Feature Diaspora
muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down . . . and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the federal government,” he wrote. Tis is not news to Nelson Winbush.
His grandfather, Louis Napoleon Nelson, was, Winbush says, a Black Confeder- ate who served as a private in a Tennes- see Cavalry regiment in the Confederate Army. Winbush’s slave grandfather was brought to the battlefront by his slave master to cook and clean for him. A retired headmaster from Kissimmee in Florida, Winbush says his grandfather eventually won his freedom. Once free, he volun- teered to fight for the South as a rifleman. Winbush has a photo of his grandfather in a Confederate uniform. He say he fought for the South because he believed it was better the devil you knew than the devil you did not. Asked whether it was really possible to be both black and a Confeder- ate, Winbush says “yes”. “Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray.” Because his grandfather served the
Confederacy, Winbush was invited re- cently to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organisation whose mission is to preserve “the history and legacy of Confederate heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern cause.” But critics of Black Confederates like
Winbush say they are dupes being used by racists. Tey reject the idea that large numbers of black slaves fought willingly for a Confederate army that wanted to keep them enslaved. “Tese Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery,” says Civil War historian James McPherson. A former professor of history at Princeton University in New Jersey, he dismisses the recent rash of books on Black Confederates as “pseudo history”. Another critic, Robert Krick, author of
several celebrated books on the Confeder- acy, said he examined the military records of more than 100,000 Confederate soldiers and found only a handful belonging to black soldiers. “It’s pure fantasy”, he says. Ervin L. Jordan Jnr , the African-Amer-
ican Civil War historian, does not agree. Author of Black Confederates and Afro- Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Jordan, a professor at the University of Virginia, says blacks who wore Confederate grey
76 | April 2011 New African
have been deliberately excised from his- tory. “Tey are the Civil War’s forgotten people,” says Jordan, “yet their existence was more widespread than American his- tory has recorded.” Jordan says he unearthed a document
in which a white slave master, captured by Northern troops with one of his slaves, agreed to swear allegiance to the Union in exchange for his freedom. Interestingly, the slave refused, saying “Massa [‘Master’] had no principles”. Jordan added: “Numer- ous Afro-Virginians, free blacks and slaves, were genuine Southern loyalists, not as a consequence of white pressure but due to their preferences.” Before Jordan published his book on
Black Confederates in 1995, other books on the subject had been published. But none of them was written by respected black scholars who taught at respected in- stitutions, like the University of Virginia. Jordan’s critics have accused him of being a foil for white Southern extremists and making the incredible seem credible. But Jordan insists unapologetically:
“Black Confederate loyalty was more widespread than American history has acknowledged.” He, like Winbush, insists he is not being used by white Southerners eager to rewrite America’s history of slavery and the special part the South played in it. Winbush says he is not a black man who has taken up the cause of the white South. He is a Southerner who has taken up the Southern cause, he insists. Taking up the “Southern cause” has made Winbush a popular figure on the conservative lecture circuit. He has travelled from Southern town to Southern town delighting white conservatives with the story of his grand- father and the Black Confederates. Te American Civil War “wasn’t about
slavery”, insists Winbush, sounding like the apologist for the South that his crit- ics claim he is. “It was about states’ rights and tariffs.” However, his views are shared by other black Civil War revisionists who have sprung up recently. Among them is Anthony Hervey, president of the Black Confederate Soldier Foundation. Hervey made news recently after he dressed him- self in a Confederate uniform and marched across the University of Mississippi campus waving a Confederate flag. But of all the African-Americans who
claim kinship with the Confederate South, H. K. Edgerton, who is from Asheville,
“ Blacks who wore
Confederate grey are ‘the Civil War’s forgotten people’, claim the revisionist historians.”
Above and top right: Around 200,000 black soldiers fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, as part of the United States Colored Troops. Right: Robert Hayes of the League of the South, whose view is that the South should not be ashamed of slavery
North Carolina, is the most colourful and outspoken. A former president of a chapter of the civil rights group, the National As- sociation for the Advancement of Colored People, Edgerton lost his job because of his controversial pro-Confederate views. “It was better to be an African in the South- land as a slave,” he claims, “than to be free in Africa.” Like Winbush, Edgerton says his
grandfather, too, served in the Confeder- ate Army, as a surgeon’s aide in the 34th North Carolina Confederate Regiment.
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