Searching for Black Confederates
Searching for Black Confederates

Author: Kevin M. Levin

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-08-09

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1469653273

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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.

Searching for Black Confederates
Searching for Black Confederates

Author: Kevin M. Levin

Publisher: Civil War America

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781469669410

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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.

Black Confederates
Black Confederates

Author: Charles Kelly Barrow

Publisher: Pelican Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781565549371

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Contains correspondence, military records, and reminiscences from brave men who served what they considered their country.

Remembering The Battle of the Crater
Remembering The Battle of the Crater

Author: Kevin M. Levin

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2012-07-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0813140412

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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 Women's Fight
The Women's Fight

Author: Thavolia Glymph

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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Historians of the Civil War often speak of 'wars within a war' - the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War - North and South, white and black, slave and free - showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.

A House Built by Slaves
A House Built by Slaves

Author: Jonathan W. White

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-12

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1538161818

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Readers of American history and books on Abraham Lincoln will appreciate what Los Angeles Review of Books deems an "accessible book" that "puts a human face — many human faces — on the story of Lincoln’s attitudes toward and engagement with African Americans" and Publishers Weekly calls "a rich and comprehensive account." Widely praised and winner of the 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, this book illuminates why Lincoln’s unprecedented welcoming of African American men and women to the White House transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States. From his 1862 meetings with Black Christian ministers, Lincoln began inviting African Americans of every background into his home, from ex-slaves from the Deep South to champions of abolitionism such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. More than a good-will gesture, the president conferred with his guests about the essential issues of citizenship and voting rights. Drawing from an array of primary sources, White reveals how African Americans used the White House as a national stage to amplify their calls for equality. Even more than 160 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s inclusion of African Americans remains a necessary example in a country still struggling from racial divisions today.

The Gray and the Black
The Gray and the Black

Author: Robert F. Durden

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2000-05-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780807125571

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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.”

Choctaw Confederates
Choctaw Confederates

Author: Fay A. Yarbrough

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-10-22

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1469665123

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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 Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader
The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2011-01-05

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1604737883

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Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans—including most history teachers—think the Confederate States seceded for “states' rights.” This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's “Declaration of the Immediate Causes. . .” says, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.