Reply #95: it is a myth [View All]

[WoodrowFan]

and you ignored his arguments. If so many blacks fought for the South, why were there none among the POWS? Why did the Confederate Congress have to debate allowing blacks to serve in the Army if they were already there in great numbers? Maybe the author isn't so much biased as he is annoyed by neo-confederate myths..

Here, try this recent book.. Confederate Emancipation : Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War by Bruce Levine. Sorry, but using blacks as teamsters aside, there were only a handful of blacks who fought for the South in the Civil War, no matter what you keep telling yourself.

http://tinyurl.com/mx8ow

From the Washington Post review..

... In the past decade, the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm (with tentative support from some academic historians) has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their "homeland." A quasi-debate over the existence of "black Confederates" has seeped into academic conferences, historical journals and many Web sites. The issue of competing popular memories is driven largely by the desire of current white supremacists to re-legitimize the Confederacy while tacitly rejecting the victories of the modern civil rights movement. What could better buttress the claims of "color-blind conservatism" in our own time than the notion that the slaveholding leaders of the Confederacy were themselves the true emancipators and that many slaves were devoted to the Southern rebellion? George Orwell warned us: Who needs real history when you can control public language and political debate? This book is a scholarly, well-written demolition of the invented tradition of "black Confederates." Levine's intrepid research overwhelms the myth, although it will never kill it as long as such stories reinforce current social needs and political agendas.