Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Myth of the Black Confederate...

Yesterday, I had a chance to go to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI with my friend Christina (who has a really good blog too) to take a look at the Emancipation Proclamation while it was on a rare tour of the United States.

Undoubtedly the greatest executive order ever issued by a President of the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation marks a turning point in both the Civil War and in Black history. With it, the end of the Civil War was expedited by the freeing of millions of Confederate slaves of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation made abolition one of central goals of the war while outraging white Southerners who envisioned a race war.

Unfortunately, weren't able to stay for the entire SIX HOURS in line to see it. 

But I did get this nice replica Civil War Confederate States of America battlefield hat.



While buying the hat, my friend Christina strongly persuaded me to purchase the blue, Union hat which was worn by famous African American regiments in the North. I shot back to her, "No, there were Blacks who fought for the Confederacy. There had to be".

But were there?

When I initially purchased the hat, I didn't think of any political statements or implications being made by purchasing the Confederate battle hat during the Emancipation presentation during the year that we commemorate the sesquicentennial anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. What I was unaware of was how BIG of a historical debate the presence of idea of Black Confederate soldiers is in academia during this celebration and how contemporary forces and agendas are shaping this argument.

Books such as Dr. Erving Jordan's Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia
seek to examine the role African Americans have played in the Confederate army during the civil war and their little known contributions.  And while its undeniable that Blacks may have fought on the side of the Confederate army, what is up for debate are their numbers and their allegiances.

Dr. Jordan, a professor at the University of Virginia's primary research is on the lives of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, yet many critics of Dr. Jordan and other Black Confederates argue that the claims of Confederates in these works of research are vague and do not give ample amount of investigation into the lives of men and women who served in the Confederate army. Other criticisms by of Dr. Jordan's work by the academic and historical community argue that he provides little research into the development or ideologies behind a Black Confederate identity or what (besides being in bondage, of course) would persuade a Southern African American of the 1860s to join the Confederacy?

Confederate history advocates and heritage groups will argue that the numbers of African Americans fighting during the Civil War reached upwards of 100,000.  Because of terrible record keeping, records being destroyed and the fact that many of the African Americans who may have fought being designated as slaves/body servants and not as soldiers, there is no clear evidence to support the numbers and if they chose to fight for the principles of the Confederate Jefferson Davis and the rebel states.  Never was there an integrated Confederate army, nor was there ever platoons and regimen of Blacks like the Union soldiers of "Glory" . The Confederacy experienced a shortage of soldiers and debated up until the last three weeks of the Civil War if it should fully "recruit" and use Black soldiers. Instead, the Confederate army did not officially arm and induct these supposed Black soldiers. Yes, Blacks served within the Confederate army, but often as cooks, laborers, and servants of their rebel army masters.

In the late 1920s, African Americans who did fight in the Civil War as apart of the Confederate Army applied for payment of state government pensions because of their service. These people did exist in the Confederate army, whether as slaves/servants fighting for their masters in the south or as "patriots" as the Sons of the Confederacy would have you believe.  But these numbers reflect numbers in the hundreds and not of the 100,000 claim that groups such as Sons of the Confederacy would have you believe. Even singer Lionel Richie, on an episode of the NBC show "Who Do You Think You Are" discovered that his great great Grandfather fought for Tennessee and received a state government pension for his contributions.

There is another contemporary point as to why some will argue that Blacks willingly fought for the Confederacy: to argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery and that Blacks were okay with their condition as slaves. Both these notions may make some of our contemporaries feel good, but neither is historically accurate. Instead, they progress the notion of the benevolent slave master and a "racially united" country that clearly wasn't present during the Civil War.




Whether we know their exact contributions to the Confederate army, Black men and women played an equally important role in the changing of the Southern American landscape during the Civil War. Both free and enslaved black Southerners should be looked at as historical agents, who "occupied a myriad of different spaces that included their own unique set of challenges".  And while it may be hard to believe that large numbers of free Black men and women fought willingly for Confederate principles, their lives and their impact shouldn't be ignored either during the celebration of the Civil War.