Searching for Black Confederates by Levin Kevin M.;

Author:Levin, Kevin M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

TURNING CAMP SLAVES INTO BLACK CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS

On September 17, 1994, the General William Barksdale Camp 1220, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and John M. Stone Chapter 380, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), placed a Southern Cross of Honor on the grave of Silas Chandler in Greenwood Cemetery in West Point, Mississippi.1 By honoring him, the SCV transformed an unknown story about an obscure slave into a full-blown legend. Films, art prints, T-shirts, and the spread of the photograph of Silas and Andrew Chandler on the Internet soon followed, all promoting Silas as a loyal son of the South who became a Confederate soldier, heroically battling Yankees alongside his white owner. The Cross of Honor, introduced in 1900 by the UDC, was intended for Confederate soldiers who performed acts of valor on the battlefield. It was about this time that Myra Chandler Sampson, the great-granddaughter of Silas, discovered the marker. For Sampson, it represented nothing less than the SCV’s and UDC’s goal to “perpetuate myths in attempt to rewrite and sugar-coat the shameful truth about parts of our American history for political and financial gain.”2

The Confederate heritage community relied on a wide range of accounts of former camp slaves that became popularized by the turn of the twentieth century rather than on Lost Cause narratives from the immediate postwar period. By the 1990s, photographs of uniformed black men as well as pension applications in which the distinction between slave and soldier was sometimes clouded became evidence that the Confederacy recruited large numbers of blacks into the army as soldiers. Interpreting black men in the army as soldiers echoed the Lost Cause’s insistence that African Americans were loyal but also constituted a break with the claim that they did so as slaves.

The reinterpretation of Silas Chandler and others as soldiers, serving in an equal capacity to white men, was part of a much broader counternarrative that was first introduced by the SCV in the late 1970s in response to a growing interest among academic historians and the general public in the history of slavery, the role of African Americans in the Union army during the Civil War, and the importance of emancipation. This resurgence of interest picked up speed during the civil rights era as historians and black Americans challenged the central tenets of the Lost Cause, especially the unassailable belief in the loyalty of the slave population. They emphasized the central role that slavery played in causing the war and emancipation as its most important outcome. At the center of this new narrative were stories of black Union soldiers and accounts of their role in helping to destroy the Confederacy and end slavery. Popular magazines such as Jet and Ebony, literature published by civil rights organizations, and public speeches of civil rights activists embraced the black Union soldier as a reminder of emancipation, freedom, and the “unfinished work” of achieving equal rights. New scholarship focused attention at historic sites and museums on the history of slavery, and popular television shows

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