Reviewed by: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin Scott Hancock (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. Cloth, $30.00.) We now have a manual for how to respond to anyone insisting that enslaved black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army. In Searching for Black Confederates, Kevin Levin systematically dismantles the myth of slaves fighting in gray. He explicates the myth’s origins, its reliance on faulty evidence, and the motives behind it. The book is not only an incredibly useful manual but also an excellent model for undergraduates in a historical methods course on how to situate careful research within broader contexts such as the politics of race. It is a valuable study of how race and memory have worked in tandem, constantly adapting to changing social circumstances to perpetuate “the myths 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” (11) from the end of the Civil War to the present. Levin draws a bold line from the past to the present, particularly in the introduction and in the conclusion, pointing to the ways this history shapes present realities politically and at times violently. The first chapter verifies that nearly all alleged black Confederates were in reality “camp slaves” whom Confederate soldiers brought into military [End Page 593] campaigns. Levin does not give attention to female camp slaves; an understandable absence since the myth focuses exclusively on black men. Camp slaves lived long days with a heavy workload, though much of their behavior challenged paternalism. Some worked reluctantly, at risk of severe punishment, and some attempted escape. Nonetheless, Levin argues that genuine bonds formed because of the shared experience of hardship and danger, as many camp slaves were perilously close to combat lines. Confederates’ assumptions that slaves shared their commitment to the South’s cause, however, were not supported by slaves’ actions. When slaves stayed with masters, often it was not because of a commitment to a cause, but rather out of a desire to return to their own families, among other reasons. Similarly, images of slaves in Confederate uniforms are evidence only of slaves being dressed up by owners for staged photos or of slaves having acquired an abandoned uniform because it conferred some status among other slaves. The second chapter describes camp slaves’ battlefield experience. Levin notes that although many slaves stayed with masters during the Gettysburg campaign, many others escaped as a result of their proximity to the North. Gettysburg, then, a debatable military turning point, in reality signaled “a crisis of confidence in soldiers’ belief in their slaves’ unwavering fidelity” (52). Additionally, Confederate soldiers routinely ridiculed slaves near the battlefield, and “at no point did soldiers in the field report that blacks were . . . serving as soldiers” (60). Levin hammers this vital point home repeatedly: Confederates across ranks typically thought the idea of slaves as soldiers was ludicrous and viewed such a concept as an affront to white manhood. Colonel Howell Cobb’s testimony along these lines is just one of numerous excellent examples Levin provides. Cobb, adamantly against the notion of slaves as soldiers throughout the war, was mentioned as being at Antietam by Dr. Lewis Steiner. Steiner’s account, used ubiquitously to promulgate the myth, describes sixty-five thousand black men among the ranks. And yet “at no time did Cobb ever admit that the men observed by Steiner or any other group of free and enslaved black men attached to the army were serving as soldiers during the war” (61). The men were slaves and workers, not soldiers. The first two chapters firmly establish an absence of any reliable wartime testimony of slaves serving as soldiers and provide ample testimony that slaves were never enlisted. The third chapter explores postwar memory. Into the 1940s, camp slaves were remembered only as slaves, never as armed combatants. Remembering them as soldiers would have undermined the Lost Cause’s emphasis on southern white men nobly standing [End Page...