So did African Americans fight for the Confederacy?
My conclusion, similar to Professor O’Malley’s is yes, but not quite as large as some sources make it out to be. That’s where the real question lies, whether the account of Steiner or Cobb was more accurate. Both were primary sources of the time, but are drastically different. I really couldn’t tell which of them was telling the truth, but whoever wasn’t was a real fool. Cobb would be completely hypocritical saying black men shouldnt be armed, forgetting the fact that three years earlier in Steiner’s comments he was LEADING a group comprised of some black men. OR, Steiner was a fool and couldn’t properly recognize Cobb (Secretary of something of the US at the time) and made it up. I feel if any of them are correct, Steiner’s would be more reliable to trust. Still there’s no solid answer on what happened, which is unfortunate because historians and students can’t come to any real conclusions.
So a) WHY would African Americans fight for the Confederacy? b) Was slavery not as bad as it was portrayed by the north?
a. Who knows. Was there a promise for freedom? The best chance for a decent life? Did they not want to leave their home? It makes sense if people established their family and life somewhere and did not know anything else. But we’re forgetting those who wanted freedom. Maybe the idea of freedom outweighed everything else that matter.
a cont. Why wouldn’t Lincoln allow black Americans to fight for the union either? I wasn’t crazy about Frederick Douglass’s book, but I’m all for him on his argument. Arm the slaves! Let them fight for their own freedom. Don’t just let the white people make a difference. Why couldn’t they? Maybe he overdid his account on how many slaves were fighting in the south so people would be energized to fight for the north!
b. Worst excuse in the book. Slavery has no excuse and it’s tiring to hear about it to this day that it “wasn’t so bad,” “black people were given a home, food, etc” like what? If slavery wasn’t so bad then a country wouldn’t almost split into two over it. Yes there were other reasons like sectionalism, etc but come on. We learned in class that 75% of white people didn’t have any, so only a fourth of the south actually enslaved African Americans. This just reminds me of a Joseph Stalin quote “the death of one Russian soldier is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic,” not sure if it’s Joseph Stalin or not (I’ll check later) but it was in one of my psychology textbooks. So why can’t one person being enslaved be enough to make something seem heinous and inhumane. Why does it matter that only 25% of people owned slaves, and only a small amount of those people owned greater than 10 slaves? Why does it have to be such a significant amount of people being prejudiced against for it to matter. I feel like I’m leaving the point here but anyways, slavery was a clear problem that’s repercussions still affect our country now.
**saying all this, there’s no doubt that there are exceptions. I’m all about acknowledging exceptions. Black Americans owning black slaves and such, but I’m not even going to try and explain that one. The only thing I can compare that to is Mexican or Muslim people supporting Donald Trump.