Virginia's Black Confederates
One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and
often do so with bias and dishonesty. That's true about our War
of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way,
are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central
government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over
Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take
over London. Both wars were wars of independence.
Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an
article "Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on
black Confederate soldiers," (Oct. 20, 2010). The textbook says
that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy. Sieff claims
that "Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of
black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history."
William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff said, "It is disconcerting
that the next generation is being taught history based on an
unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship." Let's examine
that accepted scholarship.
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Virginia, newspaper proposed "three
cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg" after 70
blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to
them" in defense of Virginia. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass
observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in
the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and
laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders
and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all
that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."
Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from
1891 to 1987, wrote "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the
Confederate Army," in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He
says, "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in
Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of
color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in
Virginia."
Wesley cites Horace Greeley's "American Conflict" (1866) saying,
"For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed
in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had been
embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white
troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the
armies of the Union."
Wesley goes on to say, "An observer in Charleston at the outbreak
of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular
attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to
insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of
shooting the Yankees."
One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in
order to preserve slavery. What's untaught in most history
classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think
of ourselves as citizens of [these] United States. For most of
our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia,
citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we
resided. Wesley says, "To the majority of the Negroes, as to all
the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be
ruthlessly attacking independent States, invading the beloved
homeland and trampling upon all that these men held dear." Blacks
have fought in all of our wars both before and after slavery, in
hopes of better treatment afterwards.
Denying the role, and thereby cheapening the memory, of the
Confederacy's slaves and freemen who fought in a failed war of
independence is part of the agenda to cover up Abraham Lincoln's
unconstitutional acts to prevent Southern secession. Did states
have a right to secede? At the 1787 Constitutional Convention,
James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal
government to suppress a seceding state. He said, "A Union of the
States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its
own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more
like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and
would probably be considered by the party attacked as a
dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
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