Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin Tracy L. Barnett (bio) Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. By Kevin M. Levin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 240. $30.00 cloth; $22.99 ebook) The image is an all too familiar one: a white and Black man sitting side-by-side, both armed to the teeth, both attired in rebel grey. To neo-Confederates, this is undeniable proof of the Black Confederate soldier. To most scholars, however, this an image of enslavement, indicative of a carefully-cultivated myth rather than any real form of racial equality. In Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Kevin M. Levin traces the development of this myth over the course of a one hundred fifty-year period. The myth, he concludes, took hold among Confederate heritage organizations in the 1970s as a direct response to the Civil Rights movements and [End Page 539] scholars increasing efforts to place slavery—not states’ rights—as the central tenet of secession, Confederacy identity, and the Civil War. Organized both chronologically and thematically, Levin begins in 1861. Planters’ sons, marching off to war, occasionally took slaves with them. These “camp slaves” served their white owners and reinforced the South’s racial hierarchy by performing menial tasks—cooking, hauling, mending—associated with slavery. While living in military encampments, these Black men were not soldiers; only white men were Confederate soldiers. To be sure, the Confederacy relied heavily on enslaved labor (allowing more white men to bear arms) and, in the final months of the war, briefly considered more. But, as Levin rightly notes, “at no point during the debate over enlistment was it ever revealed that Black men were already serving in the Confederate army as soldiers” (p. 5). Post-war veterans reunions and publications, steeped in Lost Cause notions, only served to reinforce the image of the benevolent master and the devoted slave. Some former camp slaves qualified for postwar aid, but these pensions never classified these men as soldiers; they were “Indigent Servants of Soldiers or Sailors of the Late Confederacy” (p. 6). Only in the late twentieth century did the Sons of Confederate Veterans transform “camp slaves” into roughly 200,000, or so, “Black Confederate soldiers.” Responding to increased emphasis placed on slavery by scholars and the general public, Confederate heritage organizations crafted the story of the Black Confederate soldier in the 1970s to promote their interpretation of the war and their political agenda. The myth gained little traction at first, Levin argues, but it, nonetheless, set the narrative. In the 1990s, it began to spread over the web and, then, later, on blogs and social media. Indeed, the internet has transformed the discipline. For professionals, it offers new possibilities in the form of innovative digital humanities projects and online archives. For the layman, it provides an unregulated forum to spread alarmist information and misinformation. With a touch of Photoshop, inauguration crowds suddenly double in size and Black Confederate soldiers appear one hundred fifty years after the fact. [End Page 540] During the sesquicentennial, the myth gained traction among the Confederate heritage community and found a small but vocal number of African American supporters. Most mainstream Americans, however, have rejected it. Bold and provocative, Levin pushes for “an honest national conversation about the history and legacy of slavery,” which “can happen only if we put aside the myth of and self-serving narratives of loyal slaves and brave Black Confederate soldiers that have long played a role in maintaining the color line in American life” (p. 11). And, in our present era of deadly white supremacist rallies and debates over Confederate monuments, it is time for this conversation. A must read for academics, undergraduates, and general readers alike, Searching for Black Confederates forces us to confront the construction of racialized mythology and, in doing so, calls upon us, as a nation, to reckon with the meaning of white supremacy. [End Page 541] Tracy L. Barnett TRACY L. BARNETT is a PhD student at the University of Georgia. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society