How about “supporters of this monument have provided zero historical documentation of even a single black soldier who fought willingly for the Confederacy in South Carolina.”
If you’re going to build a memorial, it seems like the onus is on you to provide evidence that the person being so honored actually existed.
(ETA: not to mention that they did something worthy of remembrance.)
I have a lot of friends. None of them are assholes.
What Douglas talked about in his paper, when I read it, was vastly “we made our camp slaves fight for us”, which doesn’t exactly make them soldiers in the normal sense, drawing no salary from the south, etc. He did mention a small number of free black men who signed up, but there’s no mention of ones specifically from South Carolina and it seems that they largely changed sides or dropped out as soon as it was possible to do so.
Happy birthday, by the way 
*sighs
Given that there have always been self-hating members of every caste and manufactured social construct, it is likely that there were indeed some Black Confederates in existence.
Just as there were Black overseers during slavery and Jewish kappos during the holocaust, that probability does nothing to negate the terrible reality of our nation’s shameful history.
That some of the supporters of the Confederacy were probably people of color is not the issue at hand here.
Furthermore, the motivation that any such participants may have had for supporting the South in the civil war is also not the issue at hand; self interest and the high likelihood of Stockholm Syndrome aside.
The issue here is the dubious desire to officially ‘honor’ any faction of the Confederacy; let alone one that is, at best, an insignificant minority in the overall scheme of things.
Long story short; this seems like a piss poor attempt to placate the citizens who take issue with unamerican monuments (which were erected long after the war, with the specific intent of intimidation and revisionism) by offering an insulting dose of tokenism.
It’s a non-solution to a problem that such GOP officials in SC don’t seem to want to resolve…
Imagine if someone proposed building a monument to the kapos who worked for the Nazis.
In this current ‘bizarro-world’ reality we seem to be living in?
Like Wednesday Addams once said:
True. At the moment there are plenty of Jewish apologists for the casual anti-Semite president* and his less-than-casual anti-Semite supporters because of his decision on Jerusalem (which was more about pandering to American Xtianists than about doing anything for the Jews).
It may seem that way to you, but i think the point that needs to be made is no African American troops fought in South Carolina’s regiments given the evidence of a total of three post-war pensions given to black people, two for cook/servant, none for armed service; and the fact that, during the war, South Carolina prehibited free African Americans from carrying weapons.
“In all my years of research, I can say I have seen no documentation of black South Carolina soldiers fighting for the Confederacy. In fact, when secession came, the state turned down free (blacks) who wanted to volunteer because they didn’t want armed persons of color,” said Edgar, who spent 32 years as director of the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies and is author of “South Carolina: A History.”
From:
Perhaps we shouldn’t erect a statue to a traitor for merely proposing that they shouldn’t let their racism lead to their execution for said treason (while we didn’t decide to kill the traitors it was still on the table at that point).
The only source of that photo comes from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in a book they published about black confederates which on the pages before (falsely) claims hundreds of pension applications and that these records included “touching references to the devotion many servants had to their masters.” I would be far more suspicious of the work of this guy than of the historians that are saying there is zero evidence of free black South Carolina soldiers.
As the article @Dioptase1 posted says:
They are reacting to a growing chorus of “neo-Confederates,” who assert that tens of thousands of blacks loyally fought as soldiers for the Confederacy and that hundreds of thousands more supported it. Neo-Confederates acknowledge that the Confederacy legally prohibited slaves from fighting as soldiers until the last month of the war. But they argue that 10 percent of the Confederate states’ 250,000 free blacks enlisted as soldiers, and that thousands of loyal slaves fought alongside their masters even though the Confederacy prohibited it. They do this, as the Civil War scholar James McPherson noted, “as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”
Neo-confederates, like those who provided the source of your footnote to that photo. Where there black confederates? Yeah probably, but the number is estimated at less than 1% of the African-Americans in the confederacy that white southerners continue to use as their token black friend to prove the Civil War wasn’t based in the racist slave trade.
Gets onto “Black Confederates” at 10:20.
And for the nitpickers…
I agree that the motivation of the SC legislators is very suspect.
My only point was that to answer that with the claim that “zero” Black Americans served is also a falsehood. It would be very interesting to find interviews with those men about their motivations for serving, and their experiences during the war. For evidence of Blacks serving, one source is Military pensions paid to those Men, which can be found in the national archives.
Interesting that mine is the only comment you chose to even partially address; conveniently ignoring the main point, as well as the various rebuttals from other people.
F this southern white bullshit. I hate it.
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I am currently traveling. I am not ignoring anyone, just busy and distracted.
The “Black Confederate” pension claims that I have cross checked with State or National archives have so far proved accurate. I don’t know about the “touching references of devotion”, but the South Carolina archives publish images of 330 Confederate pension applications. I am not disagreeing about the reasons for the war, or that large numbers of African Americans willingly served. I am not supporting whatever cause or motivations that the subjects of the article stand for. I am disagreeing with the dogmatic statement that no Blacks willingly served in the CSA. To begin with, it is a negative which is always hard to prove. I love history. Both of my parents were historians. I find it discouraging when we allow modern politics to affect our study of historical events. How “neo-Confederates” will react to the information should not be a factor.
Here is some reasoning for why it is hard to say that no Free Blacks willingly served in the CSA in South Carolina: If we are looking at pension records, South Carolina did not begin recording those pensions until 1923. That puts an applicant who was 17 at enlistment in 1861 at 62 years of age when the application was recorded. So that eliminates not only combat deaths, but deaths from wounds or even old age, at a time when life expectancy for Black Males in the US was 46. In 1923, there were 330 South Carolina African American CSA pension applications. A small number, but not zero. If we can assume that statistics from South Carolina are somewhat analogous to those of Mississippi, there is more data. Mississippi started recording pension data for Black veterans in 1888. 1,739 of approximately 36,000 pension applications were from African Americans, or 4%. That of course again excludes those who died during the war or from wounds soon after. And it does not explore how many served willingly. The Vietnam and WW2 monuments do not have special sections for those who did not volunteer, nor do they exclude service members who died while serving as cooks or laborers. Doris Miller served as a messman in a segregated US Navy, received no weapons training, and was prohibited from touching weapons. And won the Navy Cross.
“One famous African American Confederate is Private Henry Brown of Darlington, South Carolina, who volunteered to serve in the army. Today, a 15-foot monument stands in his memory. Born in Camden, Brown joined Captain W. H. Evans’s 8th South Carolina Infantry and later served with Captain S. H. Wild in the 21st Regiment. He served as a drummer with the Darlington Guards and is buried in Darlington’s Brockington Heights neighborhood.”
-Daniel Brock, “Pensions for African Americans who Served or Fought for the Confederate States of America” Journal of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2012.
Mr. Brown’s pay voucher-
Tom Arch, served as a private ( not a servant, cook, musician, or teamster) in Company H, Rions Battalion, CSA from 1862 to 1865. I don’t know why Mr. Arch enlisted, or whether he faced enemy fire. It would be pretty arrogant for anyone to claim to definitive knowledge of answers to those questions without more solid information.
