A speaker on Confederate Memorial Day in Kissimmee, Florida was a black man driving a pickup truck with  country music blasting away from his the tape deck. He wore a suit of gray, on his head  a slouch hat, around his neck a glaring rebel-flag tie, his skin was black and what he had to say infuriated many Civil War scholars and authors.

“The history books were written by Yankees and they’ve seen fit to leave out a lot”,  Nelson Winbush told a crowd of 40 whites along side the Kissimmee, Florida rodeo grounds. “Better than 90,000 blacks fought for the south”.

Mr. Winbush told of his slave grandfather, Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to battle in the Civil War with his master's sons and went to his grave in 1934; wearing a Confederate uniform. Mr. Winbush said scholars have covered up and lied about black loyalty to the South rather than upset the Northern orthodoxy about the Civil War, what it stood for and what transpired during the war.

When most Americans think of Civil War soldiers, the colors that come to mind are blue and gray;  not black. Until the Civil War movie "Glory" came out in 1989, there was little or no recognition of the 200,000 brave blacks who fought for the North. Now, Southerners believe, it is time to honor another forgotten black group who fought in that awful war: the blacks who served in the Confederate Army. What makes this revisionism so amazing and unbelievable  is that a number of its leading supporters are themselves black and  regard their research as liberating, honest and morally right.

Black Confederates have also become victims in the many fights over the rebel battle flag, which flies over the South Carolina state house, forms part of Georgia's state banner, is found on many state, county and city departmental seals and in the homes of thousands; both black and white alike. When New York Gov. George Pataki recently joined a call to remove Georgia's flag from Albany's display of state flags, because of its "racist" component, he immediately threw fuel  and fire in the faces of many. "As many as 50,000 brave young black men were wounded and killed fighting for the South," wrote Charlie Condon, South Carolina's attorney general in a letter. "Your slander of our region and its historic flag is outrageous and offensive." As before, it all began in the North.

What many historians find outrageous and offensive, however,  are the very claims made by men like Mr. Condon’ who later revised his estimate to 50,000 blacks who "served in the Confederate Army." An American University  professor puts the number of black rebels actually shooting people at only 30,000. Still, most historians even regard that number inflated -- by almost 30,000. James McPherson, a Princeton historian and one of the nation's leading Civil War scholars says, "It's pure fantasy,".  Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service says  "It's b.s., wishful thinking." Robert Krick, author of 10 books on the Confederacy, says he has studied the records of 150,000 Southern soldiers and found fewer than a dozen were black. "Of course, if I documented 12, someone would start adding zeros," he stated. How, on the other hand, do all these scholarly historians explain away the Confederate and Union military records which accounts for dozens of black Confederate units and thousands of individual black Confederate soldiers? The archives are full of names, dates, enlistment’s and deaths on the battlefields of honorable, brave black Confederates.

Many scholars such  as these say claims of  black Confederates come from unreliable stories, a blurring of soldiers and laborers who assisted them, and the rapid exchange on the Internet of what Mr. McPherson calls "pseudohistory." They say that thousands of  blacks did  accompany  Confederate  troops, but only as servants, cooks, teamsters and musicians , and most were slaves who were forced to serve involuntarily until the final days of the war;  that  the Confederacy staunchly refused to enlist black soldiers. They claim that some  blacks  carried  guns  for  their  masters and often wore castoff uniforms, which explains eyewitness accounts of blacks units, but that they were not really black Confederates.

Many historians in the North are quite angry over what they perceive as the twisting of  political correctness to fuel the black Confederate movement. Leslie Rowland, a University of Maryland historian says, "It's a search for a multicultural Confederacy, a desperate desire to feel better about your ancestor;  if you suggest that some blacks supported the South, then you can deny that the Confederacy was about slavery and white supremacy." An Amherst College historian, David Blight, compares the trend to bygone notions of happy "plantation darkies."

Confederate groups invited to Civil War veterans reunions openly invited ex-slaves to their reunions, and today the descendants of those ex-slaves are still invited to  all Confederate functions. A Senate bill was actually approved in 1923 for the establishment of a "mammy" monument in Washington D.C.; but it was swept under the carpet and the monument was never built. Blight says, the subject of  Black Confederates,  is  simply a new and more acceptable way to "legitimize the Confederacy."  Defenders of Confederate heritage, however,  say they are only setting the record straight and battling another historical falsehood conceived by the North: that anyone who honors, likes or defends the Confederacy and Confederate symbols must be a racist. Sons of Confederate Veterans posted a "fact sheet" on its web page during one Black History Month, stating that thousands of  blacks served the Confederacy "because it was their home, and they hoped for the reward of patriotism." Lt. Commander in Chief, Patrick Griffin, of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, says black service to the southern cause reveals "a certain amount of solidarity" between slaves and masters. "Slavery was not a good thing, but it was part of the culture at the time. You had black and white people fighting to preserve their culture." That was true both in the North and in the south.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans and other groups always make a point of giving credit to blacks who write on the subject, even though it isn't always welcomed by the writers themselves. They say some people use their material selectively to promote their own agenda.  Still, Ervin Jordan Jr., a black professor and archivist at the University of Virginia says,  he resents the criticism he receives from liberal academics and fellow blacks, who feel he is "airing dirty laundry" and aiding racists in his writing about black loyalty to the South. He often cites many historic examples of "people fighting in the forces of their oppressors"; not only blacks but Indians as well , who scouted for the U.S. Army and whose people were often massacred by those same armies. He says, "I don't think black Confederates should be pushed back in the closet because they're inconvenient or make us uncomfortable,". 

 SOURCES

Blight, David, Amherst College

Horwitz, Anthony, The Wall Street Journal

Jordon,, Jr., Ervin, Univ. of Virginia

Sons of Confederate Veterans

Winebush, Nelson, Kissimmee, Florida