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More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.
Contains correspondence, military records, and reminiscences from brave men who served what they considered their country.
A study of the role of Afro-Virginians in the Civil War.
Little has been written about the military role of African Americans in military campaigns of the United States despite the fact that men and women of color were involved in all national conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War. Indeed, the thought of black men and women serving the Confederacy during the Civil War is difficult for some to believe because it appears to be a paradox. Yet the surviving narratives, writings of Civil War veterans and their family members, county histories, newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and recorded tributes to black Confederates, offer heartfelt sentiments and historical information that cannot be ignored--and demonstrate that they did serve the Confederacy as soldiers, bodyguards, sailors, construction workers, cooks, and teamsters. Since his 1995 publication of Forgotten Confederates: An Anthology about Black Southerners, author Charles Kelly Barrow has continued to collect source material for this second volume. Subscribers of Confederate Veteran magazine responded to Barrow's classified ads, and excerpts from other publications such as the Journal of Negro History (Vol. IV, July 1919) and Smithsonian Magazine (March 1979) are included here. One excerpt includes the surprising testimony by black Confederate Eddie Brown Page III for the U.S. District Court that helped determine if the Confederate battle emblem should be removed from the Georgia state flag. After Sergeant Page's testimony, the case was later dismissed. Full of surprising anecdotes, eloquent statements, tragic testaments, and admirable accounts of those blacks who fought for and with the South, this collection deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in the Civil War's lesser known aspects.
Levine sheds light on such hot-button topics as what the Confederacy was fighting for, whether black southerners were willing to fight in large numbers in defense of the South, and what this episode foretold about life and politics in the post-war South.
That the Confederacy in its waning days frantically turned to the idea of arming slaves has long been known by all close students of the Civil War. Yet the more explosive, if unexamined, issue before the southern people and leaders in this last great crisis was whether or not the South itself should initiate a program of emancipation as part of a plan to recruit black soldiers. Jefferson Davis and other leaders, including Robert E. Lee, attempted to force the South to face the desperate alternative of sacrificing one of its war aims—the preservation of slavery—in order to achieve the other—an independent southern nation. In The Gray and the Black, Robert F. Durden reconstructs this intensely passionate debate that cuts to the heart of what the war was about for the South. Throughout his narrative, Durden lets the participants speak for themselves—in journal extracts, newspaper articles, letters, and speeches. These documents and Durden’s perceptive commentary demonstrate with sad finality that, when faced with this ultimate choice, southerners, with certain fascinating exceptions, could not bring themselves to abandon the “peculiar institution.”
When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states' rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation's support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.
The battle of the Crater is known as one of the Civil War's bloodiest struggles -- a Union loss with combined casualties of 5,000, many of whom were members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) under Union Brigadier General Edward Ferrero. The battle was a violent clash of forces as Confederate soldiers fought for the first time against African American soldiers. After the Union lost the battle, these black soldiers were captured and subject both to extensive abuse and the threat of being returned to slavery in the South. Yet, despite their heroism and sacrifice, these men are often overlooked in public memory of the war. In Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War is Murder, Kevin M. Levin addresses the shared recollection of a battle that epitomizes the way Americans have chosen to remember, or in many cases forget, the presence of the USCT. The volume analyzes how the racial component of the war's history was portrayed at various points during the 140 years following its conclusion, illuminating the social changes and challenges experienced by the nation as a whole. Remembering The Battle of the Crater gives the members of the USCT a newfound voice in history.
The first serious scholarship on a forgotten Civil War issue. Eleven essays detail the experiences of black servants and soldiers in the Conferderate Army. One reviewer called it an important contribution to the study of race in war.
In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these flag wars reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.