David Hamilton Golland

Historian James R. Grossman recently posted this blog entry on a current elementary or secondary school textbook in use in the state of Virginia.

Obviously the historical profession needs to work harder to ensure that children at all levels are assigned quality history textbooks, and another problem is the ability of partisans of historical "pseudofacts" to use the internet to spread false messages about the past. But as an internet user and sometime blogger, I'd prefer to meet the challenge head-on. So here's my rebuttal to the notion that there may have been as many as 65,000 African-Americans in the Confederate Army:

Certainly we can dismiss out of hand the notion that black soldiers served under General Stonewall Jackson, who died in May of 1863, nearly two years before the Confederate government authorized the recruiting of black troops. Further, the fact that blacks were not allowed to serve in the Confederate Army until weeks before the end of the war creates a logistical problem with the veracity of the statement. Could the ragtag remnants of the Confederate government and army even have mustered in (let alone trained) 65,000 volunteers of any color in that short time span? And if they did, wouldn't they have been able to win a few battles and prolong the war into at least the early summer of 1865? With 65,000 fresh recruits, why would General Lee have surrendered when he did?

So clearly we're not talking about actual soldiers, legally recruited and trained. What then are we talking about? Assuming that this figure of 65,000 was not made out of whole cloth, is there any other way to arrive at it?

If we include, in addition to the handful of actual black soldiers that did enlist to fight for the south during the Confederacy's final days, the blacks (most, if not all of whom, presumably, were slaves) who served support functions for southern white soldiers and officers during the war, perhaps we could get to that figure, but I doubt it. But what if we counted all the slaves owned by confederate army officers? If we consider these human beings as personal property, as slave-owners certainly did (and modern Confederate apologists certainly still do), then being owned by a soldier in the Confederate army would make them "part" of the army in the manner in which a soldier's canteen is "part" of the army. These people may never have seen a battlefield; many of them may have even abandoned their owners after hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation; nevertheless, Confederate apologists might still consider them somehow part of the army, and when added together, they might meet or even exceed the figure of 65,000.

But this seems to me the very definition of comparing apples with oranges. Even if 65,000 slaves were coerced (with offers of freedom or more direct modes of coercion) into the Confederate ranks, how does that compare to the 180,000 former slaves and free blacks who willingly and eagerly fought for their freedom on the Union side?

Look, some black southerners served in the Confederate army in the final days of the Civil War. OK. And there's a nut down in Ashville, North Carolina, a black man who marches to the town square every morning in full Confederate regalia. But it just isn't important enough to record beyond a footnote--certainly in comparison to the service of black soldiers in the Union army. The attempt to inflate the figure is an attempt to make black Confederate soldiers more relevant than they were--and thereby justify the false claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.

What do you think?