There was a cover-up of the Civil War going way back, and records of the cover-up still exist today.
Because Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, estimated that after the war there were going to be enormous numbers of lawsuits, he ordered extraordinary levels of records retention. And when the Union Army captured Confederate records, their records were added to the mix. Today this provides an incredible snapshot into the people of the time.
From 1891, many Confederate soldiers applied to receive their pensions from the former Confederate states. So when the southern states decided to pay pensions, they had extensive enlistment rosters to work from, from the archive.
However, when black veterans applied for their pensions, and when asked, replied they had been soldiers, if their names were annotated in the Confederate records as “soldier”, it was lined through, and an alternative occupation, usually “servant” was handwritten next to it.
Even before the turn of the century, the official story was dictated that no blacks had served in the Confederate army as soldiers. And that official story remains today, and is vehemently defended as the truth in most histories.
The real truth is far less clear. In some southern states, there was a substantial population of black freemen, many of whom were entrepreneurs. And while in some states there was a strict prohibition against black enlistments, in other states there was far less so.
Likewise many officers of means did retain servants, black and white, and sometimes these servants were indeed enlisted men. And it would not be uncommon for them to be armed for their duties, such as guarding the officers goods and horse from thieves.
North Carolina had a large proportion of freedmen, and these had, until 1835, been permitted to vote.
As antebellum slavery became more lucrative, freedmen’s rights were diminished, and limitations on them became greater.
The slave power continued to enforce slavery over a population that became increasingly white due to the frequent rape of slave women by white masters and overseers, so much so that some poor whites were captured by slave catchers, and sold into slavery, with paperwork forged as necessary. Mostly white female slaves sold at a premium into the brothels, and were very popular with the southern gentlemen.
After the war, to the extent possible, defeated southerners tried to reestablish the antebellum conditions via the KKK, or through black codes, literacy tests, harsh sentences to plantation-jails such as the infamous Angola prison. Mass murders of blacks occurred such as the Rosewood Massacre right after a KKK rally at Gainesville Florida in 1922. Southern Democrats were long able to use southern mythos to block federal laws to punish lynching. Blacks were routinely prevented from voting, serving on jury, or serving in civil service positions.
One officer of means, a R.E. Lee had a servant who was both black and white. His cook, Mack Lee was his son by a slave woman.
North Carolina had the highest proportion of freedmen before the war, and went farthest at Gettysburg, and at Chickamanga.
considering who was in charge of the state governments when black soldiers would have applied for pensions, I submit it was southern racism post reconstruction that resulted in the wholesale deletion of soldier and substitution of servant for black confederates, and not a Northern conspiracy.