Probably, the discovery that more than a few African Americans served on the Confederate side in the Civil War -- and not just as servants, either -- will strike some readers as contradictory, or even unnatural. Certainly, most historians have ignored the subject. But history is history: One must deal with past reality, not subordinate the facts to modern political positions. In researching the subject, Barrow called on the readership of _Confederate Veteran,_ the official publication of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to submit information on black Southern loyalists. The results were large and diverse, based on official reports, pension applications, family correspondence, newspaper articles, and published memoirs, and from that came this anthology of historical documents and accounts, originally published under the title _Forgotten Confederates._ In fact, the most conservative estimate is that some 50,000 African Americans served on the Confederate side, compared to 600,000 to 1,000,000 white Confederates (depending on who did the counting). Few of them were "properly enlisted," of course (the Confederate Congress did not authorize such enlistments until the War was in its last days), but those who worked as servants, bodyguards, nurses, cooks, scouts, barbers, teamsters, musicians, and construction workers frequently joined the fight, whether sanctioned or not. The irony, of course, is that black Confederates served within white units, while black Union troops were carefully segregated from white troops. At least twenty-five percent of the Confederate Ordnance Department was black, and several black militia units were raised in Louisiana and Alabama. There were black Confederate sharpshooters in the Seven Days campaign in 1862, and more than 1,000 black sailors served in the Confederate Navy. And a surprising number of black faces appear in photographs of post-War Confederate reunions, many of which are reproduced in this volume. This is an engrossing collection of material and the twenty-one-page bibliography of sources for further study will be most useful to local historians.

This book is a wonderful claberation of doucments overlooked by history.The author is a great mind and I recomend this book highly for its agnolagement of our forgoten heroes.This book brings halt to all "myths".

Collaboratively compiled and edited by Charles Kelly Barrow, J. H. Segars, and R. B. Rosenburg, Black Confederates is a scholarly analysis of historical evidence of those black Americans who served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Correspondence, military records, preserved narratives and newspaper accounts present as clear a picture as possible of some seemingly self-contradictory people. Why did they fight, and in some cases, lose their lives for the South in a conflict fought to perpetuate the institution of slavery? This question is carefully scrutinized in a historical work that challenges commonly held precepts and brings to light an oft-overlooked side of America's deadliest war. Black Confederates is a welcome and fascinating addition to Black Studies and Civil War Studies reading lists and reference collections.

I had no idea so many black soldiers fought for the South.Some were really body servants, others were quartermasters and cooks and others were flat out real soldiers. This is a piece of history that has been totally left out of the history books. This is the only book of it's kind that I know of so if you are a black or Civil War history buff you must add this one to your collection.

Mr. Barrow has written a most extraordinary book on some of the most noble, yet sadly forgotten, defenders of the Confederacy - the Black Confederates. He offers a quite insightful look of their service throughout the War For Southern Independence. Some of the personal accounts of these brave men of colour are wonderful, leaving us to question the bigotry of those who use revisionist tactics in portraying the War For Southern Independence. I believe the unfortunate & temporarily successful block of the racist organisation NAACP against a proposed monument in the Commonwealth of Virginia, that was to have been erected to the memory of the thousands upon thousand of blacks who wore the grey & butternut & bore the Saint Andrew's Cross of the Southern Confederacy, is such an example.

The common conception of black Southerners in the Civil War has described a people unified by their opposition to the Confederacy and resisting the Southern war effort, either passively and actively.
This view can only be maintained by ignoring a mass of research material that strongly suggests that black opinion, like other opinion, was represented across the spectrum, and was strongly influenced by sectional, local, and family loyalties which have largely disappeared in the modern world, but which were of paramount importance in the nineteenth century. Many blacks, free and slave, in fact, considered themselves Southerners first and blacks second, and served the Southern cause enthusiastically.
This unconventional view is supported here by a wealth of clippings, rosters, memoirs, photos, archival records, and other data to convincingly demonstrate that the matter is more complex than the simplifiers of history would have it, and to show that the actual record of the black Southerner leaves no firm ground for those who would cite his experiences for modern political purposes.
(The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)