On April 19, 2019, a man—who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag—posted in a Facebook group called “Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of Northern Aggression,” which has more than 2,000 members. “Heads up y’all there’s gonna be a book coming out in sept saying black confederates are a myth,” he wrote. “Be prepared to give a negative review on amazon when it’s released.” “I damned sure will,” another man immediately replied.



SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR’S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH by Kevin M. Levin The University of North Carolina Press 240 pp., $30.00

Within this online community, the publication of Kevin M. Levin’s excellent book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, is nothing less than a declaration of war. In the last several decades, Levin writes, a growing number of people have begun to accept as fact claims that between 500 and 100,000 black soldiers fought in racially integrated units in the Confederate Army. There are hundreds of web sites, legions of online communities, and whole books devoted to perpetuating these claims. Billboards reading “75,000 Confederates of color?” have recently appeared in Missouri, and one fourth-grade Virginia history textbook asserted that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks.” Although it is difficult to measure the pervasiveness of this narrative, one study from 2013 found that 16 percent of students at a Virginia university believed that “blacks fought for the Confederacy.”

Yet, as Levin patiently explains, this is totally untrue—predicated on a misreading and misunderstanding of historical documents, as well as outright lies and manipulations. The myth of black Confederates enables white supremacists to portray the Civil War inaccurately as a struggle over states’ rights, not slavery; as a fight for Southern liberty, not for oppression. This in turn justifies their retrograde and racist politics in the present. To those who have embraced this myth, Levin’s book is a terrifying prospect, and for good reason. Searching for Black Confederates is a bracing corrective, a slender yet vital volume in the growing library of texts dedicated to dispelling white supremacist talking points.

There were plenty of black men present in Confederate Army camps, and even on the gray side of Civil War battlefields. The Confederate Army pressed tens of thousands of slaves into work as teamsters, butchers, blacksmiths, ditchdiggers, and hospital attendants; thousands more were brought to war by their masters, for whom they performed less desirable labor and assisted with washing, sewing, and food preparation. Countless slaves used the excitement of war and the confusion of battle to flee. Many others stayed, some for years, sometimes even saving their masters’ lives and nursing their wounds; they may have felt some sense of kinship with their masters, with whom they were now sharing close quarters and the intimacy of the trenches, but many undoubtedly remained because they had family still on their masters’ homesteads, and they feared reprisals against their loved ones or the loss of the chance to reunite. As the war continued, the increasing flood of escapes led the Confederate Army to employ free blacks—“who, it was believed, had fewer reasons to flee”—though only in “support roles.”

It is true that some black men did occasionally “man artillery and perform as sharpshooters,” likely when they themselves feared Northern shells or after their masters had fallen. But these black men were not soldiers. Indeed, they could not have been. The Confederacy did not allow black men—free or enslaved—to serve in its military. As the Confederate Army began racking up defeats, there were increasing calls to dragoon slaves or pay free blacks to serve as soldiers, and Jefferson Davis eventually voiced his support for this—but it never came to pass. Lee surrendered before a single black Confederate soldier ever marched into battle.