Union soldier
The controversy over "Black Confederates" seems unlikely to die anytime soon. Recent posts by Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates (and the comments on those posts) have inspired me to ponder the possible tactics for combatting the myth that tens thousands of slaves willingly served the Confederacy as enlisted soldiers and its implications (i.e. that slavery was incidental to the Southern economic/social/political regime, that a large number of slaves were unfailingly loyal to their owners, that the war was not about slavery, etc.).
As Ta-Nehisi Coates has rightfully observed, the evidence supporting the "Black Confederates" argument is both anecdotal and incidental. Among the thousands of slaves who were forced to serve the Confederate army and its soldiers as teamsters, manual laborers, cooks, body servants, and orderlies, some may have served willingly and some may have taken up arms at some point. Yet, it would be foolish to turn scattered stories of slaves retrieving their masters' bodies from battlefields or protecting their homes from foraging troops into legions of armed slaves recruited by the Confederate government and willingly fighting to preserve the Confederacy.
Thus, I propose a thought experiment. Anyone who accepts the idea that a significant number of black men fought for the Confederacy must also accept the "fact" that all Civil War armies were chock-full of women. We'll call this the Forgotten Legion Theory.
