Comments on: Ed Bearss on Black Confederates

By: Keeping It Honest: What Did Ed Bearss Say? | Crossroads

Keeping It Honest: What Did Ed Bearss Say? | Crossroads — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:02:13 +0000

[...] I’m not the first person to point out the troublesome nature of this quote and its misuse by people who claim to want to uncover “true” history. Kevin Levin’s brought it up before, including here. [...]

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:59:15 +0000

Thanks for the confirmation, but I agree with Brooks that it is time for Ed Bearss to issue a more formal statement.

By: Cash

Cash — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:06:35 +0000

Kevin,

In January of 2007, in Sarasota, Florida, I asked Ed Bearss directly about that quote. He told me to my face he was misquoted and the idea of black confederates was, in his words, “B.S.”

By: Marc Ferguson

Marc Ferguson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:29:36 +0000

I agree

By: bobhuddleston

bobhuddleston — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:28:00 +0000

Krick’s own estimate is that there were a little over a million men in gray. (see Robert K. Krick, “The Power of the Land: Leadership on the Battlefield,” Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., _Struggle for a Vast Future _, Oxford, U.K., Osprey Publishing, 2006, p. 62), so that would make less than a hundred BCs.

By: Michael Lynch

Michael Lynch — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:19:26 +0000

One of the highest estimates that I've seen for total number of men serving for the Confederacy during the war is 1.5 million. If Krick's sample of records was typical of Confederate soldiers as a whole, then the number of blacks who were Confederate soldiers was smaller than the number of women who disguised themselves as men and fought. Doesn't say much for all those stories about thousands of armed blacks fighting for the South. You were likelier to run into a cross-dresser on a Civil War battlefield than you were a black soldier in gray.

–ML

By: Brooks D. Simpson

Brooks D. Simpson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:16:56 +0000

I think Ed has to put something on paper that can be circulated from an unimpeachable source. I've heard enough stories about people talking to Ed, and Ed denying the spin placed on the comments. Yet the quote persists.

By: Brooks D. Simpson

Brooks D. Simpson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:15:12 +0000

I think this observation is to the point, but it also highlights that the proper target should be the people who come to this fresh.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:03:44 +0000

I think most reasonable people who read this quote are able to draw such a conclusion. The problem is that we are not dealing with folks who are looking to clarify a complex subject and they seem to be completely incapable of anything approaching analysis.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:02:16 +0000

It would be enough if someone from Civil War Times, North and South, or America's Civil War asked him to clarify his position. Hey Dana Shoaf, you out there?

By: Marc Ferguson

Marc Ferguson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:56:14 +0000

I was on a battlefield tour in June '08 at Gettysburg with Ed and asked him about black Confederates, and the quotes attributed to him. He bluntly told me that he has been misquoted, said that claims about black Confederates are b.s. [he used the actual words, not the initials], and seemed genuinely irritated that such quotes are still floating about the internet. Perhaps Brooks knows how to contact him so that he might directly confront some of these claims.

By: margaretdblough

margaretdblough — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:45:53 +0000

Something that occurred to me is that, even if the quote is accurate, it does not even begin to establish that Bearss talking about the activities of Blacks above and below the Mason-Dixon line means that he is talking about the existence of so-called Black Confederates. In the clip you linked to (BTW, you don't have to register; you just have to verify that you are old enough to watch mature content), he's talking among others about the Louisiana Native Guards, which the Confederacy did not accept into Confederate Service, and the Black South Carolina regiments in the UNION army.

Any conspiracy after 1910 would have been to wipe out the contributions of Blacks to US armed forces as Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 and began to impose Jim Crow on civilian and military federal employees.