Long before the War Between the States and long after, there were wild accusations about the inhumanity of slavery and the wretched plight of African Americans supposedly brutalised by Southern plantation owners.

John Brown fanned the flames of pure hatred and racial fanaticism in Kentucky. Apart from widespread murder, for which he was quite rightly hanged, he caused much damage to peace by sewing wide the seeds of racial contempt that grew with the maelstrom that has become known as The American Civil War.

In spite of history’s twisted account, slavery was not the cause of that horrific war. There’s no doubt some slaves were inhumanely treated by both the North and South, both had slaves throughout the war but it’s a fallacy to believe all African Americans were disgruntled with their lot. The reality is that many suffered more during the war on the streets of New York at the hands of white gangs and after the war when they were turned out of Southern plantations and homes and left to somehow fend for themselves or deported to faraway foreign shores.

Lincoln’s solution to the so called Negro Problem was to endorse an American colonial state in Africa called Liberia after Liberty and transport as many as possible, regardless of where they were born or what part of Africa they originally came from. In any language this act cannot be interpreted as freedom or liberty.

Today Liberia is the centre of much violence and anguish that to some extent is inherited from conflict caused over Lincoln’s cajoled deportation and displacement of so many African Americans. Liberia has always struggled with its identity and past, one that has carried through to current violent, bloody, political and economic turmoil in that country.

Famed African American abolitionist Frederick Douglas urged Lincoln to wage war against slavery but Lincoln ignored his repeated requests and even the current public debate, insisting the war was for Union. 

While there were numerous accounts of Southern slaves eagerly awaiting the salvation of President Lincoln's Union soldiers marching steadfastly south, there's much more to this fascinating story.

Lincoln had a penchant for minstrel songs and far from being the saviour of African Americans, whom he liked to call niggers and blacks, he had ethnic cleansing plans to completely rid the United States of all of them, a massive and unimaginable undertaking.

After the war, in 1916, young enthusiasts organised a reunion of grey bearded Confederate veterans and were horrified when numbers of black Americans turned up for the occasion dressed in their best, some in Southern uniforms. They tried to turn them away until some of the veterans recognised the old boys and rushed to embrace them. This picture captures that moment, one of many from that time that were ignored because they defy the preferred historic account of the conflict.

Using Federal funds Lincoln removed some five thousand black men, women and children, from Northern States to the tiny island of Haiti, also scene of much present day political turmoil. South America was also used to dump unwanted coloured people. To this day exiled white Confederate States citizens (Confederados) exist there and preserve the traditions of the Old South. The irony is that Kock’s contract was signed by Lincoln only a day before his famous proclamation permanently freeing slaves in Confederate States or States in rebellion but not in Northern States.

In a speech at Peoria Illinois, Lincoln brazenly says, “ I don’t see blacks as equals and advocate colonisation of them.”  Lincoln’s planned program of racial separation to permanently rid the USA of millions of African Americans was a racial prejudice and ethnic cleansing on a scale of the later Nazi regime

Had Lincoln not been assassinated it’s likely the United States would have embarked on the same journey of white supremacy and apartheid as South Africa, the very thing he accused the South of. Had the war not been fought its possible to speculate the South would have found a new relationship with its coloured people, for there is evidence a plenty that this relationship was evolving, all be it very slowly. History is twisted here too, Lincoln was assassinated by a Northerner.

Lincoln’s racial intentions were broadly known amongst Southern blacks; no doubt the South ensured they knew.

African Americans, on both sides, were working and fighting valiantly in defence of what they saw as their freedom and homes and what they thought was right.

Black militiamen fighting for the Confederacy, operated Battery 2 of the Richmond Howitzers. They saw action as early as the battle of 1^st Manassas, or as Federals liked to call it, Bull Run, a disaster for the North.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forest, who was later to join the now infamous Ku Klux Klan as its first Imperial Wizard, had slaves and freemen willingly serving under his command. General Forest always spoke highly of their abilities and loyalty. After the war he said, "Black Southerners in gray stayed with me. Better Confederates did not live." So here we see African Americans actually standing shoulder to shoulder with their white brothers from the South.

Free black musicians, cooks, soldiers and teamsters earned the same pay as white Confederate privates and more in some cases, unlike their Union counterparts who were often treated with contempt and paid less. One Confederate soldier remarked, when a Union coloured company fled from the battlefield, “I don’t know who killed more of them, us or the Yankees.” Union troops turned ranks and fired on their own fleeing coloured soldiers just as Russian soldiers did under Stalin’s instructions during World War II.

In the South a quota was set for 300 thousand black soldiers for the Confederacy and 83% of Richmond’s male slave population volunteered for duty. It should be remembered that many slaves remained on farms and cotton plantations when their owners had long left to fight and die for their country and homeland. They left behind their women and children, unprotected but for the secure knowledge they were safe in the custody of loyal slaves and freemen. After the war, to protect these now defenceless women and children, Bedford Forest saw the Ku Klux Klan, not as a tool to persecute African Americans but to protect the many hapless families preyed upon by so called “Union Liberators” and “Carpetbaggers.” In 1868 when Forest saw the Klan running off the rails into extremism he ordered it disbanded and the Klan ceased to exist that same year, later disgraceful exploits have no bearing on him.

American University Professor Ed Smith estimates some 93 thousand African Americans willingly served the Confederacy in some way during the war, both as freemen and women and as slaves. In Louisiana freed blacks gave reasons for fighting for the Confederacy in a letter published by the New Orleans' Daily Delta.

"The free coloured population love their homes, their properties, even their own slaves and recognise no other country than Louisiana, and are ready to shed their blood for her defence.”

This loyalty to country meant little to Lincoln, in fact it might have further flamed his desire to transport these too loyal African Americans to places far away from the U.S.A.      

Louisiana recruits went on to say,

“We have no sympathy for Abolitionists; no love for the North, but we have plenty for Louisiana. We will fight for her in 1861 as we fought in 1814-15."

African American professor at Southern University, Dr Leonard Haynes, talking about history’s denial, says, “When you eliminate the black Confederate soldier, you’ve eliminated the history of the South.”

Lincoln had no love for enslaved blacks and wasn’t waging war against the South for their benefit he made that plain. 

"I will say that I am not, nor have I ever been, in favour of bringing about, in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

His 1863 Emancipation Proclamation reveals the depth of his contempt for African Americans by freeing only those slaves who were in States rebelling against the North, people he had no authority over. It didn't apply to slaves in the North’s West Virginia and areas and states not in rebellion with the North.

General Ulysses Grant had slaves who had to wait for the 13th Amendment to be freed. Explaining why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant said jokingly, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."

Lincoln waged war on a pretext to preserve the Union and later when the horror and cost of that war in lives was revealed, he claimed it was to free slaves. Slaves that his Union States also hypocritically held throughout the war and persecuted with displacement and transportation during and after it.

By 1867 the American Colonisation Society had transported more than 13 thousand African Americans to Liberia. With the sudden presence of 4 million freed slaves after the war, the death of Abraham Lincoln and loss of political and financial support, the program of transportation was considered to be too big a problem and abandoned.

The 1783 peace agreement with England, The Treaty of Paris, created 13 sovereign Federal nations, a strange coincidence that later there should be 13 Confederate nations. In 1787 they came together as principals to create a Federal government, as specified in a Constitution, it gave specific delegated authority. In the business world, principals always retain the right to dismiss unsatisfactory agents; the South acted on that right, States Rights, when it seceded.

From the moment Confederate batteries fired their guns on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had the pretext for war. Through force of arms The War Between the States settled the question of secession, enabling a victorious Federal government to run roughshod over States' Rights, rights specified by the Constitution's 10th Amendment. It also gave Lincoln the chance to begin his long planned transportation of African Americans.

Shortly after the Yankee surrender of Fort Sumter in 1861, a Confederate company of armed and uniformed coloured soldiers was seen marching proudly through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina.

Later, a company of freed African Americans offered their services as soldiers to the Governor of Tennessee. The Governor accepted them, providing they were 17 or over. In 1861 the 1^st Louisiana Regiment of Native Guards was formed entirely of freed black men.

In 1865 the Confederate Congress, all be it too late, authorised the raising of black regiments to fight in the army of Northern Virginia. Until this time African Americans were largely integrated with regular troops and on equal pay, unlike the North that couldn’t abide black men in its ranks, segregated them and paid them less.

Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group dedicated to giving more accurate accounts of the War Between the States, has long railed against the common concept of Union and black slavery. African Americans fought bravely against the North and it is a disgrace that political propagandists, even to this day, hide their heroic deeds from history. 

His grave is decorated with a Confederate Iron Cross, deservedly placed there in a Confederate Honour Service by

the Mississippi division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, without them this would not have happened.

It wasn’t only the army that benefited from African American Confederates.  1,150 black sailors served the Confederate navy and one is amongst the last Confederates to surrender, on board CSS Shenandoah, (see previous Bugle Story) six months after war’s end.

In the final victory parade in Washington came the ultimate indignity, the Union forbade African Americans from marching, it seems they were the wrong colour. In spite of 10% of the Union army then being comprised of African American descent they were denied the opportunity to march in the final parade. The only commander who could enforce such a despicable order was Abraham Lincoln.

Today, in battle re-enactments in the States, African Americans, dressed in grey Confederate uniforms, carry the Battle Flag honouring the deeds of their brave forebears; this is a very good start.

Professor Ed Smith says, probably the first military monument to honour African Americans who fought for the South is erected at Arlington National Cemetery. Designed by renowned sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel it was dedicated in 1914 on the eve of another horrific war. The monument reveals a black Confederate soldier marching in step with fellow white Confederates. The monument also depicts a white soldier handing his baby to a coloured woman for safe protection before going to battle.

After the war, Moses Ezekiel became friendly with Robert E Lee who encouraged him to study art and help redress the World’s distorted image of the South. In his magnificent Arlington monument Moses more than fulfilled Lee’s dreams he encapsulated them.  

Moses is buried there at Arlington as he wished by his monument in the grounds of Lee’s former mansion and in the company of many fellow Confederates.

History needs rewriting on the subject of African Americans so that we may fully appreciate the true depth of loyalty and courage that Southern people of all colours, including American Indians, felt for their land, culture and place in it. They knew of the shallow promises of Abraham Lincoln and the true motive of his war, their ultimate deportation to lands unknown.

In helping to fight that war on both sides African Americans also helped shape a nation.

In spite of and perhaps because of Abraham Lincoln’s intentions, they forged a rightful place for themselves in the United States as equal partners and citizens. The country is culturally stronger because of them and the South owes Confederate African Americans a great debt, a fact that learned historians and intelligent Southerners are well aware of.