South Carolina GOP reps propose monument to the zero black Confederate combatants who served in the Civil War

If I’ve pegged their target audience correctly… they won’t have to think of another way.

:grimacing:

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these lawmakers have the deepest respect for and attachment to a history they clearly never studied.

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The Tomb of the Implausible Soldier

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I’m sure that happened. Like slavery, the way indentured servants were treated varied greatly, though indentured servants at least had laws on how they were supposed to be treated. And, unlike chattel slavery, it ended at some point.

The bill would also require public schools to teach the contributions of black people toward the Confederate cause.

Oh that’s easy:

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As others have pointed out, there were indentured servants as well. The main difference, IIRC, is that slaves were property where IS’s were not - so you could freely beat, torture, rape, and kill a slave (property are not people), but could get in trouble for doing so to an IS, as that was still a person under the law.

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I was clearly not around during the Civil War, but Fredrick Douglass was. According to him:
“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, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may to destroy the Federal Government and build up that of the traitors and rebels. There were such soldiers at Manassas, and they are probably there still.” F.D. 1861

sarter
Joe Sarter, Holding the sword of his father, Alec Sarter,( Union City, S.C.) a Confederate sentry.

The source article and proposed bill refer to Black Veterans. There were not zero Black veterans of the Confederacy in South Carolina. few, perhaps.

Here is another: George Bird of Sanderson S.C. was a free Black man who enlisted as a cook in the 12th S.C. volunteers. He served from 1861 until 1865, and received a veteran’s pension.

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Plus if a master knocked up an indentured servant, he didn’t get to keep the baby as his property like a chattel slave.

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FROM, comrade, from. Let us not Moose the goalposts.

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If there were any black South Carolinians who took up arms on behalf of the Confederacy then there certainly hasn’t been a lot of historical documentation for them. All the black Confederate pensioners on record from South Carolina appear to have served as attendants and cooks.

Do you have a source for the claim about Alec Sarter serving as an armed sentry? Google doesn’t seem to turn up much.

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One of my university professors has made a career of researching the issue, and so far he’s come up with nothing. The Civil War was incredibly well documented. If it had actually happened, we’d have actual records, not surmises.

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Its a fair bit more complicated than that. The easy line on indenture is that it was voluntary, and servitude lasted until some debt was paid or term of service expired. Usually in terms of America (as in the Americas not the US) it was supposedly the cost to immigrate here.

In practice (at least under the English) it was often involuntary. Imposed as a punishment for some crime (especially debt, sometime political). There were many ways the term/debt could be extended. Or ignored. Its generally regarded as a form of slavery. And bears a very close resemblance to what we refer to as human trafficking today (which is often also technically a form of slavery).

But its not a form of chattel slavery. It was not hereditary. It was possible to buy out or finish the term. There were clear limits on treatment, legal recourse for the indentured. Some of which could be used to vacate the contract/sentence.

It seems to have crossed over a bit with then been replaced by Transportation. Which was sort of a combo of exile and penal servitude. You couldn’t buy yourself out of that. But simply running away seems to have been a popular approach.

Indenture wasn’t much of a thing in the US after the revolution. And by the civil war anywhere but maybe Australia, in the form of Transportation.

Which is why.

Probably means Free Blacks serving penal sentences and POWs.

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Holy fucking fuck.

“We are all learning a lot,” Chumley said. “The purpose of the bill is education.”

Okay, but that is a good one.

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That sounds like a distinction without a difference for sure. I mean in contemporary society there are convenience store managers forcing their employees to have sex with them. I can’t imagine many indentured servants would find themselves in a position to say “no” (and even if they did, “no” didn’t start meaning “no” until, the 1980s (or was it the 1990s?)).

Though your later point about not owning their children would be a meaningful (though obviously gag-inducing) distinction.

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but here is an article linked by dioptase1 written by a harvard professor of african-american studies citing eyewitness-accounts that there was a number of black confederates greater than zero. i don’t see a refutation, just denial. can’t modern confederate apologists be right about that and still be stupid?

“If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

  • Confederate general Howell Cobb

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I don’t get why he spends so much space on the numbers of African-American who worked in logistic roles or production. Unless those can be shown to have been free Americans, working on their own will for wage, it’s meaningless drivel. I might as well count the forced laborers working on farms and factories in defense of my country. “See, there were Jews and Poles working for the German Reich’s war effort!“

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That got me too! If you want to learn about the confederacy, do a book report, make a zine, don’t try to pass a racist f-ing law. What an ass.

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There were no African American soldiers in the confederacy. There were lots of African American soldiers in the confederacy.

Either way, this monument idea is obscene. This is how they want to address racial injustice? By saying, “No, it’s cool. Some of them fought on our side”?!

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But that’s how they think, in their bizarro version of reality; and when reality slaps them for it, they get sullen and blame their perennial bogeymen, the libruls.

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