Efforts to Recognize Black Confederates Encounter Flak

Like other members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Emerson Emory says he wants to preserve his Southern heritage. His mission, however, is especially challenging--and controversial.

The 74-year-old Dallas psychiatrist is black, and his insistence that many black Southerners not only supported the Confederacy but fought for it in the Civil War often draws reactions ranging from skepticism to outrage.

“Most of the reaction was among my friends in the black race--they couldn’t understand,” Emory said. “I think it’s one of those things that they don’t want to hear anything about.”

Although recognition of the role black soldiers played for the Union, dramatized in the movie “Glory,” has grown in the last decade, there remains little recognition or even acknowledgment of black Confederates. There is sharp debate about their numbers, if any, and why they would have supported the South.

Emory, a World War II Army veteran, was turned down last summer in his request to pay tribute to black Confederates at ceremonies in Washington that honored nearly 200,000 black soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

The African-American Civil War Foundation’s historian wrote that the memorial was dedicated to the troops who fought to end slavery and expressed doubt that black men served the Confederate Army.

Civil rights leaders also criticized the teachers of a class last fall at Randolph Community College in North Carolina. The teachers, Sons of Confederate Veterans members like Emory, contended that some slaves were loyal to the South.

Charles Kelly Barrow, a Zebulon, Ga., high school teacher who is white, has spent years researching blacks in the Confederacy. Besides many disbelieving blacks, he said, there are whites who don’t want to admit that blacks fought for the South.

“They’re in opposition either way. Certain people have always tried to divide white and black Southerners,” he said.

Barrow’s 1995 book, “Forgotten Confederates,” is an anthology that draws upon wartime newspaper accounts, later accounts of Civil War reunions, essays, obituaries and pension records to offer evidence of blacks serving the Confederacy.

Some Southern heritage buffs estimate their numbers as between 38,000 to 90,000 men, mainly serving as laborers, teamsters, musicians and cooks.

However, there are accounts that, from the war’s beginning, blacks in gray sometimes were armed in battle.

“Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie knives, dirks, etc.,” Union Capt. Isaac W. Heysinger wrote in an 1862 account of the Maryland campaign. He said there appeared to be thousands among the Confederate Army.

Barrow also found numerous anecdotal accounts, from blacks manning Confederate artillery at the first Battle of Bull Run to stories of black sharpshooters being used to harass Union troops. Besides examples of loyalty and even bravery on behalf of the Confederacy, Southern heritage buffs also note that there were no wide slave insurrections during the war.

“Why? This was their home,” Emory said.

However, those on the other side of the debate point to the thousands of slaves who fled to the North and joined the fight against the Rebels. Many of those who remained behind probably did so out of fear and an expectation that they would soon be free regardless, they say.

“As the star of the Confederacy waned, the Negroes within its shrinking orbit continued to enact the roles in which they had cast themselves,” wrote Morgan State College professor Benjamin Quarles in his 1953 book, “The Negro in the Civil War.” “They were convinced that the fated hour of freedom was drawing nearer by the minute.”