The notion of "black Confederates" continues to be a tasteless falsehood.

"A man who doesn't know the truth is just an idiot, but a man
who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook." - Bertolt Brecht

The widespread internet debunking of the faked photo at right is of course an excellent development, but there's no reason to expect it to do much to slow down the morally bankrupt campaign to convince people who aren't paying close attention that there were large numbers of black Confederate soldiers fighting for the South.  Up until one encounters this particular case, it is just barely possible to think that these attempts have been based merely in ignorance. But the painstaking analysis of this photo by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, upon which the general debunking is based, proves that blatant dishonesty is also involved.

Their paper, "Retouching History: the Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph," should be read in full, but here's a brief summary of what they found.  The historical photo upon which the forgery was built is of members of the 25th Regiment of United States Colored Troops, photographed in Philadelphia during the winter of 1862 and wearing U.S. Army regulation issue light blue wool overcoats.  As you see, the coats show up as gray in a black-and-white photograph.  Here's the original picture:

The close observer will detect the presence of their commanding officer, wearing what is indisputably a Union uniform, and will further notice that this officer has been cropped out of the "black Confederates" version.  This is enough to settle the matter of dishonesty, but Handler and Tuite have more:

• The original photo was used as the basis for an 1864 poster recruiting black enlistments in the Union Army, further establishing its Northern provenance. 
• The belt buckle of the soldier seventh from the left in the original photo (fifth from the left in the faked version) has "US" clearly marked on it.  It has been obscured to the point of illegibility in the forgery.  (I can't post the photos large enough to make this point clear, so that's another reason to see Handler and Tuite's article, where they can.)
• The caption superimposed on the cropped photo, "1st Louisiana Native Guard 1861," seems intended to be the clincher: hey, it must be the Louisiana Native Guard, it's printed right on the photo itself! But the technology to superimpose printing on photographs seems not to have existed in the 1860s.  Also, their name is Guards, plural.
• Although the font of the caption seems vaguely old-fashioned enough to maybe be from the 19th Century, it is in fact a modern font called Algerian, designed in 1968 and standard equipment in some versions of Microsoft Word--therefore usable in Photoshop and other image-manipulation programs.  

1864 Union recruiting poster based on the original photo

I wrote some time ago about the case of Silas Chandler, a Mississippi slave taken along to war when his master went into the Confederate army.  The master's descendants had apparently grown up with family history that said the master had freed Silas the year before the war and the two of them had enlisted together and served in the same regiment.  None of this turned out to be true: researchers on the PBS show History Detectives dug up enough primary documentary evidence to make clear that Silas was never freed by his master and was in camp not as a soldier but as the property of a soldier.  But I'm not aware of any reason to assume the master's descendants were consciously lying:  most of us are willing to believe the family history we grew up with.  There's no doubt with this case, though: this forgery was put up by people intent on doing a bad thing.

Among all the other things wrong with this, it's disrespectful to the actual Louisiana Native Guards, who were a Creole unit of the Louisiana state militia and nominally part of the Confederate army.

So, you might wonder, if the real Native Guards were even only technically part of the rebel army, why do neo-Confederates have to invent lies about them in order to make their case?  Why not just point at the facts and say, "See?  Black Confederates!"  Well, the full facts don't do much to further the impression that neo-Confederates wish to convey, that blacks across the South actively supported the Confederate cause and were willing to fight for it in an army in which they were welcome.

Antebellum Louisiana was unique in that, as results of laws enacted under previous Spanish rule as well as immigration by French-speaking Caribbean blacks, it had a sizable population of free, property-owning people of color.  As a U.S. territory and then in the early days of statehood, Louisiana gradually eliminated or eroded various rights of this group, but even so, many members of pre-war Louisiana's free black community had accumulated enough wealth that they owned good-sized plantations--and the slaves that were needed to run them.  From the Encyclopedia of Louisiana:

from the
Durnford family website

In Placquemines, Orleans, St. John the Baptist, Iberville, St. Landry, Pointe Coupee, Natchitoches, as well as other parishes free people of color entered the planter class, owning sugar and cotton plantations and more than twenty slaves.  In some ways sugar planter Andrew Durnford, who owned St. Rosalie Plantation, in Placquemines Parish, was representative of this group. . . . By 1850 Andrew Durnford was listed as owning seventy slaves.  He and other free black slave owners treated their own slave labor force in much the same manner as his white neighbors, buying, selling, and disciplining their human chattel.

To say the least, this is a group of pre-Civil War blacks with an atypical set of concerns.  From a different entry in the Encyclopedia, here's the career of the militia regiment they helped raise:

In April 1861, a group of influential free men of color met in New Orleans and formed a regiment called the Native Guards. . . . Historians disagree about the motivations of the men who raised this regiment.  Some suggest that the Afro-Creole leaders acted out of fear, that they created the Native Guards to assuage the anxieties of those who saw free blacks as a dangerously disloyal population in the Confederacy.  Other historians argue that the Native Guards reflected the economic and cultural ties black elites shared with their white counterparts.  They contend that Afro-Creoles hoped that military volunteerism might earn them full citizenship in the Confederacy, something that was denied to them under the flag of the United States.  A third assertion, far more dubious, made by neo-Confederate historians suggests that the Confederate Native Guards represent a kind of proof that the Civil War was not about slavery, or at the very least, that the Confederacy did not hew to the ideology of white supremacy.

Whatever the motivations of the Native Guard's leaders, neither the State of Louisiana nor the Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia, knew what to do with these black soldiers. Not until the loss of New Orleans was imminent were weapons issued to the Native Guards. With the Union Navy steaming up the Mississippi River toward New Orleans, Gen. Mansfield Lovell ordered the free black regiment to keep peace in the city while his rebel army plundered it of anything portable enough to take with them in their retreat.  Left behind by their comrades, the Native Guards quietly dissolved as the Union Adm. David Farragut's squadron arrived at the levee on April 26, 1862.

 Ultimately, the greatest contribution of these so-called "black Confederates" was that they served as the basis for a new, Union version of the Native Guards.  In the summer of 1862, a delegation of its officers . . . met with Gen. Benjamin Butler in New Orleans to swear their loyalty to the Union and tender their services to the Army.

Their dissolution as a Confederate unit in April was actually their second.  They had been forced to disband in February 1862 by the Louisiana State Legislature, which passed a comprehensive militia reorganization statute, the first sentence of which limited militia enlistment to whites.  But desperation is the mother of Confederate interest in black troops, so the governor ignored the law and called them back into service when Farragut's ships entered the Mississippi in March.

Funeral procession of Andre Calloux,

Native Guards captain killed at Ft. Hudson

As Union soldiers, the Guards had a distinguished career, fighting alongside white troops at Fort Hudson, where their skill and courage contributed to the country's change of mind about the suitability of blacks as soldiers.

Oh, and another reason neo-Confederates can't come up with a legit photo of the Native Guards proudly serving in gray:  neither the Confederate Army nor the State of Louisiana ever provided the Guards with uniforms.  That's how seriously "black Confederates" were taken by real Confederates. 

Black Confederates? Not so much.

Elizabeth Margolius, who is directing Opus 1861 for us this spring, and I are in a workshop this week for the show, listening to an amazingly good bunch of singers and musicians play through the songs we've chosen in the structure we've tried to build, and talking about the songs and their context and so on.  One thing that's come up is the ongoing disinformation campaign to convince us all that there were black Confederate soldiers fighting for the South.  Thousands of them.

One of the singers recently saw an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 2009 that featured a Civil War tintype showing the above picture of a white man and a black man together, both armed and in Confederate uniforms.  The white's family history related that they were friends who served together.  Both men had the last name Chandler:  Andrew Chandler had owned Silas Chandler, but had freed him a year before the war, and both had enlisted in a Mississippi regiment of the Confederate army.

I don't doubt that Andrew Chandler's family historians are sincere, but the claim that Silas was an enlisted Confederate soldier is clearly preposterous.  The picture is more plausibly explained by the fact that many Confederates brought slaves along with them into their units, and frequently had them dress in uniforms like mascots.  Posing with his mascot, and letting the mascot hold arms like he's a real soldier, was apparently a diversion Andrew Chandler had time for.

The Confederacy outlawed using blacks as soldiers, until the Confederate Congress legalized it in an act of sheer desperation eighteen days before Lee surrendered.  Of course they wouldn't want black soldiers.  The South feared a widespread slave uprising, which was why John Brown's raid had galvanized them so.  Why on earth would they want to train thousands of blacks to use weapons and organize themselves into fighting units?  What happens after the South wins the war and then wants all these armed warriors to go back to picking cotton?

It turns out another PBS show, History Detectives, aired a segment about the Chandler tintype just last week and destroyed Andrew Chandler's descendants' version of things.  Andrew could not have freed Silas in 1860, because the Mississippi constitution at the time outlawed freeing slaves; it couldn't be done.  The 1860 census recorded zero free blacks living in the county where Silas resided.  The application Silas filed in 1916 for a Confederate pension when he was indigent and too infirm to work was on the form given to those freedmen who, while enslaved, had been used as servants by their enlisted masters ("What was the number of the regiment or name of the vessel in which your master served?").  And the roster for the regiment in question still exists; it lists Andrew as serving, but not Silas.  As for the weapons Silas holds in the photo, the Atlanta expert in Confederate photos consulted by History Detectives pronounced them "a photographer's prop."

The tintype is an unimportant curio, except that it's being used to further the agenda of Confederate apologists.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy have placed on his grave a Confederate Iron Cross and a Confederate battle flag in order to claim him as a Confederate soldier.  This is just plain ugly.  The groups are part of a movement among "neo-Confederates" to establish the myth of black Confederates as history.  Their object, of course, is to make slavery seem to be not the main cause of the war:  if the South were fighting to preserve and extend slavery, would so many blacks have enlisted to help it?  So the movement spreads as fact, among other lies, the howler that Stonewall Jackson commanded two black battalions.

Their disinformation campaign has been conducted mostly on the internet, but briefly crept into actual print last year, when a fourth-grade history textbook used in Virginia schools repeated the Stonewall Jackson falsehood as fact.  The book's author, Joy Masoff, is not a neo-Confederate, merely an ignoramus (her book also got the number of Confederate states, and the year the U.S. entered World War One, both wrong).  After a public outcry, school officials pulled the book.  Its publishers say that from now on they are going to start having people who actually know things read their books before they send them out. 

As for Silas Chandler, in 2008 fifty-two of his descendants signed a petition to get the Confederate paraphernalia removed from his grave.  An excerpt from a letter explaining their position:

In a cynical attempt to further their political objectives, the descendants of Silas’ oppressors have decided  to place an iron cross and a confederate flag on Silas’ grave.  This is equivalent to the descendants of the Gestapo placing a swastika on the grave of a Holocaust victim.  The placing of the confederate flag on Silas’ grave is a gross affront to the memory of Silas, and nothing more than  an attempt to rewrite history.

 On October 3 of this year, eighteen days ago, Myra Chandler Sampson, one of Silas's great-granddaughters, posted the following reply when a commenter on an article about Silas asked if they had received an answer from either the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy:

Not yet.