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I had heard this story and about this book many years ago ~ and it loomed just outside the reach of my recall. ~ I just remembered, Sentor's , elected officials walking out ~ but couldn't remember why! for the life of me. ~ It truly was a Doc Holiday wink ~ that set the fire. ~ I'll never forget it again.

We still battle this fog of misunderstanding today

Again, it was a place in time ~ were people were doing the best they knew how.

While we are all slaves in one form or another ~ The right to own another " is" ofcoarse wrong and flawed in nature.

CharlesEdm

What I hate is historical revisionism.

This idea that the souths attempt at seperation was some noble purpose. ~ As for the union being voluntary, the entire point of government process is to provide a set of rules to abide by, if you're defeated ellectorally, thats the reality. You have no more right to seperate based on the grounds of slavery, than an American individual has the right to seperate his house from the USA in order to avoid paying parking fines.

Just remember who fired the first shot.

Cottonblossom

Cottonblossom

I went riding with a friend from Perth to an artisan well in Prattville, Alabama..that I didn't even know was there!!..I felt so stupid..born & raised here & he knew more than I did!

He is also the one that started telling me facts I had never heard of about the South & The War between the States..and now I HAVE to know these things..I am so hooked & love it....might be a midlife crisis too you think? lol..

In reference to the information about the book Complicity as well as the other reference I gave to you, you have to read them, you have to understand what I posted for you, out of the kindness of my heart, was a review, the book covers how the North profited and prolonged slavery and does indeed speak of abolitionist's who owned slaves, in fact, alot of abolitionist's owned slaves, they were hypocrites, they would aid in running slave mills and then turn around and stand on their soapboxes speaking out against slavery. Too many people rely on internet sources, in college, internet sources are more times to none held as unreliable, and believe it or not, REAL books are to be utilized for research papers or reliable articles. Therefore, back at you,,,,DUH!!!!!!

Did I view someone stating that not many slaves served for the Confederacy? If I'm not mistaken, there were over 90,000 slaves who served for the Confederacy, they were in Antietam among many other battles and they were just as patriotic as the "whites", at least according to history. In the article which I wrote on this topic, I found a quote from a slave which stated "General, the only cowardly blood I have in my veins is the white blood"!

TRUMAN R. CLARK*
Clark is a professor of American history (now emeritus) at Tomball College.
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.

"who were taken along by their masters to continue the duties of a personal valet that they performed back on the plantation."

PrimeWoman
What I find sad and distressful is the fact that the Yankee-Rebel mentality exists still.

Can we fast forward to this new millenium?

We are a collective amalgam known as the UNITED States of America.

It's simply ignorant and narrow-minded to believe that any one of us has superior value as a human being over another.

TRUMAN R. CLARK*
Clark is a professor of American history (now emeritus) at Tomball College.
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.

Estimates of Black Confederate Serving the South

How many black Confederates served the South in combat or direct battlefield support ? The numbers vary wildly from 15,000 to 120,000. The truth remains that nobody has an accurate figure. My estimate is that 65,000 blacks scattered across the entire South followed the Confederate armies from one battlefield to the next from 1861 to 1865. Larger numbers of blacks loyally served the Confederacy, not as soldiers but as employees of the Army, Navy, Confederate government or the individual State governments.

Where does this estimate of 65,000 come from ?

Dr. Steiner, Chief Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed that Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson's troops in occupation of Frederick, Maryland, in 1862: "Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in this number [Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc.....and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army."

If we assume Dr. Steiner is somewhat reliable and assume that this 3,000 Negroes of Jackson's troops are a representative number of black Confederates in a typical Confederate fighting force, then we may be able to make a rough calculation. First we must determine how many men were part of Jackson's troops ? If Lee had 50,000, was Jackson's force, 25,000 ? That would be a likely estimate. So then what percentage is 3,000 of 25,000 ? Answer: 12 %. So that would tell us that 12% of Jackson's force was black Confederates. Now, if we assume that Steiner meant 3,000 blacks soldiers in Lee's entire 50,000 force that crossed the Potomac, then the percentage of black Confederates is reduced to 6%. Either way it is calculated, black Confederates were a considerable percentage of the total Confederate fighting force.

To extend this reasoning across the entire Confederate Army, what does this represent ? That depends on the total number of men that served in the CS Army, which is also in itself debatable as muster rolls are notoriously incomplete.

For example, let's use for example the 1,000,000 listed names in Broadfoot's Confederate roster compiled by the National Archives. Yes, there is some repeat names, but let's use that figure as an example. What percentage is 12% ? This would translate to 120,000 black Confederates and half that, 60,000. As such, the 65,000 estimate is not an unreasonable estimate. Debatable ? Yes. Refutable ? Absolutely not. Black Confederates imaginary ? Ridiculous

Could Dr. Steiner have been wrong regarding the numbers ? Yes, absolutely. In fact, many Army officers routinely made mistakes at estimating the enemies numerical strengths. However, the smaller the body of troops one is estimating, the more likely that number is correct. While Steiner failed to accurately estimate Lee's total forces (I recall he estimated 80,000 instead of 50,000), in my opinion, it is unlikely he erred as significantly with a handful of 3,000 black troops. So even if Steiner made an overestimate of 30%, we still are in the range of 40,000 to 80,000.

ttp://www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/blackcs.htm#
Estimates%20of%20Black%20Confederate
%20Serving%20the%20South

More Accounts of Black Confederates:
A letter by a Federal officer:
Col. Giles Smith commanded the First Brigade and Col. T. Kilby Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, the Fourth. I communicated to these officers General Sherman's orders and charged Colonel Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, specially with the duty of clearing away the road to the crossing and getting it into the best condition for effecting our crossing that he possibly could. The work was vigorously pressed under his immediate supervision and orders, and he devoted himself to it with as much energy and activity as any living man could employ. It had to be prosecuted under the fire of the enemy's sharpshooters, protected as well as the men might be by our skirmishers on the bank, who were ordered to keep up so vigorous a fire that the enemy should not dare to lift their heads above their rifle-pits; but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men. The casualties in the brigade were 11 killed, 40 wounded, and 4 missing; aggregate, 55. Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
D. STUART,
Brigadier-General, Commanding."

“There are at the present moment many Colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but real soldiers, having musket on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down any loyal troops and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government and build up that of the…rebels.”

- Frederick Douglas

"Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in this number [Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc.....and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army."

Dr. Lewis Steiner,
Chief Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission
while observing Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson's occupation of Frederick, Maryland, in 1862

Confederate General John B. Gordon (Army of Northern Virginia) reported that all of his troops were in favor of Colored troops and that it’s adoption would have “greatly encouraged the army”. Gen. Lee was anxious to receive regiments of black soldiers. The Richmond Sentinel reported on 24 Mar 1864, “None…will deny that our servants are more worthy of respect than the motley hordes which come against us.” “Bad faith [to black Confederates] must be avoided as an indelible dishonor.”

Edward C. Smith
Director of American Studies at American University in Washington,
Vice President of the Abraham Lincoln Institute,
Smithsonian Institution scholar
authority on the participation of blacks on the Southern side in the War Between the States.

cocytus
News Flash - Civil War is over.

The South lost.

The Union was saved

Cottonblossom
Why would it be named after a Union General?

Can you explain the burning of Atlanta?..Why did Sherman try to destroy Atlanta?

As I stated with not only ONE but TWO sources I gave you, if you are too lazy to read them, then I guess we SHOULD not discuss it any further, for it's no good to kick a dead horse, if you do not want to research facts, TRUE sources that is, that is not my problem, therefore Charles, say as you will, for I gave two really great sources, is it really my fault you do not want to leave the computer? I don't think so.

The black troops, however, faced greater peril than white troops when captured by the Confederate Army. In 1863 the Confederate Congress threatened to punish severely officers of black troops and to enslave black soldiers. As a result, President Lincoln issued General Order 233, threatening reprisal on Confederate prisoners of war (POWs) for any mistreatment of black troops. Although the threat generally restrained the Confederates, black captives were typically treated more harshly than white captives. In perhaps the most heinous known example of abuse, Confederate soldiers shot to death black Union soldiers captured at the Fort Pillow, TN, engagement of 1864. Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest witnessed the massacre and did nothing to stop it.

On the opposite side of the debate, professional historians Glatthaar, McPerson and Robert Krick have analyzed, between them, over 25,000 letters of soldiers, 1,500 manuscript collections, and Confederate service records of 150,000 soldiers, and have all encountered very few accounts of black soldiers.(20) Therefore, they see no reason to attach a large number to the individual blacks who took up arms occasionally.

Clearly, a lot depends on the reading of accounts and sources, otherwise there would not be such a different result, with on both sides a similar confidence in one's own findings. The most powerful argument that can be made against the case of a significant number of blacks fighting in the Confederate armies, and deriving a large number of black soldiers of the accounts, is the fact that enlistment of coloreds was simply prohibited by the Confederate government. In fact, this, and the notion that secession had been largely about the preservation of slavery and race relations,(21) is why most historians dismiss the possibility of large numbers of black Confederates.

In his study of Confederate emancipation and the eventual enlistment of colored soldiers in the Southern army, Bruce Levine, professor of history at the University of California, argues that there cannot have been large units of black fighting men, because there was no societal foundation; the entire notion of letting blacks fight went against what the Confederacy stood for and struggled against. Indeed, that is why it took so long for the government to accept the possibility of colored enlistment. There may have been a few who championed the cause in order to save the Cause, but most were too stubborn.(22)

As stated before, in his own admission, Rollins relies heavily on anecdotal evidence, and so do the other authors. Anecdotal in itself need not necessarily work against an argument. In fact, the presence of women in armies-dressed up as men, or serving as spies-is not found in official records, either, yet they are treated as heroes who defied convention. They are recognized as exceptional, but are honored all the same.(23) Women, on the other hand, run much less the chance of being used as the poster child for the Confederate Lost Cause, and are more readily accepted than gun toting blacks.

These objections cast some light, if rather a shadow, on the proposed numer of 30,000 fighting blacks. It is, after all, questionable how one can calculate such a large number from scattered anecdotal evidence alone. Moreover, both amidst controversy and in communication, a number as large as 30,000 would have been noticed, if not abundantly, at least more frequently than the abovementioned Civil War historians have found.

Looking at the accounts more specifically, the loyal slave of Jordan's essay, who could not take an oath that his master would not take, may have exclaimed this for other reasons than mere loyalty: he could hardly declare openly that he would easily go against his master-who would never swear loyalty to the Union. Jordan's interpretation is therefore too simple. His southern angle is illustrated also in his continuous reference to slaves as "Afro-Virginians," which is both an anachronism as a misnomer: such a hyphenated epithet was unthinkable in the nineteenth century South, because blacks were not recognized (let alone acknowledged) as citizens.

Rollins' examples are also interpreted naively askew, for the black sniper had to choose between fighting or being sold away from his wife and family. Fighting for the South rather seems like a lesser of two evils than a sign of pride. General Gordon's remark about "strange stories" of a "Negro marksman" at Fort Wagner illustrates mainly that that the balance of blacks fighting for the Union and for the Confederacy is disproportionately out of kilter, as the 54th Massachusetts were on the other side.(24)

On a more scholarly note, the third example is accompanied by an incomplete footnote, making the story of Kelly untraceable.(25) In the same line, Rollins often relies on unclear accounts, attributed to "an observer" or "onlookers" who remain mostly unknown, partly because they were cited thus in newspaper articles, and partly because Rollins uses obscure sources.(26) A least obscure source he relies heavily on, is H.C. Blackerby's Blacks in Blue and Gray, which borrows extensively from accounts and articles of the post-war period.

Many anecdotes are rather ambiguous: a comparison between different accounts of the same scene often leads to different viewings. Soldiers in one story, the blacks involved in a skirmish are referred to as mere "teamsters" or servants in another.(27) There are other reasons for misinterpretation: southern soldiers were often filthy and sunburnt, and could easily be identified as being dark-skinned; also, blacks donning old uniforms, wearing their masters' guns could easily be viewed as soldiers.(28) For these reasons, the accounts and articles, specifically when written shortly after the Civil War, should be studied carefully for their right historical value.

Pensions, also, are not clear-cut evidence for the presence of black soldiers in Southern armies, because they were often awarded to a group that could be so broadly defined as to include the workers and body servants. In Virginia, for instance, pensions became eligible for anyone who "accompanied a soldier [...] or who served as a cook, hostler, or teamster, or who worked in breastworks under any command of the army."(29) Having accompanied the army, or even having been wounded, did not require being a soldier, actively fighting, or merely carrying a musket; all it took was being associated with the armed forces.

A final critique is aimed at the photos often used to illustrate both that blacks did serve in the armies of the South. Granting that photos do not lie, their usage brings several difficulties. A photograph cannot elaborate on the exact role of the blacks it portrays, or the position they fulfilled in the army: it merely illustrates proximity. At most, they deliver an incomplete story, and conclusions drawn from them should be tentative.

If, after scrutiny, evidence is so meager, there must be an additional reason why a large number of academics and non-scholars nonetheless believe that there was a significant body of black soldiers fighting for the South.

It is, partly, because the scholars who propose such amounts of black soldiers are misinterpreting the available sources.(30) Whereas professional historians specialized in Civil War history discard the possibility that large numbers of blacks served in Southern ranks, the academics most actively promulgating black Confederates are not, in fact, trained historians. The risk is great, therefore, that they lack the scrutiny needed to make a correct interpretation and take sources on face value.

The sources used by them are, after all, largely unreliable, as is explained by Bruce Chadwick, in The Reel Civil War. In the post-bellum, pre-film era (roughly 1865 to 1920) a historiographical trend of revisionism and reconciliation flourished.(31) This trend was characterized by an emphasis on the personal endurance of horrors in the war by both North and South, and, to serve reconcilation, any blame the South had in provoking the conflict was largely ignored or smoothed over, thus opening the way to a glorification of the antebellum South. Consequently, Southerners should never been seen again as evil slave owners.(32) It was during this period also, that the pro-Confederate publications, such as the Confederate Veteran were started; the stories in which, combined with anniversaries and reunions, added to nostalgia, feeding the growing belief "that at least the Southern boys were just as brave and heroic as the Northern boys."(33)

If that period was mainly concerned with "accomplish[ing] the essential task of solidifying a united nation,"(34) since the 1950s, a growing racial awareness has shifted Civil War history writing, which consquently contended that slavery was an important cause of the Civil War.(35) When the end of the twentieth century gave rise to a new branch of Civil War historiography, those historians had to include this racial awareness in their search for what David W. Blight, professor of history at Yale University, dubs: a "national narrative for what the war was about."(36) If slavery did not fit well into this "new nationalism" of the end of the twentieth century in which the South was pardoned by mere devotion (i.e, "devotion alone made everyone right and no one truly wrong"),(37) the solution would be to get rid of slavery as a grave wrong and cause of the war.

This appears to be exactly what the academics have done to support the idea of a significant number of black soldiers: they use the sources of the first historiographic, reconciliatory period, the idea of a shared devotion, which not only justified the South, but also solidified the nation. Segar and Barrow, for example, sift out "important passages" from books written between 1865 and 1925, and use The Confederate Veteran as an "invaluable source."(38) The important difference is, however, that the area of focus is the one mainly left out in the earlier period; thus combining the reconciliation of the "new nationalism" with the racial awareness of preceding era. Hence, the implication seems to be the extra motivation beyond mere truth value.

It seems that the best case that can be made for large numbers of colored Confederates is based on sloppy evidence that cannot and does not convince the large majority of historians. Many of the accounts that the promotors of black Confederates rely on are ambiguous, partisan, or the result of revisionism in history. Sometimes, however, Rollins et al misrepresent the testimonies made, such as ascribing loyalty to a slave who may just fear for his hide, or by referring to blacks as "Afro-Virginians."

These untrained historians too easily derive favorable conclusions from unclear sources and are sincerely under the impression that they honor a large group that has unjustly been left out of the major historiography, motivated, it seems, by a union of reconciliation and racial awareness of earlier historiographical periods. Their remedy is the production of books and articles, backed up by faulty scholarship, which lead to the conclusion that large numbers of loyal blacks must have accompanied the Southern armies and have actively handled rifles.

A factor in the accumulation of such a number may be the fact that the accounts of fighting slaves have been concentrated into a growing number of essays, thus adding to the notion that there must have been a significant body of them. The scattered fractions of accounts and indications were a much more realistic representation of the amount of blacks fighting; indeed, one might say fighting blacks were as scattered and obscure as the sources initially were.

Now, most laymen are not historians and are much more easily persuaded by the face value of documents, especially when compiled into such neat volumes as the one published by Segars and Barrow. They are, in addition, often swayed by a present feeling of nationalism or regional pride, which blurs skepticism. Thus the faulty scholarship serves as an important source for annotation in online essays that promote the notion that thousands of blacks did fight along with their grandfathers, and that, indeed, the Civil War was not about slavery after all. Not necessarily does the South rise again, but apologia for the Lost Cause, for the Old South, proliferates, and it soothes national memory.

Those championing an increase in the alotted number of colored Confederates, concluding that the Confederacy was worth fighting for by blacks, forget that often even white people were moved to war by much less honorable motives than the Cause for the preservation of Old South values. Indeed, it seems that blacks fought mainly out of self-interest and of care for their family.

Although the promotions of false notions is regrettable, there is something to be said for an increased attention for the forgotten, loyal blacks. Indeed, if anything can be learned from the testimonies and sources, it is that blacks are not to be treated as a monolithic group that automatically sided with the North. Also, a careful professional approach of the issue can serve to educate people and correct the wrongful interpretation of this element in history. Therefore, a solid case can be made to give more attention to this obscure corner in history.

If The Littlest Rebel was pervaded with racist depictions of blacks and slaves, the portrayal of Holt, the colored character in Ride with the Devil, is one of the more distinguished accounts of Southern blacks in movies. As a former slave, he fights alongside his old neighbor and long time friend for the South in Missouri. When his friend dies, Holt admits that his entire purpose of fighting has dissipated, clarifying that he did not fight for the South perse, but out of loyalty to the one who bought his freedom. All of which seems perfectly balanced from a historical viewpoint.

Perhaps professional historians can learn from popular culture and dig into interesting stories that have taken place in the margins of history. This may, in turn, influence other, large productions in popular culture, such as The Last Full Measure, the final sequel to Gods and Generals and Gettysburg, two films that both largely ignored the many cooks and servants accompanying the army of Northern Virginia.(43) Who knows, it might even feature a few black companies at the end of the war-though they will not be given orders by a colonel with blonde curls and blue ribbons.