Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 1524 Commander's Column for January 2024 - Remembering Black Confederates for Black History Month

 February is generally recognized as Black History month in the mainstream indoctrination media.  This provides an opportunity to review the truth around some of the myths surrounding the slaves and freedmen in the South during the period around the War for Southern Independence.  Not to be forgotten is Juneteenth which falls outside of February.  This newly invented holiday supposedly celebrates the last slaves being freed in Texas in June of 1865 with the surrender of the last Confederate troops.  Unfortunately it erroneously associates those events whereas the last slaves were of course freed in Yankee New Jersey in January of 1866 when that state ratified the 13^th Amendment - https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/essex/montclair/2021/02/28/american-dream-paramus-nj-part-north-jersey-slavery-legacy/4212248001/#:~:text=The%20last%2016%20enslaved%20people,about%20New%20Jersey's%20slave%20history . 

It is also generally accepted that all blacks were freedmen who served in the Union army.  In fact, the Southern states had thousands of blacks both freed and serving as slaves who served the Confederate army as body or personal servants to their masters who were serving in a unit, cooks, wagon team drivers, laborers but also as soldiers fighting alongside whites in defense of their homeland.  Officers often had such body servants and some were credited with caring for their masters injured in battle.  They were also recognized as Confederate soldiers and pensioners.    (https://fairfieldgenealogysociety.org/Members_Only/PDF/Articles/Body-Servants.pdf )  

In the “American Conflict”, abolitionist Horace Greeley even stated, “For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy.  They had been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union.”  “In 1861 (he Tennessee legislature) passed the Act for the Relief of Volunteers stating, “the governor is hereby authorized, at his discretion, to receive into the military service of the state, all male free persons of color between the ages of fifteen and fifty years —who may be sound in his mind and body, and capable of actual service.  That such free persons of color shall receive, each, eight dollars per month as pay, for such person shall be entitled to draw, each, one ration per day, and shall be entitled to a yearly allowance each for clothing.”” (https://www.timesnews.net/living/features/were-black-confederate-soldiers-real-or-postwar-propaganda/article_cbcbfbcc-cc19-5f3b-b8b7-8d62f4883e59.html)

This same article recounts of course those black men who served with Forrest’s cavalry numbering around forty-five.  Forrest offered them their freedom if they fought for him and all did even til death and to the end of the WBTS.  Nelson Winbush is an SCV member whose “grandfather Louis Napoleon Nelson, a slave turned freedman rode with Forrest in the 7th Tennessee Cavalry, an integrated unit. According to records, Nelson fought at Shiloh, Lookout Mountain, Brice’s Crossroads and Vicksburg. He later became the 7th Tennessee Cavalry’s chaplain.” 

Holt Collier was a black man in Mississippi “given his freedom papers (he) followed his former owner Howell Hinds to Memphis to join the Confederate Army where he first served as an orderly in a field hospital, then actively fought as a soldier, and served as a spy.   Collier (later) joined the Ninth Texas Calvary, riding with them until the end of the war.”  (https://www.lowerdelta.org/community-news/the-amazing-holt-collier-mississippis-famous-hunting-guide/#:~:text=Holt%20Collier%20was%20born%20a,successful%20hunter%20and%20hunting%20guide.)   He became well known after the WBTS as a hunter and sportsman and famously led President Theodore Roosevelt on a bear hunt in Mississippi in 1902. 

While the Union army often used blacks as cannon fodder in battle, many can’t understand why blacks would have fought for the Confederacy but one has to consider the allegiance to their homes and families who they were defending and to their masters many of whom they held genuine affection.  Edward C. Smith, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., studied this phenomenon and concluded, “What many Americans forget is that there were 5,000 black soldiers that fought with George Washington during the Revolutionary War. And of course in (the War of) 1812 Andrew Jackson, who praised the blacks in his service profusely, also knew that those blacks were taking a risk fighting for the United States government. So if blacks can fight for George Washington, it’s hard for me to reject the idea that their grandsons could not have fought for Robert E. Lee.  I think the problem we have today is that most Americans have a difficult time accepting the past because we read into the past the prejudices of the present. The moment you do that you’re not dealing with history.”