re: I’ll take “things that are conveniently never discussed” for $200, Alex

quote:

---

Quit being stupid.

---

quote:

---

"It's completely false," Loewen said. "One reason we know it's false was that the Confederacy by policy flatly did not allow blacks to be soldiers until March of 1865."

The idea had been brought up before, University of Tennessee historian Stephen Ash wrote in 2006 in the journal Reviews in American History. In January of 1864, Confederate Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne proposed enlisting slaves. When Confederate President Jefferson Davis heard the suggestion, Ash wrote, he "not only rejected the idea but also ordered that the subject be dropped and never discussed again in the army."

About three weeks before the Civil War ended, however, a desperate Davis changed his tune. By that point, the war was lost and few, if any, blacks signed up.

White officers did bring their slaves to the front, where they were pressed into service doing laundry and cooking, Loewen said.

---

quote:

---

The Myth of the Black Confederates is a relatively new phenomenon, arising after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, Levine says. The notion of African Americans fighting in large numbers for the South was never suggested in the immediate aftermath of the war because white veterans would have been still alive to shoot down the idea. “White Confederate soldiers would have taken it as an insult to have served in the same army with the same status as a black soldier,” he says.

As evidence that black men fought heroically for the South, neo-Confederates today will sometimes dig up photos of black servants dressed in military uniforms. But according to Levine, “Some servants were dressed in military uniforms because that was the kind of clothing available in the army.” It didn’t mean they were real members of those army units, he says.

Levine says that when the Confederacy was on its last legs, in March of 1865, the Confederate congress did pass an eleventh-hour law by a razor-thin margin, allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers. But even that law freed no one.

“The Southern government invited masters to volunteer their slaves for the army, but first they would have to emancipate them because Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee knew that still-enslaved black men would certainly not fight for the South,” he says. “The overwhelming majority of masters declined that invitation.”

In the final weeks of the war, the South tried to recruit black soldiers in a handful of states, he says, “but nothing happened anywhere, except Richmond and Petersburg, where they apparently raised about 60 black soldiers in the Confederate army, who then saw virtually no action.”

In contrast, once black soldiers were accepted into the Union army in 1863, roughly 190,000 to 200,000 fought for the North. Even more telling, he adds, an estimated 80 percent of those soldiers were slaves and free blacks recruited by the Union army in slave states.

---

quote:

---

Some blacks fought for the South in the Civil War.

---

quote:

---

There are a few stories of black teamsters and laborers fighting, but they were not military.

---

quote:

---

I’ll take “things that are conveniently never discussed” for $200, Alex

---

quote:

---

Most slaves were sold to traders by Muslims

---