What do you think of this Institute and the people they are bringing in.

What evidence are you referring to? Nothing that you have shared constitutes evidence for black soldiers serving openly in Confederate ranks. What you’ve provided is evidence that is in desperate need of analysis. That’s the point. You provide no analysis whatsoever, just stories from various sources. History is not done by collecting stories. You must provide analysis. There were no black Confederate soldiers. There were, however, thousands of blacks who served in various capacities as slaves. You would be doing the field of Civil War history a great deal of good if you told me about them. I am done with this thread.

Thanks for the link, but I still have no idea what this man has written and I suspect that you don’t either.

Kevin, that is not what I have or would say at all. But there appears to be evidence that blacks served the Confederacy for reasons and beliefs that went beyond the master-slave relationship. And I’m perplexed that for you and other individuals with a dedication to understanding the complexity of the war would reach such a one-dimensional conclusion – that all southern blacks serving the Confederacy were serving/fighting against their will.

I know you may not think it matters, but we should give Edward Smith his proper dues. I found him on the faculty as a professor of history at American University http://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/esmith.cfm

I should have been more careful in saying this. Of course, I should have made the point by referring to those who ended up in the army as a result of the draft. Thanks

Your assertion regarding Union soldiers – “most of them were in the army against their will” doesn’t seem accurate to me. Most of the war was fought by volunteers, particularly at the beginning of the war. Furthermore, draftees, those coerced into the army, were the least reliable.

The point is that they were not in the army in the sense that a volunteer or draftee was a member of an army. They were present as slaves, not as soldiers. Are you really suggesting that we ought to drop this crucial distinction? Your analogy with Union soldiers doesn’t work at all. Yes, most of them were in the army against their will, but they were drafted owing to the fact that they were citizens. Comparing the coercion of the military and slavery goes much too far and forces us to abandon what must be a salient distinction. In the end, we judge their performance as soldiers. I fail to understand how we can assess the experiences of slaves along the same lines. They were not citizens, which means that they did not stand in the same relationship to the United States or the Confederacy as did a white citizen.

Your last point is important: “Do you grossly overstep the boundaries of historianship when you assume that you know what black participants thought as they served the Confederacy, applied for pensions, and congregated at CW reunions?” That’s the point, Jim. Carmichael and others want to know, to the extent possible, how slaves viewed the war from within the Confederate army. Unfortunately, you would have us forget the fact that they were there as slaves. This is not primarily about loyalty and devotion to a cause; rather it’s a subject that is best approached with the master-slave relationship in mind.

Now, apply this same logic to blacks serving either with or for the Confederate army. Do you grossly overstep the boundaries of historianship when you assume that you know what black participants thought as they served the Confederacy, applied for pensions, and congregated at CW reunions?

In all the debate that the Confederate slave subject generates on this blog and elsewhere, I am still mystified by the failure of some to appreciate a fundamental fact that applies to every African American who existed in a Southern army—he was a slave and thus denied the ability to have free will in exercising his political loyalty. All the acts of bravery and fidelity on the part of slaves in battle and camp cannot overturn this basic and defining fact. Once we recognize this hard reality we will be better prepared to subdue our emotion and begin to consider the complicated ways in which slaves and whites coexisted in the army. To suggest that a slave who purchased a gray uniform was somehow committed to the Southern cause or loyal to his master overlooks the fact that there wasn’t a blue one at the Sutler’s store for him to purchase. Even if he was able to secure one, he sure as hell wouldn’t have been allowed to wear it in the Confederate ranks. What choices and political options were available to slaves is what we should be focusing on in this debate, for we cannot consider any act of “devotion” without also considering at the same time what punishments awaited a black man who failed to do his “duty” to the master class.

For those who are emphatic that Confederate slaves were both brave and loyal in their service to the Southern cause I would like for them to explain the implications of this argument. When I am in a charitable mood, I would like to believe that those who cherish the idea of the loyal Confederate slave do so as a way to protect their ancestors from being demonized by Americans who see history as a morality play. I understand their insecurities, but if they really want Americans to take their Southern ancestors on the historical terms of the antebellum South then they will have to abandon the notion that they are a minority group that is under siege from the political left–in doing so they will take the first step to seeing the past as a search for complexities and not for universal truths that can be used to assail PC radicals. Too many Americans have the insatiable need to see themselves as a minority group under attack. This perspective fosters a strange way of seeing the world in which the “persecuted” feel that they are the true owners of truth because the rest of the world has conspired against them. This position is intellectually debilitating and it is a paranoia that pervades both political extremes, not just the right. Those of us who are baffled by the folks who go to sleep every night believing that Confederate armies were composed of slaves who wanted to die for their masters and the Southern cause deserve our serious engagement, not our ridicule. We cannot make fun of their ceremonies, even if we think they are doing injustice to the complexities of the past. We have to find a way to create a dialogue.

I have no doubt that some slaves felt a strong sense of attachment to their masters and maybe even to the outfits that they served, but this “attachment” was forged as part of a slave system that was based, at the most fundamental level, on coercion. Let’s stop getting so misty-eyed over those slaves who served with white soldiers as a band of brothers and let’s also stop denouncing anyone who sincerely wants to understand the intimate relationship that existed between slaves and their masters. We are missing the complexities of this relationship in the army and its broader impact on soldier relations, the home front, and the political ideology of the Confederacy.