A fourth-grade Virginia state history textbook is coming under fire for saying that black soliders fought in large numbers for the South during the Civil War, the Washington Post reports.

“Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson,” according to the textbook, written by Joy Masoff, who is not a historian. She says she found evidence for the statement on the Internet. However, there is no record that black troops fought under Jackson, who died in 1863, two years before Robert E. Lee’s desperation proposal to arm slaves in return for freedom.

The Civil War Gazette says the evidence shows that “under a hundred to as many as several hundred blacks may have actually engaged in combat for the South during the Civil War by actually carrying and discharging a weapon.” By contrast, 180,000 black soldiers fought for the North.

Masoff’s work appears to be based on the claim of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of male descendants of soldiers that argues the Civil War was not about slavery, but protecting individual freedom and defending against an illegal invasion. The SCV’s views are spelled out this paper issued for Black History Month.

While blacks helping whites defend the motherland from Yankee depredation makes a good story now, it wasn’t the argument made at the time. As Georgia ex-governor and Confederate general Howell Cobb famously wrote to Jefferson Davis in opposing Lee’s proposal, “Use all the negroes you can get for cooking, digging, chopping and such. But don’t arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

Guess what, governor? Some 130 years later, General Colin Powell quoted this passage in his autobiography.