re: What obscure piece of Louisiana history do you know?

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There was a girl in Jonesville during the 30's who had telekinesis powers

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I think his statement was a fair one.

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You would.

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One of the more interesting questions related to blacks serving in the American Civil War is this, did blacks (free or slave) serve in combat roles in the Confederate Army? Unquestionably the historical evidence is strong that some blacks – perhaps several thousand – did serve in the Confederate Army in unofficial, non-combat roles as servants, laborers, teamster, musician, cooks, etc. But the official record is very unsupportive that thousands of blacks served as official soldiers in the ranks of the Southern soldiers’ rosters.

LINK we use the word official we mean that a black soldier would have been documented through the same paperwork process as a white man would have in terms of enlisting, mustering in or out, and perhaps applying for pension benefits after the war. It is this logistical paperwork process that leaves a trail for historians to study and interpret.

But how strong is the primary historical evidence – letters, diaries, first-hand accounts, military records, etc., – that blacks served in combat roles for the South? It is an important question.

Besides the fact that it is important to preserve accurate history it is also important to “get it right” when it comes to knowing who fought in the Civil War so that these individuals can be properly honored and their place in history duly noted. Some who favor a Southern perspective on the war, particularly defending the proposition that the South did not fight to preserve or defend slavery, have argued that thousands of slaves fought on behalf of the South thereby proving that they were generally supportive of the Southern way of life.

Some people have suggested that as many as 30,000 blacks took on the uniform and actually fought for the South, but does the historical record support that amount? What exactly does the historical record provide us with any kind of confidence to be able to answer this question?

In short, if one sticks solely to the historical record for primary evidence of the black soldier picking up arms and fighting for the South, one can only conclude that the support for such a claim is scanty at best – merely anecdoctal – and entirely unsubstantiated at worst. Instead of the widely claimed and purported number of 30,000 fighting black soldiers for the Confederacy, an honest look at the historical record leads one to the conclusion that as little as under a hundred to as many as several hundred blacks may have actually engaged in combat for the South during the Civil War by actually carrying and discharging a weapon. How to interpret that evidence – or lack thereof – is left to the professional and armchair historians to debate.

It is widely accepted by historians that perhaps as many as 200,000 blacks served in the Union Army. That is a sizable number when one realizes that only 750,000 to 900,000 men even fought for the South during the entire Civil War. According to historian and Professor James I. Robertson, Jr., “Approximately 180,000 blacks served as Federal soldiers. This figure represents 9 percent of the North’s fighting force. One-third of the blacks (68,178) died in the service, with sickness causing thirty times more deaths than battle.” Soldiers Blue and Gray: p. 35.

For the Union side at least, the historical record is fairly definitive and clear: we know that about 9-12% of the Union Army was filled by black troops, depending on if one goes with the figure of 180,000 or 200,000 black Union troops serving. Black Union soldiers participated in at least 41 major battles and roughly 450 smaller actions. 37,000 black Union soldiers died in the Civil War. Though early black troops were not aggressively deployed as bearers of arms, it is the case that by the middle of the war, at least, more and more black Union troops were entrusted to carry arms and to perform in combat action.
CWG has discovered that historians and staff – notably Robert Krick – at Spotsylvania National Battlefield Park have sifted through about 100,000 soldiers’ records to see how many non-whites were represented. Non-whites could be blacks, Native Americans, and mulattoes. They found that only 20-30 non-whites were found out of 100,000 soldiers’ records. That is less than 1/300th of one percent. Taking into account that the following estimate involves more conjecture than a good historian would be comfortable with applying to acceptable methods of reliable historical inquiry, one can still get a fairly solid “finger in the air” estimate that if that same ratio of 1/300th was applied to the figure-range of 750,000 – 900,000 Confederates serving during the war from 1861-1865, then one could only reasonably conclude that, at best, between 250-300 black soldiers may have served in the Confederate Army, and of those an even much smaller percentage would have been entrusted to take up arms.

This might seem surprising but a leading Civil War historian, Professor James McPherson, who won a Pulitzer prize for a Civil War book he wrote, has gone on record to say that of the more than 25,000 soldiers’ letters he has personally read over the years, he has only found evidence that perhaps 6-12 black Confederate soldiers were even mentioned.

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3 german POWs held in a scamp in La escaped and were never found...

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Gärtner was never caught by the authorities, but came forward 40 years later in 1985, "surrendering" to Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show. He effectively became the last World War II German prisoner of war in America.

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