One of the most recent works to take up the question of "Black Confederates" is Bruce Levine's Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War (2006).
Someone on the list may be able to fill in some details, but I seem to recall that in 1861 a group of free black Virginians appealed to the governor to allow them to form a militia company. Virginia had just seceded and the expectation of invasion was in the air. The governor, John Letcher, thanked them, but declined the offer and told them to return to their homes. I always assumed the move was a kind of preemptive assertion of loyalty in hopes of reducing suspicions about the free black community, but I'm less sure after reading some folks' family stories here at VA-HIST.
David Kiracofe
TCC
David Kiracofe
History
Tidewater Community College
Chesapeake Campus
1428 Cedar Road
Chesapeake, Virginia 23322
757-822-5136
>>> Daniel Morrow <[log in to unmask]> 05/15/08 11:49 AM >>>
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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