Kevin Levin’s new book Searching for Black Confederates continues to garner interest in the press. The British paper The Guardan has an article on it today. From the Guardian:
After war broke out in 1861, thousands of enslaved men were forced to accompany their masters into the army as body servants or camp slaves.
“It’s absolutely important to think of these enslaved men as the cornerstone or foundation of any Confederate army because it’s their presence, it’s the roles that they’re playing, that make camping, marching and conducting battles even possible,” Levin says.
Life in the camps could be harsh. Levin “found a couple of cases where the punishments are brutal. One Confederate officer wrote home to his wife in vivid detail about stretching out his camp slave and laying on 400 lashes. The kinds of punishments that you would have found back home on the plantation, you would have found all of that present in the army.
“It may have even been heightened because you have to remember most of these men who bring camp slaves are officers, so they have to constantly demonstrate their rank.”
When the war ended, enslaved African Americans serving the Confederate army were liberated. But by the end of the 19th century, they began to play a central role in the lost cause, a narrative white southerners developed as a way to rationalise and romanticise defeat.
Levin explains: “They argue that the war was never about slavery, that their cause remained just even though they were defeated. What was central to the lost cause was that they believed and maintained that their enslaved people remain loyal to them and the Confederacy until the very end.
“So when it came time, for example, for Confederate veterans to start meeting in large reunion gatherings, it wasn’t uncommon for these former camp slaves to attend as well. They have any number of reasons for attending: I suspect some of them are able to make a little money by entertaining these large white crowds. Some of them, perhaps, wanted to maintain old ties with their owners or the people in their respective units who are now leaders in their respective communities and so it’s a way to maintain their own status back home.
“But for white southerners and former Confederates these former camp slaves are hugely important symbolically because they symbolise the racial status quo of the antebellum period.
“These are men who now can be pointed to as the models of proper behaviour for African Americans during the Jim Crow era, so at a time when there’s a great deal of racial unrest throughout the south and there’s a new generation of African Americans who are pushing for equal rights, white southerners can point to these elderly men and say, ‘This is how you should behave.’”
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