I have read a number of musings and proposals by Confederates to enlist Black men into the Confederate army. The most famous is General Pat Cleburne’s January, 1864 proposal, but he was not the only Confederate with Black soldiers on his mind. Whenever I read the reasoning that these Confederates use in reaching their conclusion that Black men should be enlisted, one thing they have in common is that none that I have read claim that Blacks are already serving in the Confederate armies. The modern Lost Cause advocate might cling to the idea that there were Black Confederates, a myth invented in the 1970s, but the 1860s Confederates had never heard of them.
I was recently reading the papers of Confederate officer Randolph Abbott Shotwell. Shotwell was captured by Union forces in 1864 in Virginia and placed in the custody of the 27th United States Colored Troops. While he disparages their intelligence and uses racist language in describing them, he writes that his experience with these troops convinced him that Blacks could make good soldiers, if only in a subordinate and auxiliary role. Since he NEVER encountered Black soldiers before, he clearly knew that the Confederacy did not employ Black troops.
Here is a section from Shotwell’s memoir that he says is drawn from his 1864 journal. Shotwell became a leading opponent of Reconstruction after the Civil War:
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There is an abundance of evidence that blacks did indeed serve in some Confederate units. To deny this discloses either a serious lack of honesty or ignorance on the subject. Even Frederick Douglas understood this.
Any blacks “serving” Confederate units would have been doing so under duress, in the same way they were laboring as enslaved persons. Thousands fled the plantations to join the Union effort. This is why The Civil War came to seen as a fight for liberty, because the masses of blacks were not going to return to an enslaved status.
Sir-
Now I’m not going to get involved in a dispute over Black Confederates.
But you are aware that the Confederacy also took steps to emancipate in the near-clinched 1862 Confederate Emancipation Treaty with Britain and France and the latter Duncan F. Kenner Mission, aren’t you?
Slavery was an all American institution as was its end.