Heritage | Brothers in Arms: Did Blacks Serve in the Confederate Army?
 
By Cynthia Greenlee

 

Andrew and Silas Chandler, posing in their Confederate uniforms.

 I don't think black Confederates should be pushed back in the closet because they're inconvenient or make us uncomfortable.
--Associate Professor Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.

 When University of Virginia Associate Professor Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. does signings of his 1996 book, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, he's often greeted with incredulity and, he says, "little old women ask me, 'Does your mother know you're doing this?'" Others are less polite, calling him a "madman and quite insane" because Jordan belongs to a small circle of scholars who maintain that blacks supported and even fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He's also one of the few "dissidents" who are black.

As history buffs and Confederate heritage groups prepare for the 140th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, widely considered the first battle of the Civil War, a debate is brewing over whether blacks bore arms for the Confederacy. On the scholarly level, it's a battle of semantics -- who qualifies as a soldier, what constitutes support for the rebel cause -- and conflicting interpretations of historical evidence, such as pension records, muster rolls and diaries. Outside academia, the websites and obscure books push the debate along.

The notion of blacks defending an institution that enslaved their race is controversial both within and without the university. It's long been common knowledge that many African Americans fought on the Union side of the war -- a story made even more popular in the 1989 movie Glory, which depicted black soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. But until recently, little has been known about the Confederate side.

At a recent event, three scholars attempted to change that. A crowd of more than 100 people -- equal parts black and white -- gathered in the auditorium of the Library of Virginia in Richmond last month to hear a panel sponsored by the Museum of the Confederacy (MOC). Jordan joined Dr. Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., author of Louisiana's Free Men of Color in Gray, and Dr. Edward C. Smith, director of the Civil War Institute at American University, for an evening lecture convened to shed light on "the forgotten Confederates."

"This nonsense about the South being unanimously for secession is mumbo jumbo," said Dr. Smith, an African American historian who pioneered contemporary efforts to document blacks' involvement in the Civil War. It is equally mistaken, he added, to believe that no southern blacks supported it.

That support took many forms, said Jordan in his talk. Blacks served as teamsters, body servants, musicians, ditch-diggers and cooks for the troops. But the manual labor of African Americans for the Confederate side is not in dispute. What is in question is if and how many blacks served in the Confederate armies -- and if any did so, or could have done so, by choice.

Bergeron, who is white, says his historical research found that blacks not only served in the army, but that a tiny number of Louisiana's free men of color fought in white units.

"There were 2,000 blacks in the Louisiana militia, called the Native Guards," Bergeron said. "They wore gray uniforms and were sometimes not considered soldiers because they were in militias. But I was able to find and identify 15 black soldiers in white units. The fact that 15 soldiers were accepted by their [white] comrades as musket-toting soldiers is remarkable."

Getting into the numbers game is particularly dangerous. Some estimates range upward of 60,000 blacks thought to have served. But according to Smith, focusing on how many blacks defended ole' Dixie militarily misses the point.

"I have yet to read a desertion letter from a black soldier. Why did those people stay and contribute to what was eventually a lost cause? That's the larger question."

For many spectators, however, there was a more urgent question: Why would blacks essentially fight to preserve slavery and the status quo?

"I think they were there for the paycheck and to see a little bit of the world," said Jordan. According to Bergeron, free blacks in Louisiana were quoted in newspapers as saying they wanted to stand up for New Orleans and Louisiana. Smith attributes their participation partly to a long history of blacks fighting in American wars; some 5,000 fought in the Revolutionary War, and Andrew Jackson is believed to have said that black soldiers were among his finest men during the New Orleans campaign.

Many African Americans find it incomprehensible that their ancestors could have sided with the government of Jefferson Davis, fighting on the side that wanted, among other things, to preserve slavery (Confederate heritage groups tend to emphasize other goals of the southern side in the Civil War: states' rights over federal power, for example). Today, symbols of the Confederacy have been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups, making it even more difficult to imagine black soldiers in gray uniforms, fighting for the stars and bars.

"The bonds of intimacy are difficult to digest today," said Smith. "The Confederate flag is the American swastika, and the plantation the American Auschwitz." Still, he and others argue, at the time of the Civil War some African Americans in the South identified with their region, not their race. It's an assertion that makes these black scholars popular with lily-white neo-Confederate organizations, ammunition to bolster their claims that they and their forebears are and were not racists (much is made in Confederate heritage materials of the loyalty and devotion of "their" black soldiers, especially in the often-repeated story of Silas and Andrew Chandler, slave and owner, childhood friends who went to war together). Several members of such groups worked the crowd before the March 28 panel, trying to drum up support for a memorial to black Confederate soldiers.

If the majority of African Americans are skeptical, so are most scholars. Robert F. Durden, professor emeritus at Duke University, who also spoke at the MOC event, questions the scholarship behind the black Confederate theory. "There's no question that blacks served the Confederacy in many ways, mostly as noncombatants," Durden said. "I'm just dubious that significant numbers of African Americans fought in combat roles."

Others agree. James McPherson, a history professor at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal that the black Confederate movement is "pure fantasy," adding that while thousands of slaves served alongside the Confederate Army, official policy prevented their enlistment as soldiers until the war's final months.

Durden pointed to the debate over emancipation during the last year of the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis suggested that the Confederacy purchase slaves to help the army and eventually fight for it, with the promise of manumission, or freeing them, at war's end. Though there were no opinion polls at the time, scores of newspaper reports "screamed bloody murder," according to Durden, and the proposal was dismissed.

The question of sectarian identification among African Americans in the South has always been controversial, Durden says. When James H. Brewer, a professor at historically black North Carolina Central University, published his The Confederate Negro in 1969, Durden said, "he just about had to change the name of the book," though its subtitle explained it was about artisans and craftspeople.

Yet the recent flowering of black interest in the Civil War isn't unprecedented, says Durden. W.E.B Du Bois, himself the son of a member of the 54th Massachusetts, wrote about the war and its impact on race relations, as did others. "But the white majority," he said, "paid them no attention." These days, books about blacks in the Union army are proliferating (see Africana's recent conversation with Allen G. Ballard about Where I'm Bound, his fictional account of a black Union soldier's experience), but according to Smith, the black Confederate debate is still relatively new.

"Some historians don't ask certain questions and so they don't get certain answers," Smith said.

Now that those questions are being asked -- and producing controversial conclusions -- the scrutiny on the black Confederate scholars is intense. Jordan's assertion that blacks supported the Confederacy militarily, which he points out is just one of many topics covered in his book, has been disputed by critics who complain that such accounts rely heavily on anecdotal evidence.

But, says Jordan, "just because it's anecdotal doesn't mean it's not true." History is full of such contradictions, he told the Wall Street Journal, from Native Americans who served the US Army as Indian Scouts to blacks who served the Confederate cause. "I don't think black Confederates should be pushed back in the closet because they're inconvenient or make us uncomfortable."

Cynthia Greenlee is a North Carolina-based journalist.

First published: March 10, 2001

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