About this item
More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms.Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.
About the Author
Kevin Levin is an award-winning historian and educator currently living in Boston. In addition to classroom teaching, Levin has lectured widely and worked with students and teachers across the country on how to better understand the ongoing debate about Confederate monuments and Civil War memory. His published work in the area of Civil War history and historical memory can be found in popular magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. In September his next book, *Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. For more information, check out his website at http://cwmemory.com
