re: Name a little known fact about the Civil War

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A few thousand blacks did indeed fight for the Confederacy. Significantly, African-American scholars from Ervin Jordan and Joseph Reidy to Juliet Walker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor-in-chief of The Root, have stood outside this impasse, acknowledging that a few blacks, slave and free, supported the Confederacy.

How many supported it? No one knows precisely. But by drawing on these scholars and focusing on sources written or published during the war, I estimate that between 3,000 and 6,000 served as Confederate soldiers. Another 100,000 or so blacks, mostly slaves, supported the Confederacy as laborers, servants and teamsters. They built roads, batteries and fortifications; manned munitions factories—essentially did the Confederacy’s dirty work.

We know that blacks made up more than half the toilers at Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works and more than 75 percent of the workforce at Selma, Ala.’s naval ordnance plant

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they explode the myth that a slave wouldn’t fight on behalf of masters. Scholars recognize that throughout history, slave societies have armed slaves, at times with the promise of freedom. They also acknowledge that a small number of African Americans were slave owners (about 3,700, according to Loren Schweninger).

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African Americans were the first to publicize the presence of black Confederates. Frederick Douglass bemoaned the Confederate victory of First Manassas in July 1861 by noting in the August 1861 issue of his newspaper, Douglass’ Monthly, that “among rebels were black troops, no doubt pressed into service by their tyrant masters.”

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Douglass repeatedly drew attention to black Confederates in order to press his cause. “It is now pretty well established that there are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets,” he wrote in July 1861.

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What were Douglass’ sources in identifying black Confederates? One came from a Virginia fugitive who escaped to Boston shortly before the Battle of First Manassas in Virginia that summer. He saw “one regiment of 700 black men from Georgia, 1000 [men] from South Carolina, and about 1000 [men with him from] Virginia, destined for Manassas when he ran away.”

For historians these are shocking figures. But another eyewitness also observed three regiments of blacks fighting for the Confederacy at Manassas. William Henry Johnson, a free black from Connecticut, ignored the Lincoln administration’s refusal to enlist black troops and fought as an independent soldier with the 8th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. He also wrote for the Pine and Palm, a black paper, and blamed the Union loss at Manassas partly on black Confederates: “We were defeated, routed and driven from the field. … It was not alone the white man’s victory, for it was won by slaves. Yes, the Confederates had three regiments of blacks in the field, and they maneuvered like veterans, and beat the Union men back. This is not guessing, but it is a fact.”

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The Confederate Navy's CSS Shenandoah circumnavigated the world.

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Also more soldiers died of diarrhea than died in battle.

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