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

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