Doubt it
vs
Who would you "shoulder arms" for if you were "black"?
Please show me a pic of a large number of "black" confederate soldiers ready to "shoulder arms".
He omitted a few points from his source.
Black Confederate soldiers likely represented
less than 1 percent of Southern black men of military age during that period, and
less than 1 percent of Confederate soldiers. And their motivation for serving isn’t taken into account by the numbers, since some may have been
forced into service, and others may have seen fighting as a way out of
privation.
It is well known that in Louisiana and Tennessee, Stauffer added, Confederate units were organized by elite, light-skinned freedmen who identified with the slave-owning white plantation culture. (The Tennessee troops were
never issued arms, though, and the black unit known as the
Louisiana Native Guards never saw action — and
quickly switched sides as soon as Union forces appeared.
But unless readers think that black Confederates were truly enamored of the South’s cause, Stauffer related the case of
John Parker, a slave
forced to build Confederate barricades and later to join the crew of a cannon firing grapeshot at Union troops at the First Battle of Bull Run. All the while, recalled Parker, he worried about dying,
prayed for a Union victory, and dreamed of escaping to the other side.
“His case can be seen as representative,” said Stauffer. “
Masters put guns to (the heads of slaves) to make them shoot Yankees.”
Freedmen in the Confederacy
faced re-enslavement in Virginia and elsewhere, said Stauffer, so they made
displays of loyalty that were really gestures of self-protection — a “hope for better treatment, a hope not to be enslaved.”
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/09/black-confederates/
