AP U.S. History Exam Revisions Have Conservatives Furious: The Changes Are Mild at Best.
But when Masoff gets to the Civil War, she goes off the rails. “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks,” she writes, “including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” Historians in the state were appalled. Not only was there little evidence of mass voluntary participation among blacks in the Confederate war effort, but the Jackson line is pure fantasy. In fact, Masoff copied the claim from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that insists on the reality of black Confederate soldiers, and whose in-house historian, Charles Kelly Barrow, argued the point in a book called Black Confederates.
Mainstream historians dismiss the claim, but it’s easy to see how it persists. In a world where black soldiers willingly fought for the Confederacy, your beliefs are vindicated. Suddenly, the Confederate cause is noble—a fight for freedom against invaders, not a struggle in defense of slavery. Or, as Yale historian David Blight told the Washington Post, “This isn’t just about the legitimacy of the Confederacy, it’s about the legitimacy of the emancipation itself.”
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