Professor Emeritus of American History Truman R. Clark: History gives lie to myth of black Confederate soldiers.

A racist fabrication has sprung up in the last decade: that the Confederacy had “thousands” of African- American slaves “fighting” in its armies during the Civil War.

Unfortunately, even some African-American men today have gotten conned into Putting on Confederate uniforms to play “re-enactors” in an army that fought to ensure that their ancestors would remain slaves.

There are two underlying points of this claim: first, to say that slavery wasn’t so bad, because after all, the slaves themselves fought to preserve the slave South; and second, that the Confederacy wasn’t really fighting for slavery. Both these notions may make some of our contemporaries feel good, but neither is historically accurate.

When one speaks of “soldiers” and “fighting” in a war, one is not talking about slaves who were taken from their masters and forced to work on military roads and other military construction projects; nor is one talking about slaves who were taken along by their masters to continue the duties of a personal valet that they performed back on the plantation. Of course, there were thousands of African-Americans forced into these situations, but they were hardly “soldiers fighting.”

Another logical point against this wacky modern idea of a racially integrated Confederate army has to do with the prisoner of war issue during the Civil War. Through 1862, there was an effective exchange system of POWs between the two sides. This entirely broke down in 1863, however, because the Confederacy refused to see black Union soldiers as soldiers - they would not be exchanged, but instead were made slaves (or, as in the 1864 Fort Pillow incident, simply murdered after their surrender). At that, the United States refused to exchange any Southern POWs and the prisoner of war camps on both sides grew immensely in numbers and misery the rest of the war.

If the Confederacy had black soldiers in its armies, why didn’t it see black men as soldiers?

By the way, all the Confederate soldiers captured by Union troops were white men. If there were “thousands” of black soldiers in the Confederate armies, why were none of them among the approximately 215,000 soldiers captured by the U. S. forces?

If there were thousands of African-American men fighting in the Confederate armies, they apparently cleverly did so without Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, the members of the Confederate congress or any of the white soldiers of the Confederacy knowing about it. (I can just imagine some former Confederate soldier, told in 1892 that hundreds of the men in his army unit during the Civil War were black, snapping his fingers and saying, “I knew there was something different about those guys!”)

The South was running short of soldiers as the war dragged on, however, and some people began to suggest that it would be better to use slaves to fight than to lose. As late as three weeks before the Civil War came to an end, the members of the Confederate congress (and Lee and Davis) were hotly debating the question of whether to start using slaves in the Southern armies.

If, as some folks in the 1990s claim, there were already “thousands” of black troops in the Confederate armies, why were the leaders of the Confederacy still debating about whether or not they should start bringing them in?