Free Men of Color in Grey

Abstract

����� A NUMBEROFwriters have studied the use ofblacks as soldiers bythe Union and Confederate governments during die American Civil War. Most of these works have focused on the Union army since it employed large numbers of black soldiers during the conflict. When the authors do cover the Confederate side, they usually limit their coverage to the free blacks of New Orleans who formed a regiment ofNative Guards for the Louisiana militia and to efforts late in the war to employ slaves as soliders.1 Various Southern states enacted legislation accepting free blacks as laborers or in other noncombat roles, but until early 1865, the official policy ofthe Confederate government prohibited blacks from serving as armed soldiers.2 Scholars who have investigated the role of blacks in the Confederate armies usually have described only the body servants who occasionally picked up a weapon during a battle, though several writers have discussed the largely unsubstantiated cases of slaves serving in other combat situations.3 Two studies which look closely at blacks who aided the Confederate war effort fail to document satisfactorily the enlistment offree blacks as combat soldiers. One of these books exhibits a strong Confederate bias but cannot substantiate its assertion that many ofthese [free blacks] were