Book Review: Searching for Black Confederates by Kevin Levin

Newly Published

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin published by University of North Carolina Press (2019) Hardcover $30.00 Kindle $20.49.

Back in 2010 when I told a relative that I was starting a blog series on immigrants in the American Civil War, he told me that he had recently been surprised to learn that several thousand African Americans had served in the Confederate Army. “I guess the war wasn’t just about slavery,” he said.

In 2016, an older black reenactor was having a conversation with my fiancée that I happened upon. He was telling her about the suppressed story of Black Confederates. “They don’t want you to know that story,” he said.

Over the years, I have seen “Black Confederates” at the center of a school book controversy in Virginia where a textbook claimed that thousands of African Americans served with Robert E. Lee, and as a topic for heated debate on a prominent Civil War message board.

I always thought that the evidence against the claim that thousands of black men fought for the Confederacy was pretty overwhelming. First, Confederate law barred blacks from service until the final months of the war. Second, Confederate records before 1865 never refer to the presence of blacks as soldiers in the army. Third is the famous proposal by Irish-born Confederate General Patrick Cleburne’s 1864 petition to free potential fighting men and their families and then allow them to enlist.

Cleburne was a lawyer and his petition reads like a legal brief. Cleburne includes in this important document examples of instances when blacks had demonstrated that they can be as good soldiers as white men. Not a single example that he gives involves any blacks serving as Confederate soldiers. If there were Black Confederates, Cleburne would have included them in his proposal. He did not, leading me to believe they did not exist in Cleburne’s Confederacy.

The reaction by the Confederate President Jeff Davis to Cleburne was also telling. He did not write back to the general and inform him that black men were already serving in the army. Jeff Davis instead ordered the immediate suppression of Cleburne’s proposal.

In spite of what the laws of the Confederacy said, the “Black Confederate Myth” has been widely dispersed on the internet and elsewhere. As Kevin Levin points out in his engaging new book Searching for Black Confederates, real Confederates would have been surprised to find that their descendants believed that blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate Army. They knew that a couple of hundred blacks were recruited into the army in the last days of the war and that several thousand slaves and free black men worked as servants, porters, and teamsters for the Confederate military, but real Confederates knew that there were never Black Confederate soldiers filling the ranks as combat troops.

Kevin Levin traces the origins of the Black Confederate Myth to the 1970s. The Civil Rights Movement of the decade before made continued open adherence to white supremacy untenable for Confederate heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and prompted them to posit a de-racialized version of the Confederacy. The armed Confederate rebellion to preserve slavery was transformed into a Southern Rights Movement that had the interests of Black Southerners as much at heart as it did the rights of white slaveholders.

According to Levin, the Confederate Heritage folks:

“hoped to demonstrate that if free and enslaved black men fought in Confederate ranks, the war could not have been fought to abolish slavery. Stories of armed black men marching and fighting would make it easier for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and those who celebrate Confederate heritage to embrace their Lost Cause unapologetically without running the risk of being viewed as racially insensitive or worse.” (p. 4)

So, oddly enough, this peculiar institution of historical falsification came as a result of a desire by some descendants of white Confederates to retroactively transform their ancestors into racial egalitarians so that the descendants of enslaved people, supposedly believing that their own ancestors may have been Black Confederates, would embrace a Rainbow version of the Lost Cause! Or at least, and more promisingly, the Confederate Heritagers hoped that other whites, with a low interest in the Civil War, would allow them to continue to display Confederate Battle Flags and erect statues to Confederate heroes without thinking them racists.

While the myth was developed nearly a half-century ago to serve a specific function, many people today who believe in it, writes Levin, are completely unaware of its origins. One does not have to be a racist to believe the myth. School kids in Virginia have been taught it, and many people encounter it in Google searches while researching African American participation in the Civil War. The myth has even been repeated in museum exhibits and at National Park Service sites. Most people innocently encountering it don’t realize that for the first hundred years after the bombardment of Fort Sumter no one heard of Black Confederates.

Levin describes the active attempts to mislead the public about Black Confederates. One notorious example was the alteration of a photo of black Union soldiers into a fraudulent one of the same soldiers as Confederates!*

While some of the claims to the existence of Black Confederates have been nothing more than attempts to defraud the public, others have been based on misunderstanding of the historical record, particularly as it relates to Camp Slaves. These were slaves who were often brought with them by owners when they joined the Confederate Army. Officers and even privates used their slaves to cook, clean, and perform other menial tasks to make soldiering as much like home as possible. These men were sometimes given army surplus uniforms, the source of a small number of photos of slaves dressed in Confederate garb.

In addition to Camp Slaves, Levin writes:

“Tens of thousands of slaves were impressed by the government, often against the will of their owners, to help with the construction of earthworks around the cities of Richmond, Petersburg, and Atlanta. Slaves were also assigned to the construction and repair of rail lines and as workers in iron foundries and other factories producing war matériel. In service to the armies, thousands worked as teamsters, cooks, and musicians…But critically, none of these roles included service on the battlefield as enlisted soldiers.” (p. 4)

After the war, Camp Slaves became a vital element of the Lost Cause narrative. The image of the faithful slave comforting his dying master was found in novels and popular illustrations. Former Camp Slaves were “mascots” at Confederate veteran reunions. Camp Slaves were often the objects of humor at these gatherings and a few played along with white expectations for subservience and minstrelsy.

Levin argues that in the 1970s, the Old’Timey Camp Slave of the 1890s reunions became the heroic Black Confederate of the 1970s. The change in roles reflected the changing national view of race. Ken Burns’s Civil War series on PBS, the miniseries Roots, and the movie Glory inspired a reconsideration of race in American history by the general public and the Sons of Confederate Veterans hoped to stake a claim to the Confederacy being a moral leader on race relations!

Levin’s book tells the real story of the Camp Slaves, describes the evolution of the fairytale of the Black Confederates, and looks at its impact on how Americans understand their history. The good news, writes Levin, is that by the time of the Civil War Sesquicentennial the Myth of the Black Confederate was in decline. The National Park Service, nearly all academics, and museum professionals thoroughly rejected the claims of the Rainbow Confederates.*

I worry though that Americans today are more likely to study the Civil War online than in a college classroom or at a battlefield visitor center. Two years ago, when I was researching World War II, YouTube kept offering me videos of modern fringe political actors engaged in diatribes against people of color. I am guessing that the same irresponsible search results come up for high school students looking for information on African Americans during the war. Unlike me, these innocent teens may not have the faculty to distinguish scholarship from sham.

Overall, Levin’s book is a fine look at how limited evidence of an historical phenomenon can be transformed into a social media meme-worthy fake fact. It is a cautionary tale of the ability of a dedicated group of people with an agenda to change how hundreds of thousands of people view an historical event. It also shows the unscrupulousness of those willing to claim that a victim of slavery, one of the worst of all human rights abuses, was an armed defender of the system that enslaved himself and his family.

A final thought.

I knew a slave once. She was a Jew held by the Nazis. This did not make her a “Nazi Jew.” It just made her an enslaved woman whose labor was owned by her enemies but whose spirit was free to hate those who placed shackles on her limbs.

NOTES:

*Here is an example of one notorious fraud perpetrated in furtherance of the Black Confederate Myth. This image of a supposed Black Confederate military unit, the First Louisiana Native Guard, was making the rounds a decade ago. You will still find it used online as the basis of Confederate Heritage memes.

The photo is actually not of Black Confederates in 1861, but of Black Union soldiers in 1864. You can see the photo below, uncut and in its original form. As you can see, the men are in a photo studio with their white Union officer on the left. He was cropped out of the Black Confederate imposter photo because he is so obviously a Union officer.

This was not innocent mistake. The photo was the basis for a Union recruiting poster used to encourage enlistments by African Americans. This poster is so well-known that I first saw it in a children’s book when I was a boy! Below is the poster, which clearly shows the men as United States Colored Troops and not as Black Confederates.

*Among the few academics who have given any credit to the Black Confederate Myth is Henry Louis Gates.

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Author: Patrick Young

14 thoughts on “Book Review: Searching for Black Confederates by Kevin Levin

  1. A wonderful review. I thought the ending of the article about the Holocaust survivor was powerful. I can’t wait to read the book!

  2. This book is complete rubbish and only good for toilet paper. I personally have muster rolls sheets, and pay receipts that show some blacks were enlisted in Confederate ranks as early as 1861. I have an article from Douglass’ Monthly (Sept. 1861, p.516), an abolitionist paper written by Frederick Douglass whose own son served in the 54th Mass., stating that black men were in the ranks of Confederate service. You even have Christian A. Fleetwood, a black Civil War Medal of Honor winner who states they had blacks in the ranks as early as April of 1861 (The Negro as a Soldier, p.5-6). You can even find on YouTube video of black Confederates at a UCV Reunion in Biloxi, MS talking about there time in Confederate service. I even have four documented Union accounts of the Siege of Yorktown, VA in April-May 1862 that state that there was a black Confederate sharpshooter taken out. Two of these accounts are from 1866, another is from 1890 and was written by Joseph Wilson who was a member of the famed 54th Mass., and the fourth was written by a Capt. Stevens in 1892 a member of the 1st US sharpshooters and an eyewitness. To say they did not exist means you have to ignore lots of documented evidence. I could really go on with the Northern and Southern papers that talk specifically about blacks in Confederate Service. As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans we have black, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, and Indian members. This book is nothing more than politically correct propaganda that is trying to fit the narrative of how the War was solely about slavery when the historical documentation says otherwise. Levin is clearly a horrendous historian.

    1. Good Lord, what gibberish!

      But an excellent example of exactly the kind of dishonest, dishonorable fairy tale the SCV loves to perpetuate. (That mean “repeat over and over,” Mr. Pease…You clearly follow Goebbel’s teachings—tell the BIG LIE over and over,” so small minds can pretend it’s true.

      No wonder the overlap of SCVites and trumpanzees is so complete.

      1. You also have to look at (1) the official Confederate reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation Proclamation authorizing Blacks enlisting in the Union army and (2) the debate
        debate in the Confederate Congress over Davis’s last ditch effort to do the same in 1865.

    2. In the “ranks” or as “servants”?. “Civil wars” are rarely mono-causal. One need go no further than the Confed Constitution it self to read that one reason for the conflict was to preserve slavery… -“…. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States…” ARTICLE IV, paragraph 3

      1. There are a number of things that ought be raised to this.

        1) There is nothing in the Confederate Constitution that forces a state to RETAIN slavery where/when it has such in place.

        That was how the Duncan F. Kenner would have abolished slavery; each and every individual state in the Confederacy would have abolished slavery within its state constitution.

        Also, as by the end of the war, the CSA had no territories, (which it had, earlier, in temporary fashion such as in the west).

        There was also the option of amending the CSA constitution; there was also the option of letting the institution of slavery to lapse, (it would be on the books as lawful, but deliberately to become a dead letter law).

        2) One has no further to look than at the 1860 Republican party platform, the many speeches of Lincoln, including his 1st Innaugral Address to see that slavery would become an issue forced by the North-

        The North was willing to reconvene all the rights to slavery as they existed and guarantee them for all time to come.

        3) If one makes the argument that the aspect of desiring to expand slavery is the greater sin than being willing to tolerate it as it existed…that then necessitates a VERY relevant conversation about the 1846-48 Mexican American War.

  3. Please give us your sources — complete sources. Author, title, city, publisher, date and page. You are disputing a carefully sourced book with a glib response. If you want to be taken seriously, respond seriously.

    I’m having trouble, for example, finding page 561 in Douglass’ Monthly (September 1861). Give us a URL or library where you found that story. Thank you.

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