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defense."
It's not hard to find, it is actually the second sentence following your quote. So if blacks were respected members of the confederate combat arms, if they were fully integrated in the confederate army then why would southern soldiers react with horror at the thought of facing black soldiers in the Union army? One would think that if they were fighting shoulder to shoulder with blacks in their own army then they would consider black Union troops as nothing special. Yet, according to Dr. Steiner, they didn't. Why is that, do you think?
"The fact was patent, and rather, interesting when considered in connection with the horror the rebels expressed at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defense."
"The fact" that he refers to is that the Confederate Army contained numerous black soldiers "promiscuously mixed up with all the rebel horde" as he described it in the sentence right before your excerpt. That fact was "patent and rather interesting" because he didn't understand the Confederate's objection to the North using black troops when they were so obviously using them themselves.
One would think that if they were fighting shoulder to shoulder with blacks in their own army then they would consider black Union troops as nothing special. Yet, according to Dr. Steiner, they didn't. Why is that, do you think?
Because it was common perception (mostly due to newspaper accounts) that blacks fighting for the Union were mostly runaway slaves. A contemporary analogy might be the outrage a businessman feels when he finds out the competitor attempting to steal his contract is a disgruntled former employee. The contest becomes personal, and emotions are introduced into the equation. Not a great analogy, but it conveys a semblance of the ideas involved. Black Confederates also felt very strongly about the issue. They also considered runaway slaves that would take up arms against them to be not just enemy soldiers, but traitors to country, home, and family. Consider an event observed and recorded by Arthur Freemantle following the battle of Manassas: A Southern slave with the Army had run off to the union side immediately prior to the battle, and was recaptured following the Confederate victory. Two other black servants were so outraged by his action that they insistently demanded that he be shot or hanged as a traitor. This was before the North's use of black troops. If loyal slaves perceived his action as traitorous because he would offer his labor to the enemy, imagine how they would have felt if he could have taken up arms against them.