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

by Kevin M. Levin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469653266
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/09/2019
Series:	Civil War America
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	679,091
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and the award-winning blog Civil War Memory (cwmemory.com).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

When parents discover that their schoolchildren are learning about black Confederates, when visitors read a display at a historic site that celebrates black Confederates, and when undergraduates encounter hagiographies of black Confederates online, they will now have a rigorous and trustworthy resource at their disposal to dismantle this dangerous and corrosive distortion of history.—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of Civil Torture: An American Tradition, a Pulitzer Prize finalist



The pose one sees in photographs of Confederate soldiers with their seemingly loyal 'camp slaves' is in microcosm what the issue of 'black Confederates' became in our own time—a 'pose' by neo-Confederates seeking legitimacy for their fool's cause. Kevin Levin has provided this mythic problem what it dearly needs: a carefully researched and beautifully written history, first of wartime itself, then of the Lost Cause memorial period, and then of the Civil War sesquicentennial in which the question of blacks in gray would not die. Levin's book needs to be widely read as a rich history drawing the life out of a lethal narrative of wish fulfillment.—David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Editorial Reviews

Excellent. . . . a bracing corrective, a slender yet vital volume in the growing library of texts dedicated to dispelling white supremacist talking points.—New Republic



Levin's timely and telling account should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the uses and abuses of history and the power and dangers of mythmaking.—Library Journal, starred review



Provides an important corrective to a thriving, albeit bogus, subtopic of Civil War history, which claims that some African Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. . . . [and] comprehensively dismantles the associated "Lost Cause" narrative.—Choice



Levin's study is the first of its kind to blueprint and then debunk the mythology of enslaved African Americans who allegedly served voluntarily in behalf of the Confederacy. . . . Searching for Black Confederates is highly recommended for historians, students, and enthusiasts of the Civil War and Civil War memory.—Journal of Southern History



Levin has made a significant contribution to the scholarship on the American Civil War and with this volume secures his place as one our most important memory scholars. His methodical evaluation of memory and the black Confederate myth demonstrates ways we can and should explain how and why fabricated historical narratives emerge and are maintained.—H-Net Reviews



This book is a major contribution to any Civil War bookshelf. . . . [Levin] reveals how [the] story of black Confederates bolstered romantic views of the loyal, happy slaves (slavery wasn't so bad after all) and countered the "slavery caused the war" narrative in so doing. . . . Levin's authoritative voice will serve to counter such noxious fake history for years to come.—Journal of African American History



Kevin Levin writes well, and he has definitely done his homework. He presents a strong case debunking the myth of black Confederate soldiers—Journal of America's Military Past



Should be required reading for anyone interested in how Americans remember the Civil War. Acolytes of the Lost Cause will no doubt find little to like. But for anyone else, Levin's powerful indictment should represent the death knell for Civil War's most persistent myth.—America's Civil War



Levin's objective in Searching for Black Confederates is to inoculate the public against the "myth"—to make readers aware of the often-purposeful distortions and agendas that underlie it.— Virginia Magazine of History & Biography



A clear and compelling explanation of the rise of that myth, a vital step toward counteracting its hold on the internet." —North Carolina Historical Review

From the Publisher

★ 07/01/2019

Levin, author of the blog Civil War Memory, incisively reveals the origins and various iterations of the "black Confederate" mythology that white supremacists, pro-Confederate memorialists, and states' righters have conjured up to insist that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War and that slaves loved their masters and "home" so much that they were willing to fight for them. He skillfully deconstructs the so-called evidence that such mythmakers have distorted and even fabricated to make their claims, and tracks the ready way the Internet has circulated such unchecked conjurations. Levin is especially persuasive in showing that slaves who worked for the Confederacy during the war always did so as slaves, and that whites then understood them only as such. Even the Lost Cause mythology of the postwar era that celebrated supposedly loyal slaves never claimed them as soldiers in the cause. That claim came in response to the modern civil rights movement as whites sought to cleanse their own history of racism by creating legions of supposed black Confederates rallying for states' rights. VERDICT Levin's timely and telling account should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the uses and abuses of history and the power and dangers of mythmaking.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal