- Joined
- Jan 12, 2016
- Location
- South Carolina
There is a lot of modern political discussion in this column which cannot be discussed here, but there are portions of it that can and should be. I interact with the author Wanjiru Njoya on X and she's really been diving into this subject recently and pointing out a lot of the flaws in how this history is presented and viewed today, including some discussion on the semantics used to discount black Southern army service of any sort.
mises.org
Erasing Black Confederates | Mises Institute
One of contentious parts of the history of the American Civil War is the question of whether southern blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate army. While
Those who seek to erase black Confederates from the historical record argue that black confederates may have appeared to everyone at the time to be soldiers, but in truth they were not real soldiers. The concept of black Confederates is said to be a myth, unworthy of inclusion in any history of the American South. For example, the American Battlefield Trust states that "black soldiers made up 10 percent of the Union Army," but adds that there were no black Confederates: "There were no black Confederate combat units in service during the war and no documentation whatsoever exists for any black man being paid or pensioned as a Confederate soldier."
By "no documentation whatsoever" they do not mean that there are no war records of Confederate soldiers—their argument is that the black men documented by the Confederate armies as soldiers were not "real" or "true" or "actual" soldiers despite being depicted as such. For example, Charley Benger, who played the fife for Georgia's Macon Volunteers, is documented as a soldier discharged with honor and, subsequently, in receipt of an army pension, but the Trust would argue that playing the fife in the Confederate army does not count as being an actual Confederate soldier.
The Trust further notes that "there are a total of seven Union eyewitness reports of black Confederates. Three of these reports mention black men shooting at Union soldiers, one report mentions capturing a handful of armed black men along with some soldiers." The Trust then states that, "There is no record of Union soldiers encountering an all-black line of battle or anything close to it." In the absence of an "all-black line of battle," they conclude the armed black men in the Confederate armies who were shooting at Union soldiers do not count as real soldiers, despite all appearances and despite being described in press reports of the time as soldiers. By contrast, the Union, which conveniently segregated white and black troops, exhibits the requisite all-black lines and thus meets the standard set by the Trust for blacks to count as real soldiers.
----------------
In his book Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in the Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan Jr. argues that the history of African Americans ought not to be told simply as a history of oppression and victimhood. In recounting the stories of black Confederates, he accordingly "depicts African-Americans as human beings who were an integral component of Confederate Virginia" and indeed, by extrapolation, of the Confederate States. Jordan examines the motivations, expressed in their own words, of slaves and free black men who stood with slave owners in this war. He tells their stories in order "to show African-Americans as human beings who took an active part in Confederate Virginia." He depicts all black men—"slave and free, homefront and battlefield, Confederate and Union"—as human beings with agency. He observes that black men were regarded as "indispensable" to the Confederate war effort:
-----------------
Hence, part of the debate about the existence of black Confederates has been framed as a debate about what counts as a soldier. If a black man wears the grey, bears arms with the grey, and fights with the grey, is he a soldier? The American Civil War Museum observes that,
They argue that they may have marched with the grey, and fired guns for the grey, but they were still just slaves or menial servants and should not be described as soldiers.
To those who see slaves as nonetheless human, it is not difficult to understand them as men and as much "soldiers" (in the ordinary non-technical sense) as their white comrades. The fact that the law created the status of a man as a chattel has no bearing on the substantive issue of whether he may nevertheless rightly and justly be regarded by his own commander and his own comrades as a soldier. The abolitionist slogan was, "Am I not a man and a brother?" not, "Will I become a man and a brother upon my official emancipation?" The abolitionists understood that slaves are human beings, regardless of what legal status might be accorded to them by the prevailing law.
Viktor Frankl inspired many people with his testament to the human spirit in conditions of oppression or captivity, famously stating that, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." This is a truth that applies to all human beings, slave or free. Many fail to distinguish between liberty in the sense of ability to do anything they please—a liberty denied to slaves—and liberty in the sense Frankl describes, namely, the human ability to choose one's own way.
Bringing the