Support for the South

You live in the same region I do and I have yet to see it. Come to think of it I really do not see very many white people fly it either. The only ones I see flying it are ... I better stop there, I do not want to stereotype rednecks.

KenD

 

</font>[/QUOTE]Sorry about that. I forgot to mention I am one, that is why I could not stereotype.

Kend

 

Well, I am certainly not a redneck. I've always been an indoors type person. And I would have left the indoors to defend the CSA with the rednecks against the USA invaders. Just as I would do what I could at my age to defend the USA now if it was invaded by an army.

 

I suspect that the number of blacks who fought for the south was more like a few hundred, rather than a few thousand. The South did not actively try to recruit blacks until very late in the war.

Here is something I found on the Internet:

The Role of Blacks during the Civil War


Black Americans had a great deal at stake in the battle for states versus the federal government’s rights. To many White Americans, the Civil War was about preserving the Union. For Blacks, however, it was about emancipation from Slavery. Blacks, in large numbers, volunteered to join the military; 156,000 in total. However, they were not treated equally. Initially, there was a two-tier pay scale for Blacks and Whites. Blacks also received inferior to broken down equipment. Despite their bravery on the battlefield, their contributions were and have been taken for granted.

At the beginning of the war, many slaves fled their plantations and tried to join the ranks of the Union army. Most, however, were initially returned to their masters. Lincoln, in attempting to preserve the union, believed that all states were still under the constitution. The constitution was clear on slavery--fugitive slaves should be returned to their masters. Lincoln had to walk a razor thin line. He and others knew that there were many anti-abolishionists in the North, and he did not want to make slavery an issue in the war, although it was clearly one of the primary reasons for the war.

In 1862, there was a slight change in his views and tactics used to fight the war. Since slaves were considered property, the Union army could accept the slaves as contraband (captured war material). "Contraband" units were created throughout the Union ranks(1).

As the Black Native American Indians before them learned, Blacks had unique problems with a loss on the battlefield. The Confederate forces were remarkably brutal in their treatment of Union prisoners of war. However, there were few Black prisoners of war. Most of the Black soldiers, who were captured with White Union soldiers, were executed or sold as slaves.

As it became intimately clear that the South would lose in their efforts, the South resorted to desperate measures. Black slaves were offered their freedom if they would fight for the South's cause. The numbers of Blacks who choose to do so were few in numbers.

 

Tanker,

Please supply the URLs for postings from elsewhere on the Internet.

Thanks.

 

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;You suspect wrong. Blacks in the South were used by the TENS of thousands doing the same work blacks in the Union Army did - mostly menial tasks of digging trenches, cooking, cutting wood etc.&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

Doing menial tasks is not the same as fighting. I stand by my statement that very few blacks fought for the south. On the other hand, more than 150,000 blacks were an important part of the Union army. And I question whether your figures are correct that TENS of thousands of blacks did routine tasks in the Confederate army. Certainly there were cases where blacks played important roles in fighting for the north, and apparently no cases at all where blacks were important in fighting for the south. I think that in this case, your information is distorted to fit preconceived opinions, as it is in other aspects of your ideology.

 

One very obvious reason that very few blacks fought for the south is that if the south armed the blacks, they could never be sure that the arms would not be turned against them. Many of the blacks would certainly heed the words of Frederick Douglas, as follows:

"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow....I urge you to fly to arms and smite to death the power that would bury the Government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave. This is your golden opportunity."

 

Here is an account of how blacks served in the Union Army of Tennesse. Note the large numbers that are buried in military cemeteries. This account comes from the following web site:

http://www.tnstate.edu/library/digital/BlacKs.htm


BLACKS IN THE UNION ARMY OF TENNESSEE (1861-1866)
Black Tennesseans were active participants in the American Civil War. They contributed immeasurably to the Union victory. In 1860, Tennessee had 275,719 slaves, who represented twenty-five percent of the population. Tennessee also had 7,300 free blacks in 1860, but they suffered racial discrimination and second-class citizenship without the right to vote. The slaves were owned by 36,894 persons, less than twenty percent of Tennessee's white families. The majority non-slaveholding whites belonged to the yeoman class (farmers and the poor, landless white class). Many white (i.e., East) Tennesseans opposed slavery and wanted it stopped.
After the Civil War hostilities began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina (in April, 1861), Tennessee's radical Democrats, slaveowners, and southern nationalists led a campaign for secession. The voters defeated the first secession ordinance. But in May, 1861, emotions and pressure by the pro-Confederates ran high after Fort Sumter, causing the secession ordinance to pass. Still the Confederates were no more than a vocal minority because white Unionists (thirty-five percent) and blacks (twenty-six percent) outnumbered them. However, the Confederate minority used conscription acts, loyalty requirements, intimidation, racist propaganda, outright oppression, and occupation of East Tennessee to control most Tennessee inhabitants.
The illegal control of Tennessee by the minority Confederates was short-lived. They never had real support among the people in the countryside and could not command the state's resources to effectively prosecute the war. In great paradox, even the slaveowners generally refused to furnish slave labor for the Confederate army. The Confederate General Assembly passed a law to draft free blacks as military laborers in June of 1861.
However, a large Union army arrived in February of 1862, when General U. S. Grant's Union army easily defeated the Confederates at Fort Donelson. Nashville was surrendered quickly on February 23. Then the powerful Union army pushed the Confederates from Shiloh into Mississippi and occupied all Tennessee regions by late 1863. The state Confederate government and the secessionist leader, Governor Isham G. Harris, fled into exile.
The slaves no longer feared slave patrols, empty threats from the plantation mistresses, and movements of Confederate armies. By the fall of 1862, a flood of fugitive slaves caused the federal government to begin a contraband camp system at Grand Junction. Throughout Tennessee, tens of thousands of contraband camp dwellers became an essential labor force for the Union army. They helped to build huge forts, like Nashville's Fort Negley and Memphis' Fort Pickering. From Memphis to Nashville, to Chattanooga, to Knoxville, and even to Bristol, black men and women laborers repaired roads, bridges, and railroads, and served as teamsters, common laborers, military hospital workers, servants to officers, cooks, laundresses, cattle herders, assistant surgeons, blacksmiths, and military spies.
In the spring of 1863, the Union began to recruit and organize black soldiers. By war's end, some 20, 133 black Union army soldiers served in Tennessee within the following United States Colored Troops units:

Infantry -- 11th USCT, 12th USCT, ]3th USCT, 14th U SCT,
15th USCT, 16th USCT, ]7th USCT, 18th USCT, 40th
USCT, 42th USCT, 44th USCT, 55th USCT, 59th USCT,
61th LJSCT, 63th USCT, 68th USCT, 88th USCT, 100th
USCT, 10lst USCT, 110th USCT, and 111th USCT;
Heavy and light artillery -- Ist USCHA, 2nd USCHA, 3rd
USCHA, 6th USCHA, 9th USCHA, 2nd USCLA (Battery
A), 2nd USCLA (Battery H), 2nd USCHLA (Battery F), and
2nd USCLA (Battery 1);
Cavalry -- 3rd USCC.
Another 3,000 blacks served in Tennessee's Home Guards militia units. Tennessee's USCT units fought in every major skirmish, engagement, and battle in the area. Some Tennessee USCT units assisted General William F. Sherman with his successful "March through Georgia" (in the summer of 1864), and they fought in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In the West Tennessee area, the USCT fought in the battles of Moscow, Brice's Crossroads, Memphis, Tupelo, and the Fort Pillow Massacre. At Fort Pillow (April of 1864), Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his larger army massacred black soldiers and black families who sought to escape or surrender. Forrest's racially motivated Confederate troops yelled and waved their pro-slavery symbol (the Confederate battle flag) and swore to give "no quarter" to former slaves who joined the Union army. After Fort Pillow, the Memphis USCT wore medal badges defiantly inscribed with the words, Remember Fort Pillow. Eight months later, revenge came in the decisive Battle of Nashville (December 15-19, 1864), when nearly 13,000 USCT soldiers participated in the humiliating defeat of the confederate army of Tennessee (including Forrest's unit). The war ended with a Union victory just four months later. Memphis' 3rd U. S. Colored Cavalry joined the pursuit of CSA President Jefferson Davis, when he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Mexico.
One can find the graves of many of Tennessee's USCT at the national cemeteries in Tennessee: Nashville (1,909), Memphis (4,208) -- which includes the "Fort Pillow Section"-- Chattanooga (103), Knoxville (663), Cumberland River and Stones River (186). Their gravestones are marked distinctively with USCT. These men and women constitute some of Tennessee's real heroes who defied evil Confederate principles: racism, treason, and rebellion against the United States.

 

I found the following article, apparently written by a real historian, at this web site:

http://members.aol.com/neoconfeds/trclark.htm

So Mr. Griffith, this is a direct challenge to your claim about "tens of thousands" of black soldiers aiding the Confederate cause. You should either support your claim with actual data or retract it.

History gives lie to myth of black Confederate soldiers

TRUMAN R. CLARK*
A racist fabrication has sprung up in the last decade: that the Confederacy had "thousands" of African- American slaves "fighting" in its armies during the Civil War.

Unfortunately, even some African-American men today have gotten conned into Putting on Confederate uniforms to play "re-enactors" in an army that fought to ensure that their ancestors would remain slaves.

There are two underlying points of this claim: first, to say that slavery wasn't so bad, because after all, the slaves themselves fought to preserve the slave South; and second, that the Confederacy wasn't really fighting for slavery. Both these notions may make some of our contemporaries feel good, but neither is historically accurate.

When one speaks of "soldiers" and "fighting" in a war, one is not talking about slaves who were taken from their masters and forced to work on military roads and other military construction projects; nor is one talking about slaves who were taken along by their masters to continue the duties of a personal valet that they performed back on the plantation. Of course, there were thousands of African-Americans forced into these situations, but they were hardly "soldiers fighting."

Another logical point against this wacky modern idea of a racially integrated Confederate army has to do with the prisoner of war issue during the Civil War. Through 1862, there was an effective exchange system of POWs between the two sides. This entirely broke down in 1863, however, because the Confederacy refused to see black Union soldiers as soldiers - they would not be exchanged, but instead were made slaves (or, as in the 1864 Fort Pillow incident, simply murdered after their surrender). At that, the United States refused to exchange any Southern POWs and the prisoner of war camps on both sides grew immensely in numbers and misery the rest of the war.

If the Confederacy had black soldiers in its armies, why didn't it see black men as soldiers?

By the way, all the Confederate soldiers captured by Union troops were white men. If there were "thousands" of black soldiers in the Confederate armies, why were none of them among the approximately 215,000 soldiers captured by the U. S. forces?

If there were thousands of African-American men fighting in the Confederate armies, they apparently cleverly did so without Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, the members of the Confederate congress or any of the white soldiers of the Confederacy knowing about it. (I can just imagine some former Confederate soldier, told in 1892 that hundreds of the men in his army unit during the Civil War were black, snapping his fingers and saying, "I knew there was something different about those guys!")

The South was running short of soldiers as the war dragged on, however, and some people began to suggest that it would be better to use slaves to fight than to lose. As late as three weeks before the Civil War came to an end, the members of the Confederate congress (and Lee and Davis) were hotly debating the question of whether to start using slaves in the Southern armies.

If, as some folks in the 1990s claim, there were already "thousands" of black troops in the Confederate armies, why were the leaders of the Confederacy still debating about whether or not they should start bringing them in?

The very accurate point made then by opponents of this legislation was, as one Georgia leader stated, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Southern newspaper editors blasted the idea as "the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down," a "surrender of the essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization."

And what was that "essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization"? Let's listen to the people of the times. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, said on March 21, 1861, that the Confederacy was "founded . . . its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."

What was the "very doctrine" which the South had entered into war to destroy? Let's go to the historical documents, the words of the people in those times. When Texas seceded from the Union in March 1861, its secession declaration was entirely about one subject: slavery. It said that Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" - were "the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color . . . a doctrine at war with nature . . . and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law."

But, by March 13, 1865, the Confederacy had its back against the wall, and by the less than overwhelming margin of 40 to 37 in the House, and nine to eight in the Senate, the Confederate congress approved a bill to allow Jefferson Davis to require a quota of black soldiers from each state. Presumably (although the bill did not say so) slaves who fought would, if they survived the war, be freed. Southerners who opposed using blacks in the army noted that this idea had its problems: First, it was obvious that the Yankee armies would soon free them anyway; and second, if slavery was so wonderful and happy for black people, why would one be willing to risk death to win his freedom?

The war was virtually over by then, and when black Union soldiers rode into Richmond on April 3, they found two companies of black men beginning to train as potential soldiers. (When those black men had marched down the street in Confederate uniforms, local whites had pelted them with mud.) None got into the war, and Lee surrendered on April 9.

Yes, thousands of African-American men did fight in the Civil War - about 179,000. About 37,000 of them died in uniform. But they were all in the Army (or Navy) of the United States of America. The Confederate veterans who were still alive in the generations after the war all knew that and said so.

Finally, these modem non historians say that slavery couldn't have been a main cause of the Civil War (never mind the words of Alexander Stephens and the various declarations of secession), because most of the Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves.

As modern historians such as Pulitzer Prize-winner James M. McPherson point out, the truth was that most white people in the South knew that the great bulwark of the white-supremacy system they cherished was slavery, whether or not they personally owned slaves.

"Freedom is not possible without slavery," was a typical endorsement of this underlying truth about the slave South. Without slavery, white nonslaveholders would be no better than black men.

The slave South rested upon a master-race ideology, as many generations of white Southerners stated it and lived it, from the 1600s until 1865. There is an uncomfortable parallel in our century with the master- race ideology of Nazi Germany. First, millions of the men who bravely fought and died for the Third Reich were not Nazis, but they weren't exactly fighting for the human rights of Jews or gypsies. And second, yes, as was pointed out in the movie Schindler's List, many thousands of Jews did slave labor in military production factories in Nazi Germany - but that certainly didn't make them "thousands of Jewish soldiers fighting for Germany.

We can believe in the "black soldiers fighting" in the Confederate armies just as soon as historians discover the "thousands" of Jews in the SS and Gestapo.

 

Good posts Tanker. Kidnapping people from another land, putting them in chains and forcing them to come here and work as slaves was a horrible blot on this nation's past. The North was quite justified in doing what it did. To say otherwise, even under the pretence that the South had rights to Independence, is apprehensible and inexcusable.

 

Frankly, you can badmouth the attitudes of Southerners toward blacks all you want, but you should also realize that the attitudes of Yankees toward blacks were no better.

The Yankees ended slavery as an institution that was part of the political milieu which led the Confederacy to secede and this secession was going to interfere with their desire for a strong national government instead of the Founding Fathers' ideal of a republic composed of republics.

So slamming the South because of attitudes towards blacks is rather ridiculous as the Yankees' attitudes were no better. The Yankees didn't end slavery because they were altruistic. If you think so, you are badly deceived.

 

KenH,

My main reason for posting the article by the historian is not to slam the south. I mean to show how modern day apologists for the south, such as Dr. Griffith, are simply putting out a lot of false information. I doubt that he is doing it intentionally and deliberately, but he is spreading false information just the same. It will be interesting to see how he responds to what is certainly a direct and solid contradiction to what he apparently believes. You also are a part of the movement to spread false information about the civil war. So get a grip boys and stop spreading false information about the Civil war and I will be happy. If you want to continue it, I will expose what you are doing.

 

Okay, Tanker, show me one fact I have said that is not true. Notice I said fact, not opinion. My opinion is just as valid as yours whether you agree with it or not.

 

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;Okay, Tanker, show me one fact I have said that is not true. Notice I said fact, not opinion. My opinion is just as valid as yours whether you agree with it or not. &lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

O.K. That is a challenge I accept. But I can't get to it for a few hours. Watch this thread. Hint: You might want carefully review that article you reposted about Lincoln and land speculation in relation to railroads. It is extremely misleading.