In his book, The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865, the historian James H. Brewer describes the black Confederate as “a historical enigma,” ignored by historians who are uncertain what to make of him. Black Southerners did not fare well in what Brewer calls “the rugged contest for meaningful identification in a nation’s history.” He is concerned that,
Today, in a lonely unmarked grave, forgotten and unknown, lies the Confederate Negro—a casualty of history.
To address that, Brewer documents the role played by black men in the Confederate war effort, in an attempt—however small—to ensure that they will not be forgotten. He focuses on skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen and other significant wartime roles, such as nurses in the military hospitals and men who took up arms on the battlefield even though they were not formally enlisted as soldiers.
A review of Brewer’s book in the Journal of American History in 1970 acknowledges that he “corrects a serious historical omission while delivering a telling blow to the destruction of the stereotyped southern Negro during the war.”
The stereotype of the black Southerner was that he was little more than a workhorse, commanded to perform basic tasks requiring brawn—such as digging trenches—but not expected to possess any skill or ingenuity. And yet, Brewer shows that in Virginia “less than a third of the conscripted free Negroes were laborers. . .[for example,] the great majority of the hospital employees were skilled or semiskilled workers.” Many of these were roles requiring a degree of responsibility.
Stereotypes, such as those which beset the black Confederate, reflect a form of mental shorthand—it is easier and quicker for historians to assume that a member of any specified group fits the usual behavior expected from that group. They assume that we can know for certain what members of a specified group would do in any situation—or, in the case of history, what they in fact did—by reference to their group identity.
These stereotypes are then defended even in the face of contrary evidence. One hallmark of such thought is the bewilderment exhibited when a person’s opinions or actions do not match his identity. Why would a black person behave in this unusual way, they muse, when it is not how we would expect black people to behave based on the stereotypes we have embraced?
This trend is further fueled by identity politics or “standpoint theory”—the habit of beginning every argument with, “As a white man” or “As a black woman,” as if one’s identity constitutes the essential premise of his every worldview, and as if people’s principles are shaped by nothing but their biology. This type of thinking cannot conceptualize black Southerners in any other role other than that officially designated by court historians—as victims of slavery who merit nothing but pity and horror.
That narrative, which Brewer sought to correct, insists that the only black Southerners worth historical mention are those who can be officially classified as victims of brutality, of “enslavement and degradation.” A nurse in a Confederate military hospital really does not fit that bill and is therefore of no historical significance. Also expunged from the record are the “pilots, boathands, and fishermen” whom Brewer describes. Further,
There were hundreds of slave and free Negro craftsmen engaged in such trades as boatmaker, ropemaker, caulker, blacksmith, shoemaker, and carpenter. Virginia’s railroads procured a large labor force of slaves to work as firemen, track hands, brakemen, machinists, boilermakers, and blacksmiths.
Brewer also highlights, for example, the importance of “male and female Negro nurses who composed the largest single nursing force in Virginia’s military hospitals.” He considers their role to be worthy of notice, and no doubt the wounded soldiers under their care would agree. As Brewer observes,
The services of these Negroes served to force the recognition of the Negro as a man, in perhaps the only way that this can be done, by working for some common cause: that of healing the sick, comforting the dying, and mastering the techniques on which all modern societies depend.
These were by no means all slaves. Brewer notes that there were 58,000 free blacks in Virginia at this time. But they rarely get a mention in the official narratives. They are viewed as irrelevant partly because slaves were the vast majority (491,000) and partly because, we are informed by official historians, they belong to the same class of “the oppressed” as slaves. The fact that the Confederate army paid free blacks the same wage as white conscripts is deemed immaterial. The entire group of black Virginians is erased from the war narrative, whether free or slave.
It is deeply unfortunate that the wartime experience of several thousand black people in Virginia was erased simply because the gatekeepers of correct historical opinion decided it would be wrong to remember them.
They claim to have good motives for erasing black people from the Confederate war effort—by confining history to accounts of brutality and never acknowledging any heroism that comes from what they designated “the wrong side of history,” they hope to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Further, double standards apply to this erasure because the same historians never argue that white skilled workers who were also conscripted into the Confederate army should also be erased to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Above all, they fail to acknowledge the “historical enigma” of black Confederates because they know that merely mentioning them will call for an explanation which they prefer not to acknowledge. Readers will want to know why a man would act in a manner that does not fit the stereotype of his group. The typical historian, not being a thymologist, does not have an answer. Unless he is a Southerner or has studied Southern history, the whole business looks inexplicable to him. At least, he does not have any explanation that fits his preferred brutalization narrative.
It is certainly difficult to fit ordinary tradesmen like carpenters, cobblers, and blacksmiths into the prevailing brutality narratives, especially when some of these men were running their own businesses or working on their own account. Brewer even mentions free blacks who were helped by their white friends to dodge the draft. Many historians cannot explain these events, and so they find it easier to brush the whole matter under the rug. If challenged, they simply deny that these men existed. They only share pictures of unskilled laborers digging trenches while an overseer stands over them barking orders.
Brewer takes a different approach. He confronts this history honestly, while acknowledging its complexity. He explains,
At first encounter, the Confederate Negro appears invidiously as chattel, to be used—not as a person, to be respected. His actions are characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. In his history one finds frustratingly intricate webs and countless unintelligible events. The laws under which he lived were repressive, and the South made no apologies for them. Yet thousands ignored the beckoning of their Yankee liberators. Though enslaved in a land of freedom, the Negro quickly responded to the rebel yell. Though denied the right of bearing arms, he bore them for the Confederacy. Though in fiction and in legend he twanged a banjo, sang melodious spirituals, and labored in the field, he was in fact an integral part of the entire Virginia war effort.
