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 [log in to unmask] >>> [log in to unmask] 06/15/07 9:40 AM >>> 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. . . . .