Confederate General Randal Gibson had black ancestry (?)

Luke Freet

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I personally not one obsessed with lineage and ancestry. I THINK I might have had an great great etc uncle who fought and died for the Union at Gettysburg, but I'm uncertain of it, and I have barely bothered looking deeply into that issue, since there's so many other things about the war that I find affecting.
But enough of me. On to the actual thing I'm supposed to talk about:
So, according to Randall Lee Gibson's wikipedia page (I know; wikipedia's a bad source), during the postbellum period, Gibson, former Confederate brigadier who commanded a demi-brigade of Louisianans that were sent into the deadly Hornet's Nest at Shiloh against his own better judgement, and later commander of the AoT's consolidated Louisiana Brigade, was accussed postwar of not being a pure white man. Here's the quote from wiki
"According to historian Daniel L. Sharfstein in The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White (2011), during these years a political opponent challenged Gibson's status as a white man, based on records. Gibson investigated but learned only that his ancestors were property owners, which was "enough to satisfy most of Gibson's contemporaries."[5]
"Such status," Sharfstein explains, "could not mean anything but whiteness. ... As much as racial purity mattered to white Southerners, they had to circle the wagons around Randall Gibson. If someone of his position could not be secure in his race, then no one was safe"."[5]
Sharfstein claims that Gibson's paternal line went back to freed African slaves in colonial Virginia.[5] "

I am doubtful on the validity of this claim, though will admit it'd make sense, seeing the racial makeup of New Orleans. Also, I discovered a similar story involving Moxley Sorrel: his father Francis was apparently born in Haiti before the revolution there to a mulatto mother and his french army father who hightailed out of the country to make for New Orleans. This detail was either covered up or unknown to Francis, and didnt come up until long after his and his son Moxely's deaths.

Does anyone know if these accounts are credible. Got the Sorrel story from the tour guide at the Sorrel house in Savannah.
 
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