I am a Southerner, from Texas (though I moved away a while ago), and I know that normally you can’t trust any Yankees, Blacks, skips or skops who read books and do critical thinking because they’re all indoctrinated against the South. But, here are some resources that can help you understand historical context:
Andy Hall, runs DeadConfederates.com, a Civil War researcher did a lot of work on looking up “Black Confederates”. Some of his most known pieces were about Louis Napoleon Nelson, Steve Eberhart/Perry, Private Clark Lee, and Tobe Thomas. He’s written extensively on how the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy have re-purposed former slave’s graves & identifies have been rewritten for the purpose of vindicating the Confederacy.
Kevin Levin, historian, wrote the book, “Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth” and runs the cwmemory blog & substack. Kevin and Andy’s work around looking up and understanding what records mean in context have been incredibly helpful in my own research. His most well-known work is the research he did around the Silas and Andrew Chandler picture which appeared in Civil War Monitor.
Brooks D. Simpson is a historian and writer who teaches at Arizona State University. He writes at cwcrossroads and has covered the illogicalness of Black Confederates while rooting critique in historical texts and facts.
Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic – The Secret History Of The Photo At The Center Of The Black Confederate Myth
Ta-Nehisi Coates, former writer at The Atlantic – Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? and Again with the Black Confederates. The last piece zooms in on something I try to emphasize with the research I do, these Black men were humans and they had real lives and legacies that exist outside of being Confederate mascots. Coates also gets into how bad of an idea it is to idolize and deify your ancestors.
Tools
- Ancestry.com – Good for looking up Census, Wills, Marriage Licenses, etc
- FamilySearch.org – Similar records to Ancestry.com, but free.
- Fold3.com – Military records
- Confederate Slave Payrolls – Archives.gov
- Confederate Pension Records – Archives.gov by state
Articles
- Black Confederates: Truth and Legend – Battlefields
- TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South’s schoolbooks – Facing South
- How the Myth of Black Confederates was born – Kevin Levin – Washington Post
- What Should Historians Make of “Black Confederates?” – The Civil War Monitor
- Sins of the Fathers – The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many Southern whites still believe otherwise? – Washington Post
- Myths & Misunderstandings | Black Confederates – American Civil War Museum
- To what extent did African Americans, slave or free, fight for the Confederacy? – Teaching History
- The Myth of the Black Confederate Soldier – Historic America
- Black Realities and White Statues: The Fall of Confederate Monuments – AAHIS
- History Restored: The Untold Story of Black Civil War Soldiers – Columbia – GWU
- Black Confederates – NCPedia
- “Somewhere” in the Nadir of African American History, 1890-1920 – National Humanities Center
- Reconstruction & Rights – Library of Congress
- The Diaries Left Behind by Confederate Soldiers Reveal the True Role of Enslaved Labor at Gettysburg – Smithsonian Mag
- Lost Cause Myth – Inclusive Historian
Books
Written by historians and peer reviewed
- Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) – Colin E. Woodward
- Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) – Charles B. Dew
- Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth – Kevin Levin
- Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South – Stephanie McCurry
- The False Cause Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory – Adam Domby
- Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Douglas A Blackmon
- A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation, David W. Blight
- Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory – David W. Blight
- They were her property – Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
- What this Cruel War was Over – Chandra Manning
- Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality, edited by Brooks Simpson
- Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South – Marie Jenkins Schwartz
- Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South – Ira Berlin
- Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 – Larry Koger
- Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South – Michael P. Johnson , James L. Roark
- Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptiste
- A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition] (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), Eric Foner
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James M. McPherson
- Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W.E. B. Du Bois
- Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Studies on the American South), Keri Leigh Merritt
- Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Karen L. Cox
- The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won, Edward Bonekemper III
- The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History , Gary W. Gallagher
- No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (A Ferris and Ferris Book), Karen L. Cox
It's about Heritage! 