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Date: | Thu, 15 May 2008 11:49:10 -0400 |
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My formal introduction to this topic . . . in the ancient days of the
"Compuserve Civil War Forum" . . . was Ervin L. Jordan, Jr's. Black
Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville
and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995)
Despite some serious problems with the work . . . among them errors in
simple arithmetic . . . and Jordan's apparent belief that two
regiments of black troops, one of them under a black colonel, fought
at First Manassas . . . the book was eye-opening and
groundbreaking . . . a real service to the historiography of the war.
There followed a spate of truly sketchy, badly-sourced articles and
slim "books" in which the numbers of black "troops" in the CSA
sometimes grew to half a million or more . . . and we're talking
"troops" . . . not wagon-drivers, herders, "body-servants," and other
assorted battalions of forced laborers.
Some were just bad histories.
The worst were "lost cause" propaganda tracts trying to make the case
for how much most slaves loved their masters. (They served in the
ARMY . . . and didn't REVOLT . . . so they must have been HAPPY!)
One well-respected and oft-published National Park Service historian,
noting the quantity and quality of documentation for these works,
quipped to me over breakfast, "The authors wouldn't know a
source . . . [and I paraphrase here] . . . from a hole in the ground."
And they were very very bad. Some of them cited as "definitive"
sources old folks memories of tales they'd been told by relatives who
knew people who'd seen "things."
History . . . and the men and women who served in both armies . . .
deserve better.
Is there NOW a new definitive (or even well-respected) work on this
truly important topic?
Dan
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