"It's pure fantasy," contends James McPherson, a Princeton historian and one of the nation's leading Civil War scholars. Adds Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service: "It's b.s., wishful thinking." Robert Krick, author of 10 books on the Confederacy, has studied the records of 150,000 Southern soldiers and found fewer than a dozen were black. "Of course, if I documented 12, someone would start adding zeros," ... These and other scholars say claims about black rebels derive from unreliable anecdotes, a blurring of soldiers and laborers, and the rapid spread on the Internet of what Mr. McPherson calls "pseudohistory."..."it's a search for a multicultural Confederacy, a desperate desire to feel better about your ancestors," says Leslie Rowland, a University of Maryland historian. "if you suggest that some blacks supported the South, then you can deny that the Confederacy was about slavery and white supremacy."

 

Contrary to the revisionist claims of a USA TODAY reader, there were no such things as "black Confederate soldiers"... This is a myth that was effectively quashed back when Civil War veterans were still alive to refute it.

 

A racist fabrication has sprung up in the last decade: that the Confederacy had "thousands" of African- American slaves "fighting" in its armies during the Civil War. Unfortunately, even some African-American men today have gotten conned into Putting on Confederate uniforms to play "re-enactors" in an army that fought to ensure that their ancestors would remain slaves.