We are not disputing the claim that there were some black people in the service of the Confederacy. The claim is that there is no documented evidence of black Confederate combatants from South Carolina. As your own citation notes, Private Henry Brown was a drummer and not an armed soldier. There is no evidence in your second citation that Private Tom Arch was allowed to carry a weapon either.
I concede it is possible there were a small number of armed black soldiers fighting for the Confederacy whose names or deeds have been lost to history, but we don’t usually build monuments to hypothetical people. Particularly when those hypothetical people would have been fighting for a fundamentally evil cause.
So, when discussing a proposed monument to “South Carolina African-American Confederate Veterans”
The rebuttals are that there were “Zero Black Confederate combatants”, or the discussion turns to whether any of them enlisted willingly, whether they carried rifles, or other goalpost-moving arguments. There were some (>0) free Black South Carolinians who volunteered for, and served in the Confederate Military. I provided one fairly well documented example, including his CSA pay stub, which slaves do not often receive. (Prior to the war, he was a landowner and brick mason.) There are also extant photographs of him, articles that appeared during his lifetime and upon his death. His gravesite is well marked, and a state historical marker in his hometown documents his service in three wars. Here is a quote about him by Confederate Gen. W.E. James- “…He was beating all the time regardless of the danger … He followed on to the battlefield and was under fire with the others.” Records indicate that he was at Bull Run and Manassas. Drummers were an important form of battlefield communication then. It was not about music, it was about critical communication.
So, I think it is sufficient rebuttal to the statement of “zero” to provide even one. If I opine that Bigfoot is a complete fiction, your providing one solid example is enough of a rebuttal to prove me wrong.
As a matter of opinion, I agree that the monument idea is misguided. Also that Black confederates were the exception rather than the rule.
I direct your attention to the following passage from the bill in question:
While there is representation of those African Americans from South Carolina who took up arms for the Union, there is nothing to show the contributions, sacrifices and honor of their Confederate counterparts
So in their own words the Republicans who authored this bill wanted a monument to honor the supposed counterparts of African Americans who “took up arms” for the union. I fail to see how it’s moving the goalposts to point out the total lack of evidence for the existence of said counterparts.
This monument was never about anything other than creating a piece of slavery-apologist propaganda.
Thank you for the posts you’ve provided here. They deserve all the “likes” people wasted on petty ad hominem, and more; I, at least, learned something surprising.
“Reality is what exists even when it’s not part of someone’s dogma.”
But the dogma here is that there were eager black soldiers in the confederacy, happy to defend slavery, when that’s far from the truth. The statues are in the cause of white supremacy and white washing the truth about slavery. It’s not dogma to say that, it’s historical truth to say that.
Reading this thread, I got the impression that some folks firmly believe literally zero Black Confederate soldiers existed. (This was not controversial or unbelievable to me, but I’ve never researched it.) I also learned that some Confederate apologists and miseducated Southerners believe there were a great many Black Confederate soldiers (quite a bit less believable and clearly controversial). Both these viewpoints were represented dogmatically.
@ArchStanton, on the other claw, discussed the matter as something that can be researched and understood outside of dogmas, showing that one can have strong political and philosophical beliefs without any need to rewrite history to suit them. I simply appreciated that, y’know?
Maybe read it again, because when pressed on that point, none of us said that. We said that there were none who served in combat roles and that there were very few who served as freedmen, and they often took the first opportunity to leave.
Really? So, arguing that black men rarely served, and for the vast majority of those that did left when they could is the same as saying that slaves supported their own enslavement in rather striking numbers (which the lost cause mythology would have us believe)? One side is backed up by historical fact while the other is a mythology designed to maintain white supremacy.
Tone matters more than facts here? The “rewriting” of history is sometimes necessary when the past being remembered is full of lies.
Thank you. The starting point of this discussion was that the proposed monument to mythical black combatants for the Confederacy is based on a pedestal of toxic dogma. Bringing in the documented fact that a tiny number of African-Americans willingly served in the CSA army’s supply train has certainly served as an effective distraction from that point, though.
Now then, what about that monument at Auschwitz to the heroic Jewish kapos? I have documented evidence that such individuals existed, and in greater numbers than the zealous South Carolina combat veterans of the Confederacy. If Jews were participants in the Final Solution, how anti-Semitic could it have really been?
If you don’t see dogma in this thread (and in the event that inspired it) then p’raps we use the word differently.
One person here offered evidence that I can independently verify, supporting the idea that neither of the extreme viewpoints is correct (instead supporting the marvelous idea that people in Civil War times were actual real individual human beings and not political cartoons).
Other people were snide and dismissive and attacked individuals rather than refuting their ideas, giving little evidence or making logically invalid implications that lack of evidence is positive proof.
Obviously the majority of posts and people in this thread aren’t described by either of the two preceding paragraphs. I have no desire to go back and rate them all.
I don’t understand your beef with my post, frankly. I thought I was thanking someone for being on the side of teaching real history, even when the commentariat was arrayed in opposition.
This is just a disgusting act on part of the state representative. It doesn’t matter in my mind that there were hundreds or thousands of black Confederate soldiers (which obviously the analysis seems to be saying there were none or not enough to even be recorded by then contemporary historians) since the whole mission of the Confederacy was slavery. Any memorial to its soldiers is an attempt to valorize the Confederacy in its mission to protect slavery, plain and simple.
I hereby declare that anyone who steps in to point out that Actually, the whole mission was profit, which was actually based on slavery will be immediately suspected of trying to derail this thread.
We are speaking about the service of individual soldiers, not the overall goals of secession. If course the catalyst of the war was the issue of slavery. But individual soldiers are motivated to fight for many different reasons. The Confederate military was not like the Allgemeine SS, where ideological purity was a condition of enlistment. Certainly there were many who opposed slavery who volunteered to fight for the South, and no doubt racists and even slaveholders who fought for the North. Ridiculously, the 20 Slave Rule exempted many of those who benefited most from slavery from having to fight.
The motivations of both US and CS soldiers are explored in depth in Linderman’s Embattled Courage, the Experience of Combat in the Civil Warhttps://www.amazon.com/Embattled-Courage-Experience-Combat-American/dp/0029197619.
Confederate General P. L. Cleburn wrote in 1864- “It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”
As my last comment on this subject, I present “John Brown’s Blessing”, painted by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Born a Slave Owner, he adopted abolitionist views, but nevertheless volunteered to fight for the Confederacy when war broke out.
the problem with that, is that it’s almost irrelevant to the overall cause of the war, becuase individual soldiers did not cause the war, confederate leaders did that. Don’t forget that there were drafts on in both armies.
And I also think that depending on the words of the individual leaders involved also misses the larger point - because in part public statements are often propaganda, and that individual leaders might not have agreed with what others argued. You have to contrast that with the actions of the confederacy as a whole, the dominance of the south in the congress prior to the civil war, and their actually actions - they are defending the right of white southerners to own people and profit off that ownership - there is no doubt about that among historians of the civil war. The south did not believe in freedom for all, but they believed in an aristocracy of white elites. Their actions prior to, during, and after the war tell us this.
At first I read this, and I thought you meant John Brown was born a slave owner and fought for the confederacy, and I was like “WHAT?!?” and then I realized you meant the painter, not Brown! LOL!
Again, the actions of individuals are less important in understanding the motivations of the confederacy overall. Plus, his anti-slavery paintings were started in 1865, meaning that something changed in his views during the war.
I think you’re also missing the idea that sometime like a war changes people - because it was an incredibly violent and chaotic event, and the narratives of the leaders changed, in part due to the response of the rest of the country. It’s likely that Noble had not issues with slavery prior to the war, and the war itself changed his mind. You can actually see how people’s views change during the course of the war. Chandra Manning covers the common man on both sides quite nicely in her book What This Cruel War Was Over:
The narrative went from most soldiers not thinking the war was about slavery to at the end of the war, expressing their belief that ultimately the war WAS about slavery.
