Let me begin by saying that I couldn’t be more pleased that History Detectives decided to follow up on the story behind the tintype of Silas and Andrew Chandler. No, this episode is not going to convince the diehards, who smell a conspiracy behind anything that fails to conform to their narrow and overly simplistic [...]
black Confederates
For those of you in the Boston area I will be speaking tonight at the North Worcester Civil War Round Table in Leominster. My topic is Silas Chandler and the myth of black Confederate soldiers. Nice attempt at recreating the famous tintype of Silas and Andrew Chandler. They almost pull it off except for the [...]
Welcome to all of you looking for additional information about Silas and Andrew Chandler. I’ve been writing about the two for a few years now as part of my broader interest in how the presence of enslaved and free blacks in the Confederate army have been remembered in popular culture. What follows is everything I’ve [...]
The vast majority of black Confederate accounts on the Internet follow a well-worn narrative. First, we are somehow to believe that servants/slaves volunteered to accompany their owners to war and in doing so solidified a bond of friendship and a commitment to the achievement of Confederate independence. Many of these postwar accounts offer rich descriptions [...]
Like many of you, I am looking forward to tomorrow night’s History Detectives segment, which will investigate the story behind the famous tintype of Silas and Andrew Chandler. At various points during their investigation I offered advice on what I had learned about the story as well as my understanding of the mythology that has [...]
As I wait for my flight back to Boston I wanted to share a little bit about my experience this weekend in Richmond at the ASALH. First and foremost, I was self conscious throughout of the fact that for the first time I was in the racial minority at an academic conference. A good friend [...]
Next week PBS’s History Detectives will air an episode on the famous image of Andrew and Silas Chandler. We anticipate that this episode will help to correct some of the many myths that have revolved around these two individuals. The famous photograph of Andrew and Silas is arguably the most popular image on the Web [...]
While modern day Lost Cause advocates of the black Confederate myth overwhelmingly refer to these men as soldiers, their preferred narrative falls right out of a late nineteenth-century fascination with the loyal camp or body servant. As I’ve said before there are almost no references to loyal black Confederate soldiers before the 1970s. What you [...]
