Race and the South, Part III:
Refuting the Neo-Confederates

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final online installment of this essay, which originally appeared in Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here. Read part II here.

What do the neo-Confederates cite as evidence for their case?

Their arguments against race and slavery as primary motivations for Southern secession rely on a potpourri of quotes from various Southern leaders that blacks should be enrolled as soldiers, that the South should even consider freeing the slaves if that would induce Britain to intervene.

The neo-Confederates ignore two apparent, and (for them) most unpleasant facts about their little arsenal of quotations. First, the statements are almost exclusively drawn from the very last months of the war, when defeat was staring the South in the face and any straw for survival had to be seized.

On August 21, 1862, President Davis denounced Union Generals David Hunter and John Phelps for stating their intentions to enlist blacks into the Union Army. Davis characterized Hunter and Phelps as “outlaws” and stated they were to be held “for execution as felons at such time and place as the President shall order.”[1] It is hard to believe that Davis favored enrollment of blacks in the Confederate Army if he was willing to execute federal officers who enlisted blacks as soldiers.

It was not until September 12, 1864 (40 months after Fort Sumter and less than seven months before the surrender at Appomattox), that Lee wrote to Davis advising that due to the extremities of the situation blacks should be used in support services in the Confederate Army so as to free whites for combat.[2]

It was not until November 7, 1864, that Davis endorsed the purchase of blacks for employment in the Confederate Army, but not as soldiers unless in the last extremity.[3]

It was not until March 13, 1865, less than a month before Appomattox, that the Confederate Congress in secret session, over vehement opposition and by a one-vote margin, approved the recruitment of blacks as soldiers.[4]

Second, even in those dire circumstances, as late as 1865, there are many statements from Southern leaders that black soldiers should not be permitted. For example, Howell Cobb of Georgia in the Confederate Congress, in the debate in 1865 on allowing blacks to serve as soldiers, characterized the proposal as the “beginning of the end of our revolution.”[5]

Despite the historical record that the South only reluctantly and at a very late date made tentative efforts to enroll black soldiers, the neo-Confederates, undeterred, claim that large numbers of blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate Army. Their sources of evidence are few. They frequently excuse the lack of evidence by citing National Park Service historian Edward Bearrs, who said, “I don’t want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks, both above and below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910.”[6]

What Bearrs probably meant was that the role of minorities has been excised from history, presumably by “racist” whites bent on stealing their history from them—a fairly typical leftist claim. The neo-Confederates have twisted this into an explanation for the paucity of evidence to support their claims of large-scale black participation in the Confederacy.[7] They fail, however, to address the fact that Bearrs has expressed an opinion that only a few dozen, or at most, a few hundred blacks ever served in the Confederate Armed forces.

In contrast, 200,000 blacks are known to have served in the Union forces. An interesting subject of study would be the behavior of these black troops toward Southern white people. Such an investigation would not interest neo-Confederates because they are not interested in anything that might be considered “racist” research. One suspects, however, that research into the behavior of these troops would probably demonstrate the perspicacity of President Davis and other Southerners who were outraged by the use of these slave volunteers for the Union.

One example is what has been characterized as “the famous Marianna” incident in Florida—which is no longer famous at all. I have met Southerners who were born and reared in Marianna, Florida, who had never heard of it. On September 25, 1864, federal forces attacked the little village of Marianna. They were resisted by a home guard militia unit consisting of very young teenaged boys and a few elderly men, whom they easily defeated. The federal forces consisted of a battalion of Maine cavalry, the Thirteenth Massachusetts Volunteers, and two companies of what the Southerners termed “ferocious Louisiana negroes.”

The black Union volunteers followed up their victory by throwing the wounded Confederate teenage boys into a church and burning them alive. The white federal soldiers from Massachusetts intervened to try to stop the massacre of surrendered Confederates. The behavior of these black Unionist troops shows that many Southern blacks did not have the same love for their masters and the South that neo-Confederates such as Charles Kelley Barrow, James Ronald Kennedy, and Walter Donald Kennedy like to relate to their avid fans.[8]

The evidence advanced by the neo-Confederates to support the contention that significant numbers of blacks served in the Confederate forces consists of a handful of bits and pieces of quotations that are improbable and suspect. Their trump card is a quotation from a Dr. Lewis Steiner, chief of the Union Sanitary Commission, who was in Frederick, Maryland, during its occupation by Stonewall Jackson.

Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number [Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. . . . and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army.[9]

Steiner’s comments about 3,000 black soldiers he claims to have observed in Stonewall Jackson’s forces are remarkable in many ways. Most remarkable is the fact that he alone observed this astonishing matter. No one else is recorded as having shared his discovery. Thousands and tens of thousands of people in Maryland observed the Confederate forces. No one else saw the black soldiers. There were foreign observers with the Confederate forces. None of them observed the black Confederate soldiers either. No pictures of the black Confederates in Jackson’s forces seem to have survived.

They are unmentioned in the letters of Confederate soldiers.

None of them ever seems to have been captured by the federal forces. Indeed, after the defeat at Appomattox the North paroled 28,231 Confederate soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia. The records noted the soldiers’ race. According to the Appomattox parole records maintained by the National Parks Service, exactly 35 blacks are identified as soldiers in the Confederate Army; not one is in a combat position.

Also unexplained is how Jackson came to enroll so many black soldiers when the policies of the civilian administration did not permit it. Do the neo-Confederates believe Stonewall Jackson secretly defied and violated his orders?

Georgia’s Congressman Howell Cobb was serving with Jackson’s forces when they were in Frederick, Maryland. Over two years later, in February 1865, Cobb was vehemently opposing the proposal to allow the enrollment of black soldiers, characterizing the proposal as “the end of our revolution.” One has to ask why Howell Cobb failed to notice the thousands of blacks serving with Jackson’s corps, or to address Stonewall Jackson’s defiance of his superiors’ policies.

Despite all these improbabilities, the neo-Confederates have clutched Steiner to their bosoms as their star witness. They characterize him as a witness of the utmost credibility. When one reads the report of Lewis H. Steiner (available on the internet at http://www.edinborough.com/Learn/cw_nurses/Steiner.PDF), however, other serious problems arise as to his credibility, problems that must surely discomfit the neo-Confederates.

Steiner relates numerous farfetched stories about the Southern soldiers. He accuses an officer in Jackson’s corps of grossly insulting young Unionist ladies in Frederick by handing them a gift of a ring that he told them he had carved from the bone of a dead Yankee. Only the quick and gallant action of a Yankee gentleman who snatched away this barbaric relic saved the young women from the alleged brutality and rudeness of this Southern officer. Steiner accuses Southern soldiers of not bearing themselves with fortitude (i.e., of unmanliness). He recounts with relish a story of a stalwart, clever Union lad who tricks a stupid, gullible Southerner into buying a broken- down horse near death. He characterizes the behavior of Jackson’s troops in Frederick as a “reign of terror,” although he concedes that no personal violence was done to civilians.

Steiner seems also to have been the source of the false information given to the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier about the alleged Barbara Frietchie incident (“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag!”). Whittier, who was embarrassed when the tear-jerking story was exposed as humbug, defended himself by saying he had written the poem in good faith based upon what he had been told by a doctor in Frederick, Maryland. Steiner wrote of two women in his report, one elderly, the other the wife of a Unionist, who confronted the Rebels with “their country’s flag.” The Frietchie falsehood borders on being a pastiche of these two stories.

Steiner was also a staunch abolitionist. He had a purpose in making the claim that blacks were serving as soldiers in the Confederate Army. That purpose is suggested by the concluding sentence in the paragraph about the 3,000 black soldiers: “The fact was patent, and rather interesting when considered in connection with the horror rebels express at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defense.”

Steiner and escaped slave Frederick Douglass were both supporters of enrolling black soldiers into the Union ranks. Suggesting, as both Steiner and Douglass did, that the South was using blacks as soldiers was a means of inducing reluctant conservative Northerners to go along with the proposal.

Enough has been said to deflate the myth of Confederate political correctness and multiculturalism. What are we to make of neo-Confederate Southerners who so frantically adhere to these myths?

I believe they must be viewed as nothing less than wounded victims of the incessant psychological warfare waged not merely against Southerners, but against white Americans in general. Like Patty Hearst and other kidnapping victims, the neo-Confederates have come to identify with their abusers. They beg, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.” They desperately seek forgiveness and inclusion.

Alas, their enemies, no matter how gratified they may be to see the descendants of Confederate veterans debasing themselves by embracing the ideology of the most extreme New England abolitionists, have no intention of sitting down at the table of brotherhood with white Southerners who seek to preserve their heritage.

They intend to diabolize the South and ultimately to destroy it, all in the name of “love.”

Neo-Confederates are not the only casualties of the psychological hate war against whites in America. Huge numbers of other victims are found in all areas of our country. This is so because the liberal/Marxist coalition and its minority racist allies, while they have a special hate for the South as the last region of the country populated by the founding British stock and as the embodiment of all that they despise and detest, hate the rest of white America with only slightly less intensity. The 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus demonstrated this as the media and universities erupted into a frenzy of denunciation of the European colonization of the New World. Their view in essence, is that white America was a mistake, a mistake that needs urgently to be corrected.

Race, therefore, is no longer a peculiar Southern problem. It is a national problem. As Jared Taylor has written, paraphrasing Gunnar Myrdal, it is the “real American dilemma.”

The South has a wealth of experience and wisdom to offer the beleaguered whites of America. The white community in the South is still more of a cohesive whole than those of the North and West of the United States. The South needs the help of sympathetic whites throughout the nation, but it also has much help to offer white Americans in other regions.

Contrary to the fantastic conceptions of neo-Confederates, white Southerners have more in common with white Northerners than they do with black Southerners. This is not to minimize the importance of the fact that the South is still a separate cultural, linguistic, and to some extent ethnic community with values and concerns distinct from the rest of the white community in America.

Nor can Northern whites remain indifferent to the psychological “hate” campaign being waged against Southern whites. As shown by the vilification of Columbus, minority hatred is not focused exclusively on Southern whites. In resisting this minority aggression a Southerner who has been indoctrinated with hatred and guilt for his own heritage will not be a reliable ally to Northern whites.

There can be no geographic solution to an ethnic problem. A demographic tsunami is bearing down upon the South, and the nation as a whole. Thanks to the current policy of colonizing America with non-white Third World immigrants, the prospect of our becoming a minority in our own lands is no longer that distant. The hugely disproportionate birthrate of whites and blacks in the South, by itself, would reduce whites to a minority in many Southern states in only two or three generations. And if blacks and other non-whites become the majority, the Confederate Battle Flag, Confederate monuments, and all the symbols and shrines revered by true Southerners will come down. No amount of truckling by wild exaggerations of black soldiers in the Confederate Army, no amount of flattery, no amount of pleading “we just want to be friends” could change that.

The last half of the twentieth century was a discouraging time for those who desire to see the preservation and survival of our race. At times it seems as if resistance is futile. There is nothing more demoralizing to our race than the spectacle of those who, like the neo-Confederates, are ashamed to fight for its survival and who, indeed, accept the enemy propaganda that anyone who desires the survival of the white race is immoral.

However dark the present situation may be, I cannot believe that 100 million British Americans and their cousins from other European countries are simply going to walk off the stage of history. I believe, as Rhett Butler said of the retreating Confederates from Atlanta, that they will still turn and make a stand. And when they do, Southerners who still hold the faith and beliefs of Lee and Davis will be there with them in establishing a nation on this continent where the white European race may safely abide.