Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (Civil War America)

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms.

Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

• Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
• The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
• Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War
• Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today
• Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital (Civil War America)
• Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
• Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)
• Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War
• Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps (Civil War America)