Daughter of Slave who Fought for Confederacy Dies

[Wild Bill]

Although it is limited, blacks served as laborers and combat soldiers in the Confederate Army. There are legitimate black sons of Confederate veterans in Mississippi today, several of Bedford Forrest's aides were black (they made excellent scouts), and an entire artillery battery in the Army of Tennessee was comprised of black gunners. Union troops reported being shot at by blacks in gray uniform in the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia in 1862 and Hanover Junction of the Va central and RF&P railroads was guarded by black troops in 1864-65. The entire 1st SC infantry went to war with each man having his black body servant along. There was an Arkansas Rebel pulled off the battlefield by his own body servant at Wilson's Creek, Mo. It was common place in many battles. It is, to say the least, a highly controversial politically incorrect subject nowadays.

For those interested, see Ervin l. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia; Richard Rollins (ed.), Black Southerners in Gray: Essays on Afro-Americans in Confederate Armies (Redondo Beach, CA: Rank and File Publications,1994); and Robert Durden, The Gray and the Black (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1972). I believe that one article, possibly an entire issue, of North & South Magazine was devoted to the topic a while back. The letters to the editor were heated, to say the least.

Louisiana had three black regiments offer to enlist in the Confederate Army in 1861. Believing that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, as CSA Vice Presodent Alexander Stephens said, Rebel authorities refused to accept them, and in 1863, many of these men enlisted in the Corps D'Afrique in the Union army and played a prominent role in the siege of Port Hudson.

It seems that there were so many black teamsters in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia that even Marylanders were amazed during the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign. They manned Longstreet's entire reserve ammunition wagon train and it never missed a battle.

There are even instances where blacks served in the Texas version of the KKK in 1870, see Allen W. Trelease, White Terror (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1971), and some were pursued by Union authorities all the way to Canada after they participated in the murder of a Freedmen' Bureau agent.