Black Confederates

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Question

To what extent did African Americans, slave or free, fight for the Confederacy?

Answer

While there are isolated instances of African Americans serving in the Confederate ranks, there is overwhelming evidence that this small number represents rare and exceptional cases: historian David Blight estimates that the number of black soldiers in the Confederate ranks was fewer than 200. That small number represents some partial companies of slaves training as soldiers discovered by Union forces after the fall of Richmond. One reason that only a handful of blacks fought for the Confederacy is that until the last weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress expressly forbade arming enslaved African Americans, who made up the vast majority of the black population in the South. Given white southerners' longstanding fears of a slave uprising (fears intensified by a few abortive attempts in the first half of the 19th century and exacerbated to the point of hysteria by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859), the acute resistance of Confederates to arming blacks is understandable. Putting muskets in the hands of enslaved African Americans presented more than simply a concrete threat—embracing the notion that blacks could serve as soldiers in the same fashion as whites threatened deeply-held Southern ideas of race-based honor and masculinity. As Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs put it, "The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced."

Opposition to African American soldiers was passionate on both sides. The notion of fighting alongside blacks violated many deeply-held beliefs of white Northerners and Southerners alike.

Northerners were scarcely more enthusiastic about arming African Americans than their Southern counterparts. For the first year and a half of the war, Abraham Lincoln's administration eschewed the enlistment of black troops, fearful of a public backlash. Not until Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did the Union Army begin to enroll African Americans in its ranks; even then, the decision proved deeply controversial, particularly among Northern Democrats. The Confederacy did not seriously entertain the idea of arming enslaved African Americans until a full year later, when the war situation in the South had grown much more desperate. In January 1864, months after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Patrick Cleburne (one of the most successful combat commanders in the Confederate Army) circulated a proposal to arm the slaves. Northern successes on the battlefield, Cleburne argued, threatened the South with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." Sacrificing the first, Cleburne held, could save the rest; the Confederacy could check Union advances by recruiting an army of slaves and guaranteeing freedom "within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy." A dozen of Cleburne's subordinates backed his proposal.

Lee wrote a letter to a Confederate congressman characterizing the plan as "not only expedient but necessary."

To most Southerners, however, Cleburne's plan was appalling. The prospect of arming the slaves struck one division commander as "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A brigade commander suggested that accepting enslaved African Americans as soldiers would "contravene the principles upon which we fight." Sensing the potential for the debate to cause dangerous dissension within the ranks, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to cease the discussion. Debate over the decision to arm enslaved African Americans resurfaced many months later, as the Confederacy's situation grew progressively more dire both on and off the battlefield. When another similar proposal reemerged it carried the imprimatur of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and perhaps the most revered figure in the South. In February 1865, Lee wrote a letter to a Confederate congressman characterizing the plan as "not only expedient but necessary." Even with Lee's support, though, the bill proved deeply divisive. It was not until March 13, 1865, just weeks before Lee's surrender, that the Confederate Congress passed legislation allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers. The two companies discovered by Union troops after the fall of Richmond never went into battle. Opposition to African American soldiers was passionate on both sides. The notion of fighting alongside blacks violated many deeply-held beliefs of white Northerners and Southerners alike. In the Union army, African Americans served in segregated regiments under white officers; many were used for menial tasks rather than fighting, and those that went into combat suffered abuse from their white comrades and were often singled out as targets by their Confederate foes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of African American troops fought bravely and with distinction, and by the end of the war, their actions in combat had begun to change the assumptions of at least some of their comrades regarding the fitness of blacks for battle. Despite their demonstrated fighting ability, it was nearly another full century before the United States Army finally desegregated individual units.

Bibliography

Blight, David. A Slave No More. United States: Harcourt Books, 2007. Freedmen & Southern Society Project. "Confederate Law Authorizing the Enlistment of Black Soldiers, as Promulgated in a Military Order." The Making of America."The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies." Washington, 1880-1901. Series 4. Vol. 3. Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Examining the Korean War

Teaser

Allow students to explore historical events through multiple perspectives with this lesson.

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Description

Students compare two conflicting textbook accounts of the start of the Korean war, and formulate hypotheses for the source of each textbook.

Article Body

This is a simple, straightforward lesson that not only provides students with the opportunity to analyze causes of the Korean War, but also supplies an excellent opportunity to teach some fundamental principles of historical thinking—namely, that textbooks are historical sources written from a specific point of view, and that differing perspectives produce contrasting narratives of historical events. The lesson begins with a brief discussion of reasons that textbooks—especially textbooks from different countries—might offer differing accounts of the same event. After a brief background lecture on the Korean War [supplemented by slides available here (under lesson 4)], students read two conflicting textbook accounts of the start of the war, and answer a set of guiding questions. The guiding questions are especially helpful at directing students beyond the superficial differences between the documents, encouraging them to pay attention to specific language that might make one document more or less trustworthy than the other. Finally, students are asked to hypothesize which passage came from a North Korean textbook, and which came from a South Korean textbook, again citing specific passages of text to support their hypothesis. One of the greatest strengths of this lesson is the degree to which it is anchored in the documents, and keeps bringing students back to the text itself. Often, students can state an overall sense or impression left by a document, but have difficulty articulating exactly what about the document created that impression. This lesson requires students to zero in on specific language within the text that achieves the authors’ purpose and ultimately reveals something about the source of the document.

Topic
Korean War
Time Estimate
1 to 2 class sessions
flexibility_scale
5
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes

A brief “mini-lecture” at the beginning of the lesson provides some context for the Korean war, including a map provided here (Click on the Powerpoint for Lesson 4).

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes

The lesson requires a close reading of the text; writing requirements are minimal, but could easily be expanded.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes

The two documents included provide varying perspectives on the start of the Korean War. The primary objective of the lesson is for students to analyze these interpretations in order to indentify each document’s source.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes

This is perhaps the lessons strongest point, as it requires close reading in order to make a hypothesis about source information for two conflicting documents.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes

A graphic organizer precedes the guiding questions to help students organize information from each document.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

Union or Secession: Virginians Decide

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Annotation

Created by the Library of Virginia as part of its Virginia Memory project, this website lets visitors explore the events leading up to and immediately following Virginia's secession from the Union on April 17, 1861. Short essays and more than 200 primary sources, including newspaper articles, speeches, letters, prints and drawings, official documents, maps, and other materials, present the story from a variety of perspectives, including those of women, African Americans, and people both pro- and anti-secession.

The website is divided into six different sections, each providing a different way of approaching the content. “Virginians Decide” divides Virginian history from the beginning of 1860 to July 1861 into 12 chronological sections, covering events including the 1860 presidential election, the meeting of the Virginia Convention of 1861, the formation of West Virginia, and the entrance of Virginia into the Civil War. Each section features a 300–500-word essay introducing the topic, accompanied by 5–45 related primary sources, links to the biographies of related historical figures, and 1–3 more short essays looking at aspects of the topic in greater detail. “Explore” lets visitors search all of the site's primary sources by 11 themes (Business and Economics, Convention of 1861, Elections and Politics, Journalism, Making West Virginia, Military, Restored and Loyal Government, Secessionism, Slavery, Unionism, Women) and seven geographical regions.

Visitors can get to know more about the people in the sources in “People.” Forty 400–2,500-word biographies give overviews of the lives of journalists, members of the Convention of 1850–1851 and of 1861, members of the Wheeling Convention, politicians, ministers, escaped slaves, free black businessmen, writers, army officers, slave traders, and others. Each biography includes related primary sources and links to related biographies. “Timeline” lets visitors browse sources arranged on an interactive timeline covering 1849 to 1862, and “For Educators” includes four downloadable lesson plans (on John Brown and the Fugitive Slave Law).

Of special interest to educators is “Callie's Mailbag.” This section gathers together 22 letters sent to a young educated Virginian woman, daughter of a secession-sympathetic Campbell County family. Callie Anthony was in her early 20s when she received these letters, which date from Dec. 1859 to Jul. 1861 and come from relatives and friends, expressing a wide range of pro- and anti-secession views.

Scanned documents and images can be downloaded in high resolution, and transcripts of written and printed documents are also downloadable. A valuable site for anyone teaching Virginian Civil War history, or wanting to give students a closer look at tensions in a seceding state.

Virginia Memory

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Annotation

A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.

"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.

Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.

Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."

"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.

An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.