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There were a few who did; blacks who served in the Civil War overwhelmingly chose to fight for the Union.

11 posted on 09/19/2010 5:36:27 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)

I know that now. After meeting that young man I read some books he recommended and recently I met a NC man who is researching the subject. I asked how his research had been received given the reaction we saw at the AHC and he said his response had been mixed.

20 posted on 09/19/2010 5:55:29 PM PDT by kalee (The offences we give, we write in the dust; Those we take, we engrave in marble. J Huett 1658)

I think that if I had been a black slave in 1864 I would have preferred to fight for the government that had issued the Emancipation Proclamation rather than one that wanted the institution to continue forever. There is a theory that the blacks who did volunteer to fight for the Confederacy, right at the end, intended to turn their guns on the Confederates once they were armed.

There were masters who took their body servants with them into the Confederate army, and I think there were cases of those servants taking part in battles, but they wouldn't have been officially regarded as soldiers.

Another possibility would be persons who had some African ancestry but who were able to "pass" as white--maybe DNA would be the only way to determine that there was some African ancestry.

28 posted on 09/19/2010 6:59:35 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus

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