Review: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin Levin.

It starts with a picture. A photo of two men—one white and one black—dressed in gray uniforms and armed to the teeth, a show of manhood and bravado before setting off to the front lines of the American Civil War. The photo shows Andrew Chandler, son of a wealthy planter in Mississippi, and one of his family’s slaves, Silas Chandler. Silas accompanied Andrew into the army as his camp slave, or body servant. Silas Chandler is at the center of the myth of the black Confederate, and this single photo has been widely used as proof that black men were armed and fought with the Confederate army. The reality is very different, argues Kevin Levin in his new book Searching for Black Confederates, and Silas was never a soldier for the South. Black men never fought as soldiers for the Confederacy, but that idea is increasingly used to defend the South and argue that the Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery.

Levin begins by examining the roles black men held in the armies of the Confederacy and the evidence during and after the war that these men held those roles as slaves, not soldiers. Looking at military orders, soldier and officer accounts, post-war writings and reunion proceedings, and pensions awarded to former camp slaves, Levin demonstrates how slaves were used in many ways to support the military operations of the South but were never used as soldiers. He, of course, untangles the official debates over the issue leading to the very late acceptance, in March 1865, of a policy to arm slaves. Resting on this body of evidence, Levin says, the very idea of a black Confederate soldier would be very surprising to anyone who actually fought for the Confederacy in the 1860s.

And yet the myth persists. Levin points to the 1970s as the main origin point for the black Confederate myth, as defenders of southern history fought against the increasing interpretation that the war was fought over slavery and the main legacy of the war was that of emancipation. As academic scholarship increasingly placed the focus on slavery in the Civil War and social movements in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond pushed for further rights and equality for African Americans, the image of the black Confederate increasingly appeared. The black Confederate served as a counterpoint to the Union cause of emancipation. If black men fought for the Confederacy it showed that they supported the Confederate cause, and that slavery could not have been the main motivation for southern secession. This also supported the idea of the “loyal slave” heavily present in the Lost Cause mythology. The internet caused this myth to balloon further as websites and social media sites allowed anyone to post misinformation and support the myth of the black Confederate. Making things worse is the general public’s lack of historical skills, or ability to investigate primary sources and place them into proper context instead of taking them at face value (such as the picture of Andrew and Silas).

Levin’s work is a mix of historical research and untangling historical memory. He does this balance well, first demonstrating the roles of African American men within the Confederate military based on historical research and then sleuthing out when that history was twisted into this prevalent myth of the black Confederate. It was very interesting to mark how changes in society and the shifts in historical interpretations by scholars in the field coincided with the rise of this myth, and how that has increasingly strengthened today in the debates over Confederate monuments and symbols. Levin is not shy about calling individuals and websites out for perpetrating this misinformation, and brings his analysis of how the idea of the black Confederate is used to defend southern heritage to the current day, with controversies within the last few years of black Confederates being included in a history textbook and proposals to put up new monuments to African Americans who fought for the Confederacy.

This is a book very relevant to our times. Over the last few years Civil War historians have taken center stage in the contest over Confederate memory as communities have debated the place of Confederate flags, names, and monuments in our society. Perhaps more than any other subject, the cause of the war, the role of slavery, and Civil War memory are contested within the American population. The rise of the internet and social media has inflated those conversations to a degree that a historian could spend hours online trying to combat misinformation to members of the public, many of whom fight back vigorously. Levin’s work is written in a way that can be appreciated by his peers and read by the general public. It is a work that speaks well to how history intersects with the society that is remembering it, how that changes over time and is shaped by current social forces, and the role of the historian in navigating historical memory and reality.

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and universities and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse.