it is alos important to remember that the La. Guards DID NOT SERVE in
the Confederacy, but fought for the US althought at the beginning of hte
war they volunteered to fight for the Confederacy.  THey thought they
were more white than black; clearly Jeff Davis and his cohorts (who were
already deeply into racial science and were deeply racist) thought
otherwise.

Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
     and Public Policy
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, New York   12208-3494

518-445-3386 
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See the following website for some recent research on this:

http://people.virginia.edu/~jh3v/retouchinghistory/essay.html

An excerpt:

Retouching History:
The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph
Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. [1]

Introduction

"In the past decade," the Yale historian David Blight has recently
written,
"the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm . . . has contended
that
thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the
Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their 'homeland' . . .
.
Slaves' fidelity to their masters' cause - - a falsehood constructed to
support claims that the war was not about slavery - - has long formed
one of
the staple arguments in Lost Cause ideology." [2]

In this paper we discuss a graphic example of Blight's contention by
examining a Civil War-era posed studio photograph of black Union
soldiers
with a white officer. We maintain that this photograph has been
deliberately
falsified in recent years by an unknown person/s sympathetic to the
Confederacy. This falsified or fabricated photo, purporting to be of the
1st
Louisiana Native Guards (Confederate), has been taken to promote
Neo-Confederate views, to accuse Union propagandists of duplicity, and
to
show that black soldiers were involved in the armed defense of the
Confederacy. . . . .