dear historians: "google" is a starting point...

[acroyear]

...but you better damn well double-check the potential bias factor of your sources before you go including it in a textbook, dammit...

Loudoun schools remove textbook that claims black soldiers fought for South:

The publisher has said it will provide a sticker to cover the flawed sentence in "Our Virginia." The state Board of Education, which approved the book, said this week that the claim about African Americans fighting for the Confederacy falls "outside of mainstream Civil War scholarship."

The textbook's author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian, told The Washington Post this week that she substantiated her assertion about black Confederate soldiers primarily by doing an Internet search, which led her to the work of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some other sources. The heritage group disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.

Comments

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

First, the average German went a huge way to both tolerating and implementing the Holocaust (Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Goldhagen, among many other works).

Second, the vast majority of southern secessionists were, as you say, not slaveholders. However, that doesn't mean that they didn't have a stake in slavery as an institution. White supremacy played a huge part in antebellum southern white identity, and even white farmers at the bottom of the income and social scales were invested in keeping black slaves beneath them. These soldiers were not fighting for their slaves, they were fighting for their culture, to which slavery was an integral part.

Third, to address the point of the original article, there were no black confederate soldiers because it was expressly illegal to arm them for any purpose. In the last months of the war this was overturned by a desperate government and the army began recruiting and training black soldiers, but the war ended before any substantial number of them could fight.

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

White supremacy was a universal view at the time and not just limited to the South. While the North outlawed slavery, blacks weren't exactly welcomed with open arms and often times sent back to the South. The Dred Scott decision ensured that slaves were still slaves even if they made it to the North. Face it, at the time, the entire US was a bunch of racist bastards; it wasn't just a Southern thing.

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely correct, and I never meant to imply otherwise. However, since the north (outside of a few cities) had far fewer black inhabitants it wasn't nearly the daily issue that it was in the south.