Update: Bruce Levine emailed the following to me: “Of course — as would (should?) be clear to anyone who hears or reads the text of my short talk — my point was that facts like the ones I cited are today misconstrued as proof for the preposterous claim that the Confederate army included thousands of black soldiers. That two people who enthusiastically participate in this kind of shameless distortion of historical facts should do the same to my own expose of such chicanery just seems par for the course.”

As Kevin Sieff reported in The Washington Post on Wednesday, historians are wondering how a fourth-grade textbook in Virginia was approved despite including the spurious claim that “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”

Asked about her sources, the textbook’s author, Joy Masoff — whose other books include “Fire!” and “Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest, Wackiest Moments” — cited Ervin Jordan, a University of Virginia historian who is the author of “Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia.”

Like other noted historians, Mr. Jordan told The Post that while there is documentary evidence that some African-Americans fought for the Confederacy, “There’s no way of knowing that there were thousands…. And the claim about Jackson is totally false.”

Remember that Jefferson Davis, his Sec of War, Confederate Congress, & several of the top generals of the Confederacy all advocated the killing of Union black soldiers & their white officers for enciting "servile insurrection". To go from a policy of killing armed blacks to allowing them on the field of battle on your side seems a bit outlandish. The fact that even at the end of the war there were still plenty of people in opposition to the idea of arming slaves EVEN IF IT MEANT SAVING THE CONFEDERACY-is scary.

[...]

What I find interesting here are two things. First is that here is yet another primary account of a Southern officer offering up the major cause of the war. Second is the notion of "black" Confederates. Here you have several divisional commanders scattered throughout the Army of Tennessee declaring that "armed" blacks would be detremental to the existence of the army. Now if there WERE any armed blacks operating in what amounts to the 2nd major army of the Confederacy (after the Army of Northern Virginia in the East), you would think these gentlemen would be aware of it. You would think that the arguments would be along the lines of "well, we have a few blacks in one of my brigades, but they are the exception not the rule", but you don't hear that one bit. To me this is simply more proof that at BEST the notion of armed "black" Confederates is extremely rare.

[...]

Why would the Confederates be so concerned about raising their own black troops when they hated & despised ANY black troops enough to commit these atrocities against them? Armed slave rebellions were FEARED throughout the South. So the idea of arming slaves goes contrary to everything that they stood for.

[...]

After months of heated debate, a severely watered-down version of this proposal became Confederate law in March of 1865. Gen. Richard S. Ewell assumed responsibility for implementing it, and Confederate officials and journalists confidently predicted the enlistment of thousands. But the actual results proved bitterly disappointing. A dwarf company or two of black hospital workers was attached to a unit of a local Richmond home guard just a few weeks before the war's end. The regular Confederate army apparently managed to recruit another 40 to 60 men -- men whom it drilled, fed, and housed at military prison facilities under the watchful eyes of military police and wardens -- reflecting how little confidence the government and army had in the loyalty of their last-minute recruits.

This strikingly unsuccessful last-ditch effort, furthermore, constituted the sole exception to the Confederacy's steadfast refusal to employ African American soldiers. As Gen. Ewell's longtime aide-de-camp, Maj. George Campbell Brown, later affirmed, the handful of black soldiers mustered in Richmond in 1865 were "the first and only black troops used on our side."

Do you dispute the cites above about it being illegal for blacks to serve as soldiers in the army of the CSA until very late in the war?

As a matter of fact, one of Jefferson Davis's generals did advise him to emancipate and arm slaves at the start of the war. But Davis vehemently rejected that advice. It "would revolt and disgust the whole South," he snapped. During the first few years of the war, some others repeated this suggestion. Each time, Richmond slapped it down. Not only would no slaves be enlisted; no one who was not certifiably white, whether slave or free, would be permitted to become a Confederate soldier.

And the Confederacy's policy of excluding blacks from its armed forces was effective. John Beauchamp Jones, a high-level assistant to the secretary of war, scoffed at rumors that the Confederacy had units made up of slaves. "This is utterly untrue," he wrote in his diary. "We have no armed slaves to fight for us." Asked to double-check, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon confirmed that "No slaves have been employed by the Government except as cooks or nurses in hospitals and for labor."

Why were the leaders so stubborn on this point? Because they were fighting to preserve African American slavery and the racial creed that justified it. Slavery's defenders insisted that blacks were inferior to whites -- uniquely suited to dull, arduous labor but incapable of assuming the responsibilities of free people, citizens or soldiers. As Seddon explained, since the Confederacy had taken that stand both before "the North and before the world," it could "not allow the employment as armed soldiers of negroes." Putting blacks into gray uniforms would be seen as a confession that this ideology was a lie. Even more practically, the Confederacy worried about what black troops would do with their weapons. At the very least they feared (in the words of Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin) that black Confederate soldiers would desert to the enemy "in mass."

[...]

Cleburne’s Proposal

There was, however, at least one serious proposal for a Black Confederate Army Brigade made by the South’s Major General Patrick R. Cleburne. Cleburne was a general in the Irish Army and volunteered to serve the Confederacy after the Civil War actually began in April of 1861. Meeting with nearly half of Jefferson Davis’ top generals at Tunnel Hill, Georgia, on January 2, 1864, Cleburne advised his fellow Confederate commanders that “we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves” and that “we guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war.”

Cleburne at first had the firm support of General Joseph E. Johnston, the South’s second most powerful general after Robert E. Lee. Johnston, in fact, had assembled the generals in his headquarters on the night of January 2, where the proposal was first laid out. Some of the generals there later claimed that they objected to the basic idea of arming black men and liberating them for their service to the South, but nearly all of the 15 top officers at the meeting praised Cleburne for laying out his bold blueprint for victory for the South.

The reaction from Jefferson Davis and his Secretary of War, James A. Seddon, was a blanket rejection. Despite what they saw as the “patriotic intents of the gallant author of the memorial and such of his brother officers as may have favored his opinions,” they ordered an immediate “suppression, not only of the memorial itself, but likewise of all discussion and controversy respecting or growing out of it.”

[...]