Restricted "Faithful Slave" Monuments and "Lost Cause" Marketing...

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5fish

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The whole Black Confederate debate is nothing more than the "Lost Cause" movements marketing campaign to imply the loyal slaves supported the Southern Cause objectives during the Civil War.

Many of these groups are motivated by a laudable desire to acknowledge the shared histories of black and white Southerners, rather than telling the story of the Civil War from a purely white perspective, but they go too far when they suggest that black Southerners' service on behalf of the Confederacy demonstrates voluntary support for its objectives.

It actually started at the end of the 19th century...

After the war, many different groups and governments proposed interpretations of African Americans' service to the Confederacy. The Southern Claims Commission, established by the United States Congress to compensate loyal Southerners for property taken by Union forces during the war, tended to assume that black Southerners (especially slaves) had remained loyal to the Union. They saw black service on Confederate fortifications or in businesses supporting the Confederate war effort as the result of force rather than inclination. Early in the twentieth century, most southern states expanded their pension laws to offer compensation to black men and women who had worked on behalf of the Confederacy, but those laws contained no provisions suggesting that black men could claim pensions as soldiers. The United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed a series of monuments to "loyal slaves" as part of its commemorative efforts late in the nineteenth century, while the United Confederate Veterans took pains to highlight the occasional black man who attended a reunion wearing a Confederate uniform. (The "loyal slave" is a traditional feature of the Lost Cause view of the war.)

Here is one... best one at Arlington

Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this impulse was a decades-long campaign to erect a monument to black "mammies" in Washington D. C. As early as 1904, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began campaigning for a memorial to "faithful slaves," and Southern congressmen took up the cause, unsuccessfully seeking federal funding for a monument in 1907 and 1912.2 A milestone in the UDC's campaign to commemorate both the Confederacy and "faithful slaves" was the erection of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. Sculpted by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and prominent sculptor, the imposing monument includes thirty-two life-sized reliefs, including a frieze depicting a loyal black slave accompanying his Confederate master into battle and another that portrays a departing Confederate soldier bidding farewell to his children, who cluster around an "old Negro mammy." According to Hilary A. Herbert, who wrote a history of the monument in 1914, the monument depicted "the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave – a story that can not be too often repeated to generations in which "Uncle Tom's Cabin" survives and is still manufacturing false ideas as to the South and slavery in the ‘fifties.' The astonishing fidelity of the slaves everywhere during the war to the wives and children of those who were absent in the army was convincing proof of the kindly relations between master and slave in the old South."3

Confederate_Monument_-_E_frieze_-_Arlington_National_Cemetery_-_2011.jpg



Confederate_Monument_-_W_frieze_and_statue_-_Arlington_National_Cemetery_-_2011.jpg


Why???

Even after the erection of the Confederate Monument at Arlington, UDC activists remained committed to a national monument dedicated to "mammies." The value of such a monument was clear to its supporters: one proponent explained that "a noble monument" to the memory of black "mammies" and to "their loyal conduct refutes the assertion that the master was cruel to his slave."4

The United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed a series of monuments to "loyal slaves" as part of its commemorative efforts late in the nineteenth century, while the United Confederate Veterans took pains to highlight the occasional black man who attended a reunion wearing a Confederate uniform.

Here is what Black Confederates did... everything except fighting in battle.

Most likely, those men had served as body servants rather than actual soldiers during the war. Black men had formed a large and highly visible portion of the population at every major Confederate army encampment, but not as soldiers. They washed clothes, cooked meals, cared for the personal property of individual owners, groomed horses, drove wagons, unloaded trains, built walls and bridges, and nursed the wounded. One former slave, when interviewed by an employee of the Works Progress Administration, claimed he had done a soldier's work during the war, and this was certainly a valid interpretation. Black men serving the Confederate army did almost all of the tasks that actual Confederate soldiers did on a regular basis—everything except fighting in battle. And while it is possible (perhaps even probable) that a few of the personal body servants or hired slaves working in camp could have picked up a gun and joined a battle at one point or another, there is no credible evidence to suggest that large numbers of them did so. Certainly, their numbers are statistically insignificant when compared with the thousands of black men who were forced to perform manual labor for the Confederate armies.

The Black Confederate and Faithful Slave movements were just "Lost Cause" marketing...
 
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