A recent post at Civil War Memory tells of how a so called “black confederate” was discovered to be a USCT. Kevin posted a link to David Woodbury’s Of Battlefields and Bibliophiles who posted the link to the original story. I will not comment on the story here or post an excerpt since both Kevin and David did a great job with that aspect. What I want to comment on is what was posted in response to the original story on the original site to show how neo-confederates and “Lost Causers” and the likes create “black confederates”.
What this article does not mention is that many African slaves did indeed fight for the Confederacy. Lincoln’s ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ was issued two years into the civil war, and was mostly for propaganda purposes, since Lincoln said repeatedly that he would be willing to retain slavery if it would preserve the Union. Lincoln was all about Federal power and Big government. He also believed that whites and “negros” could not live together as equals.
After presiding over America’s most destructive war (quite a feat) Lincoln’s additional legacy is that he got us lurching towards Empire. America’s decline can (in part) be attributed to this magnificent war-maker.”
As anyone who has seen Gone With the Wind knows, Georgia was in real bad shape at the time. It might have been a question of enlistment or starvation.
I suspect this gravestone said “Confederate States Army” because (1) he really was in the CSA, perhaps much longer than in the Union Army, and (2) it would be more respectable to have that on ones gravestone down south than, say, “US Army.”
We get an abbreviated, politically correct version of the story 87 years later.”
Granted, some of the other comments questioned what Samuel Brown was doing prior to joining the 137th USCT in Georgia, but that has yet to be discovered. But if you really want to know how “black confederates” are created read again the comments above. Despite the evidence, just put your head down, claim, with an uniformed guess, that he was a confederate soldier with thousands of others and hope for the best.
It would have been helpful if the original story had included more detail about how the present-day researchers had sorted out Samuel Brown’s story. But yes, this is how the “Black Confederate” argument goes — pick a long-dead man about whom very little is known, and and fill in the gaps with random, vague clippings about other, often unidentified men, and assert that they all apply to this one, too.
It doesn’t look like Samuel Brown was publicly singled out as a Black Confederate when he actually had a Confederate stone above his grave, but now, with this news story, he will be, with the added distinction of being hailed as another martyr to political correctness. Ugh.
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