Bruce C. Levine in his 2006 book, Confederate Emancipation: Southern
Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War, posed a very
important question: Why did the law that passed the Confederate Congress
early in 1865 to change public policy and free slaves who fought in the
Confederate army generate such intense opposition if any appreciable
number of free black or enslaved Southerners had already been fighting
in the army?

 

That question throws a large dash of cold water on the reliability of
undocumented post-Civil War assertions that any significant number of
black Southerners willingly fought for the Confederacy.

 

What is lacking are military and archival records that prove that they
did.

 

I am willing to believe that just about anything is possible in a large
population of Homo sapiens, and you can find some evidence somewhere to
support just about any assertion. There were, in fact, a very small
number of African American Virginians who received Confederate pensions
in the twentieth century, though few or none of them had volunteered as
soldiers. See Bill Archer, "Samuel Walker: Slave, Freedman, and
Pensioner, 1842-1933," Virginia Cavalcade 50 (2001): 40-47.

 

The 1924 amendment to the Virginia pension law that authorized those
pensions did not even mention volunteer soldiers. It offered pensions to
men who had "actually accompanied a soldier in the service and remained
faithful and loyal as the body servant of such soldier, or who served as
cook, hostler or teamster or worked on breastworks . . . and thereby
rendered service to the Confederacy."

 

What I have not seen (and I do not believe that it exists until somebody
shows us) are authentic military and archival records that document the
military service of numerous African American Virginians who were not
body servants, impressed laborers, or enslaved workers doing what their
owners required them to do.

 

Lacking such documentation, I find it impossible to believe implausible
after-the-fact stories about black Confederate regiments or even any
large numbers of black Confederate soldiers. Revisionist writers late in
the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century propagated
that myth.

 

Good writers, however good they are, who do not know enough about the
subject matter on which they write to recognize red warning flags or to
know where the interpretive land mines are buried on the bookshelf or in
the Web or to understand the differences between assertions and
documented facts, cannot write good history. And textbook publishers,
above all, should require accuracy.

 

If there is a discrepancy of interpretation on an important matter like
this, perhaps the writers and publishers should include the variant
interpretations and enough of the evidence that people can make up their
own minds. Or better yet, teachers and students can learn how to
evaluate evidence and understand disagreements and develop some useful
critical thinking skills, something evidently sorely lacking here.

 

My $0.02 (U.S. currency) worth from,

 

Brent Tarter

The Library of Virginia

[log in to unmask]

 

Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov

 


______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html