Once again, over at Facebook’s Southern Heritage Preservation Group, Royal Diadem (Ann DeWitt) has posted more information about the research she is doing on black confederates. As you can see from the image above she has begun to dive into the National Archives and Records Administration and their vast holdings of Union and Confederate documentation. In a post on this specific NARA file she posted this statement:
Research continues on the Black Confederates who were imprisoned atCampDouglas. The book “To Die inChicago” by George Levy, states “General Morgan [CSA] had ignored orders fromRichmondto report the presence of blacks in his [Confederate] army. As a result, many were captured on free soil in Confederate uniforms. The [Union] arm…y held black prisoners at Camp Douglas despite President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which declared that slaves captured with Rebel forces would be ‘forever free’ . . . it seemed that these men were not considered slaves.”
In other words, men like Isaac Cox were considered soldiers by the Union Army at Camp Douglas. Isaac Cox’s Confederate Soldier Record is at the National Archives Catalog ID 586957 and microfilm M319.
She makes special note to explain that those blacks taken prisoner were not considered slaves and that meant they were take to be soldiers by the Union army. However if one looks at the words on the card it is quite clear how Isaac Cox was seen…it is written right on the card in the remarks section: Servant. How Ms. DeWitt or the other LCT’s over at SHPG decided he was a soldier despite the evidence sitting right in front of them is beyond me.
On the other hand, why Isaac was still held as a prisoner despite the fact of the Emancipation Proclamation is a more important thing to discuss. Why was Isaac still held as a prisoner? What can we infer from the NARA card? Not much…about as much as we can conclude that he was a soldier.
What might be the reason for Isaac’s listing as a prisoner instead of being freed under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation? Well, it is possible that when the information was taken of his capture he had not been release as a freedman yet. You will not that his date of capture is the 26th of July (The same day I write this) 1863 and the card is for the month of August. Could he have been released the next day? It’s possible, but with what is presented here by Ms. DeWitt it is impossible to know. Could Isaac have been loyal to his master and stayed with him instead of taking his freedom? Again, possible, but without more information about Isaac it is impossible to tell.
That then, is the rub, asLincolnwould say. For those of us who wrestle with the subject of black confederates it is not a matter of denying these men their rightful place in history…it is providing them their rightful place in history. Ms. DeWitt and people like Susan Frise Hathaway who runs Facebook’s Anti-Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial site called Virginia War Between the States Sesquicentennial, and David Tatum’s “ATrueConfederate” can bitch and moan about me being a denier of black confederates as much as they like. But with information like what Ms. DeWitt is providing here and here it is an injustice to those blacks who did serve in some capacity during the war.
There are a number of unanswered questions about this example. The researcher questions why Cox was not freed under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, but the third card in his compiled service record (CSR) carries the notation, “released by order of the Secy of War” sometime in February 1864, about seven months after he was taken prisoner. It’s hard to know exactly what that indicates, but it’s certainly not a common entry on the CSRs for Confederate PoWs. Perhaps — and this is purely speculation — Cox was a free man employed as a servant, and therefore not subject to the terms of the EP. Perhaps he, like Hannibal Alexander, misrepresented himself to stay in the camp. Without further, detailed knowledge about Isaac Cox, we just cannot know. Some more digging in the records of Camp Douglas might provide an explanation.
You note that Cox is explicitly identified as a “servant” on the roll card reproduced, but all three cards also give the term “Nergo” in the upper left of the card, where the soldier’s rank normally goes. The rank in/rank out blanks on the CSR folder are dashed through, as well. These three cards, all based on records generated by the Federal prison camp system, ascribe no military rank to Isaac Cox at all.
As with other African American men who turn up in the records of Federal prison camps, this record for Isaac Cox, that’s generated from Union administrative lists, seems to be the only records recorded for him, with nothing from the Confederate side. I know Confederate personnel records are often fragmentary, but that excuse seems to be offered so frequently when it comes to the absence of personnel records for African Americans, that one suspects it’s more a rationalization than explanation. (The NPS Soldiers & Sailors System, a database built from the CSRs at NARA, lists over 1,200 names for the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry, including Issac Cox, so a dearth of records doesn’t seem to be an issue in this case.)
Isaac Cox’ CSR documents an African American man who, attached to the 2nd Kentucky, was captured and spent about seven months first in Camp Chase, and then Camp Douglas. But the documents do not show that he was considered an enlisted soldier, with rank, by either side. It’s tempting to look at a single document like this, and make grand, sweeping pronouncements about what it supposedly tells us about the larger universe — or in this case, the Confederate army. But what’s equally important is recognizing the limitations of these documents, and acknowledging that they don’t tell us the full story, one that in the case of Isaac Cox, we may not ever fully know.
There’s no question that Isaac Cox spent months in a Federal camp, including most of the winter of 1863-64 at Camp Douglas, one of the more infamous prison camps, North or South, of the entire war. Whatever his status, free or slave, and regardless of how much agency he had, either in serving with the 2nd Kentucky or in going “into the pen,” the little we know of his story is worth remembering, and no one challenges that. What I don’t follow is why it’s so important to some, it seems, that Isaac Cox and men like him be retroactively designated as soldiers, when they clearly and explicitly were not at the time.
I looked up the book, To Die in Chicago (previewed on Amazon), and it seems that the researcher here quotes selectively from it, to reinforce her argument that U.S. Army policy viewed Cox and several other African American men captured with Morgan as Confederate soldiers. The book’s text actually indicates that after months of confusion about their status, the Federals concluded exactly the opposite. The paragraph preceding the quote given above:
And then, the paragraph immediately following the one the researcher quotes above:
No one who’s studied Civil War prisons (on either side) would be surprised that men like Issac Cox would get caught up in a bureaucracy over their status. But the very same source the researcher uses to argue that the Federals recognized Isaac Cox as a soldier, says exactly the opposite: When ordered by the Federal officer in charge of prison camp policy to determine whether Cox and his comrades were slaves or soldiers, the commandant of Camp Douglas determined that Cox was the former, not the latter, and accordingly he was released by order of Secretary of War Stanton. It’s as plain as the printed word on the page.
Isaac H. Cox’ compiled service record here (2.5MB PDF). Three cards, all based on Federal prison camp records.
Amazing stuff…I think now that you have provided this information we are one step closer to understanding who Isaac Cox was 148 years to the day he was captured.
Thanks Andy.
I honestly feel that if there was a cache of documents showing that no Blacks actually served as soldiers in the Confederate army, the Lost Cause Traditionalists would try their best to destroy them or denounce them as forgeries. Why? Simply because that would knock the slats from the idea that they are trying to prop up about Blacks serving freely in the Confederate Army so the war couldn’t have been about slavery. BTW, has there ever been a document that actually shown a Black as an infantryman, cavalryman, or artillerist in the Confederate Army? I have yet to see one but I sure would be interested in seeing one.
The original claim, going back to the 1990s, was tens of thousands of African Americans serving as soldiers in the conventional sense, in the ranks, under arms, and so on. Like in Glory but with butternut uniforms. As that’s been repeatedly debunked, the advocacy has shifted a bit into two overlapping arguments, either that (1) everyone associated with an army in the field, including cooks, personal servants, launderers, teamsters and the like, were considered to be soldiers (clearly not the case in contemporary documentation), or (2) that being associated with the military itself is irrelevant, thus the “Black Southern Loyalist” construction mentioned here previously. Add to that more assertions that “numbers are irrelevant” — when they were actually central to the claims of BCS advocates until very recently — the propensity to toss around ill-defined words like :”service,” and you get an historical subject that’s like Jell-o — the tighter one tries to grasp it, the more it slips through one’s fingers. As I’ve said before, the “scholarship” supporting claims for BCS is a mile wide and a half-inch deep, and very little of it (as in the case of Isaac Cox) holds up to close scrutiny. And the audience for these claims either can not, or will not, police themselves by calling out slipshod “research.”
The Confederacy was a big, complicated place, and people (then and now) are complicated creatures, with all kinds of motivations. There almost certainly were a handful of men who acted, entirely unofficially, in capacities that were largely indistinguishable from those of white soldiers. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on teasing out those few cases and really understanding then, the advocates pushing the BCS meme throw out anything and everything as “evidence” to support their case, even without (as here, apparently) closely reading the evidence they actually cite. They’re looking for needles in the haystack, but doing it by throwing fistfuls of straw at the reader and saying “see? See? I told you!”
Whether it’s conscious or not, I don’t know, but what’s undeniable is that
I recently read an article about Jewish concentration camp inmates that were forced into assisting the Nazis in the extermination of other Jews. They also worked in factories making everything from clothing, equipment and munitions. They served as cooks, servants, etc. So, using the LCT theory, the Jews were Nazi soldiers too?
If you look carefully at the above document all words other than “servant” are written in a flowing hand……. The word “servant” is written in an entirely different hand or so it appears to me. It is known that on some pension rolls the actual rank or duty of some black Confederates were erased or scratched out and the word “servant” written in in it’s place. I am wondering if this is the case here.
I don’t see it as being a different hand, but that’s open to conjecture.
You’d have to know why the change was made — if by “actual rank or duty” you mean the phrasing that was pre-printed on the application forms, that did happen, and the change reflects a clarification of the man’s real role in 1861-65. The problem is not the change on the form, but knowing whether the change is an appropriate correction.
It’s a bit of a quandary, because if you’re going to argue that the man’s “actual” status was improperly changed to “servant,” then you have to have independent documentation of what that actual status really was — when often the pension record itself is the only documentation of any kind. We’ve seen cases like Richard Quarls, for example, where pensions were awarded to a former servant based on an apparent mix-up with enlistment rolls. Pension records are useful, but not definitive in determining a man’s actual status 30-50 years previously.
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