A Little Knowledge. . . .
Over at Mid-South Flaggers, the admin there has been doing a little independent research on Confederate pensions from Washington County, Mississippi, and is disturbed by what he’s found – or rather, what he’s not found:
He’s right; the word “slave” does not appear on the documents he’s looking at. Instead, they’re referred to as “servants,” and there are thirteen of them listed on the page he posted to illustrate his findings:
True, an example servant’s pension application he posted requires applicants to identify “the name of the party whom you served,” and the military unit “in which your owner served,” but it doesn’t use the word slave, and that’s what matters, right? 
Yes, Mid-South Flagger, you’ve been lied to. Just not by who you think.
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“Southern people have not gotten over the vicious habit of not believing what they don’t wish to believe”
We recently looked at an editorial from the Atlanta Southern Confederacy, arguing loudly against the arming of slaves during the winter of 1864-65. But that view was not universal. The governor of Virginia, William “Extra Billy” Smith (right, 1797-1887), was one of the first prominent Confederate office-holders to urge the Confederate congress to seriously consider the idea, calling upon them to “give this subject early consideration, and enact such measures as their wisdom may approve.” Smith’s call was taken up by an editorial in the Charlottesville Chronicle, that was reprinted in the Richmond Sentinel just before Christmas 1864:
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[1] Richmond Sentinel, December 21, 1864. Quoted in Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1972), 146-47.
Research Exercise: “Sam Cullom, Black Confederate”
The name Sam Cullom is a new one to me, but it seems he’s been celebrated in and around Livingston, Tennessee as a local Black Confederate for a while. A military-style headstone was placed over his grave about ten years ago (right), with the legend, “Pvt. Sam Cullom.” His story is told a number of places, like this 2008 piece in the Crossville, Tennessee Chronicle:
So here’s an assignment for those who may be so inclined. See what you can find in the way of historical documentation that supports or refutes this profile of Cullom. To get you started, here’s his 1921 pension application from the State of Tennessee, and his listing in the decennial U.S. Census for 1880, 1900, 1910 and 1920 (two pages).
Please feel to post links to other, primary sources that are useful in documenting Cullom’s life. Have fun.
Pension Records for Louis Napoleon Nelson
One of the best-known “black Confederate soldiers” is Louis Napoleon Nelson (right, c. 1846 – 1934), due in large part to the advocacy of his grandson, Nelson Winbush. There are any number of claims made for the nature of Nelson’s service, such as these:
[Winbush's] grandfather, Louis Napolean Nelson, was a private in Co. M, 7th Tennessee Cavalry of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Private Nelson was a slave at the start of the war. He began his military service as a cook, then a rifleman, and finally a chaplain.
Virtually nothing, however, has been offered in the way of documentation of such claims. So in the interest of injecting something tangible into future discussions of Nelson’s activities during the war, here is his 1921 Tennessee Confederate pension file (PDF).
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“. . . how many may be of use without putting guns in their hands.”
While doing some research on another topic recently I came across a reference to this item from the Richmond, Virginia Examiner of January 13, 1864. In the third winter of the war, things were looking dim for the Confederacy — though not nearly as dim as they would eventually be — and there were already suggestions that African Americans be enlisted as soldiers in the Confederate army. In this piece, an anonymous “officer of distinction” in Confederate service rejects that idea, and instead argues that more extensive use of black laborers would “restore to duty in the field forty thousand white men.”
EMPLOYMENT OF NEGROES IN THE ARMY. — An officer of distinction in the Confederate army writes as follows: The subject of placing negroes [sic.] in the army is attracting some attention. The following memoranda shows approximately how many may be of use without putting guns in their hands. Premising that we have in the field one hundred brigades, allow for each as: Engineer laborers……………………….50……….5,000
Butchers……………………………………….5………….500
Blacksmiths………………………………….2………….200
Wheelwrights……………………………….2………….200
Teamsters……………………………………50………5,000
Cooks………………………………………….40………4,000
Hospital nurses and cooks & c………40………4,000
Shoemakers…………………………………20………2,000 Total…………………………………………………….20,700 [sic., 20,900] To which may be added for the various mechanical departments under the control of the Government, as labourers, & c………………………………………….10,000 And as labourers on fixed fortifications…….20,000 Making a total of……………………………………..50,700 [50,900] The employment of this number would restore to duty in the field forty thousand white men.
There are three things that are worth noting about this piece.
First, the writer is explicitly opposed to the idea of African Americans serving under arms. He makes no distinction between enslaved persons and free men of color — neither, in his view, is appropriate for service in the ranks as soldiers. Indeed, the writer’s stated intent is to show how these men may be used “without putting guns in their hands.”
Second, the author makes no mention whatever of personal servants to white soldiers, who even then must have numbered in the thousands. This is relevant, because this group includes a majority of individuals hailed as “black Confederates” today. This suggests that this “officer of distinction” in Confederate army did not view those servants as being part of the national government’s greater military effort, which indeed they are not — personal servants are personal servants, period, full stop.
Third, the citation to this news item was found in some handwritten notes from decades ago, taken from a thesis written decades before that. But the notes, and likely the thesis from which they’re taken, record it as a summary of “Negroes in employed in the Army (by the 100 brigades then in the field).” But that’s wrong; this is not a report of current status, but a prospective look at what might be done in the future. (The note-taker almost certainly did not have access to the original newspaper.) This underscores how easy it is to misconstrue an original source, which original error gets repeated by those who follow. It would be interesting to know if other secondary works report these numbers as an actual accounting, rather than a projection based on a proposed policy.
Above all, the author gives no recognition of the modern assertion that there were large numbers of African American men in the ranks, considered soldiers under arms. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: real Confederates didn’t know about black Confederates.
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Update: In the comments, Rob Baker makes a very important point — this newspaper item comes just days after Patrick Cleburne’s now-famous proposal that the Confederacy embrace emancipation and enlist large numbers of black troops. While no public acknowledgement was made of Cleburne’s proposal at the time, it seems possible that rumors of it were circulating in Richmond. Could this short piece, penned by an anonymous “officer of distinction,” be part of the Confederate government’s effort to quash the idea?
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Black Confederates, A Subsidiary of Dixie Outfitters
Update, August 10: Near the end of this post, I wrote that “as far as I can tell, neither Barber nor Edgerton have ever explicitly claimed Heritage 411 to be a non-profit organization.”
I was wrong. They claim both non-profit status and that donations to Southern Heritage 411 are tax-deductable for donors:
To those of you who would like to make a tax deductible contribution to a non- profit organization and support H.K. Edgerton now, please make your checks payable to: Southern Heritage 411 and send it to:’ Southern Heritage 411, Inc.
P O Box 220
Odum GA 31555-0220 Dewey Barber
Owner, Dixie Outfitters
Judging from the Internet Way-back machine, this claim has been posted on the Heritage 411 website since (at least) July 2008, more than four years ago.
Kevin has made a couple of posts recently poking fun at H. K. Edgerton, and his frequent display (when not in Confederate uniform) of different shirts sold by Dixie Outfitters, frequently one with his own image emblazoned upon it. But there’s a method to this, and Edgerton’s sartorial choices need to be understood in the context of his business relationship with Dixie Outfitters. Southern Heritage 411 is a for-profit corporation, registered as such with Georgia Secretary of State from 2006 to 2010, when its license was dissolved because the company repeatedly failed to file its required annual re-registration. Although it is sometimes described as a non-for-profit organization (e.g., on Clint Lacy’s blog), and Edgerton solicits donations constantly, Heritage 411 has never been registered as such with the IRS or any state agency that I can find.
Did you ever wonder why Southern Heritage 411 is located in Georgia, when Edgerton lives 300+ miles away in North Carolina? Turns out, that’s easy — because Southern Heritage 411 is run by Dewey Barber, not H. K. Edgerton.
Dewey Barber, H. K. Edgerton and musician Terry Warren, via TerryWarren.net.
The Heritage 411 website is scattered with praise for Dixie Outfitters owner Dewey Barber, and an acknowledgment of Barber’s support for Edgerton (e.g., “HK’s main benefactor is Dewey Barber, who uses HK to sell merchandise from his business Dixie Outfitters“). But in fact, Edgerton is (or at least was, until 2010) effectively Barber’s employee, a junior officer in the company reporting to Barber, who has always been the primary contact for Heritage 411, and from 2007 t0 2010, was the CEO as well. The core truth, as outlined in official filings made by Heritage 411 in Georgia (accessible at the link above) is that Southern Heritage 411 is a for-profit business, run by Dewey Barber, with H. K. Edgerton as the public face of that business. It’s a deeply cynical arrangement, one that takes commercial advantage of Edgerton’s popularity among Confederate Heritage™ groups who embrace Edgerton and his theatrics as a sort of vaccination against being accused of some of the uglier attitudes and beliefs commonly associated with the Confederate flag. Barber’s Heritage 411 operation is, at its most benign interpretation, a sort of under-the-radar marketing enterprise, firing up the True Southrons and encouraging them to (not coincidentally) purchase Dixie Outfitters’ merchandise. It probably brings a good return on investment, too, given the effectiveness of a popular and high-profile representative like Edgerton.
Edgerton with (r.) Clint Lacy, whose blog, “Across Our Confederation,” falsely describes Southern Heritage 411 as a “non for profit resource.” Image via the John T. Coffee SCV Camp No. 1934.
As far as I can tell, neither Barber nor Edgerton have ever explicitly claimed Heritage 411 to be a non-profit organization, but they do seem perfectly content to let people believe they are, and to let others make that claim on their behalf. And Heritage 411 sure makes itself sound like a charitable organization. There’s nothing illegal about soliciting “donations” to a for-profit business like Heritage 411, but I’ll leave it for others to decide how ethical it is, given Edgerton’s continual solicitation of donations — he routinely appends an address for PayPal payments to his e-mails — and presenting himself as a lone voice, a committed and uncomplicated individual fighting the good fight for Southern Heritage™, without mentioning his formal business and legally-binding links to one of the best-known vendors of Confederate-themed merchandise in the country. I suspect there are a lot of folks, taken in by Edgerton’s apparent sincerity, who’ve donated money to Heritage 411 — money they may have been hard-pressed to give — thinking that they’re donating to a non-profit enterprise, when in fact Southern Heritage 411 is just another branch of the Dixie Outfitters’ marketing outreach.
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Stonewall Jackson’s “Regiment of Free Negroes”
Within the smoke-and-mirrors, ignore-that-man-behind-the-curtain game that constitutes advocacy for black Confederate soldiers, one often comes across the claim that Stonewall Jackson commanded two battalions of African American troops. It pops up all over the place, including (briefly) in grade school textbooks in the Old Dominion. Remarkably, with 27 bazillion books published to date on the Civil War, and a fair number of those specifically about Ol’ Blue Light himself, no one’s ever bothered to name those two battalions by their official designation, identify their officers, or point them out on the order of battle for a specific engagement.
I’m not sure where the claim about these battalions originated, but it may be at least in part based on this news item from the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer of November 27, 1861:
FROM THE UPPER POTOMAC POSITION OF THE REBELS — A FREE NEGRO REGIMENT A letter from Darnestown, Md., dated to-day, says. . . . Gen. JACKSON, who, as Colonel, formerly commanded at Harper’s Ferry, is engaged at Winchester in organizing, arming, and equipping a regiment of free negroes [sic.], said to number fully a thousand. The negroes are reported to be very enthusiastic in their new position.
Rumors and second-hand accounts of African American troops in Confederate service appeared frequently in Northern newspapers, especially during the early part of the war. We’ve seen how a single mention of black troops — from a source that seems dubious to start with — got rewritten and embellished and recycled, over and over, for weeks after the Battle of First Manassas. That one took in a lot of people, including (it seems likely) Frederick Douglass.
So now we’ve got a date (November 1861) and a location (Winchester, Virginia), for at least one (anonymous, second-hand) account of Jackson’s black troops. Anyone who has further details on this regiment — its commanding officer, its official designation, the actions in which it fought, or citations to it in Confederate sources, please drop it in the comments.
I have Fold3 open and waiting.
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How — and Why — Real Confederates Endorsed Slave Pensions
In another forum recently, there was a lively discussion going on about the historical basis for present-day claims about black Confederates. One of the topics, naturally, was the pensions that some states awarded to African American men who had served as body servants, cooks, and in other roles as personal attendants to white soldiers. One person asked why it was that the former states of the Confederacy were so late in authorizing pensions for these men, or (in some cases) did not authorize them at all. It’s a good question, that I’m sure defies a single, simple answer.
But in the process of looking for something else, I came across this editorial in the October 1913 issue of the Confederate Veteran, calling on the states to provide pensions for a “a particular class of old slaves.” I’m putting it after the jump, because it’s peppered with racial slurs and stereotypes that are hurtful to modern ears, but were wholly unremarkable for that time, place and publication. So let me apologize in advance for the language, and hope that my readers will appreciate the necessity of repeating it here, in full and in proper context, in order to be crystal clear about the author’s meaning and intent. There are times when polite paraphrasing just doesn’t do the job.
As you read this editorial, keep in mind that the Confederate Veteran, by its own masthead, officially represented (1) the United Confederate Veterans, (2) the United Daughters of the Confederacy, (3) the Sons of Veterans (i.e., the SCV), and other groups. The magazine was mostly written by Confederate veterans and their families, to be read by Confederate veterans and their families. While the editorial may not reflect formal UCV/UDC/SCV policy, its appearance in the magazine does indicate that its perspective is one that would be shared by the magazine’s readership, and its call for action would reach a willing and receptive audience.
In short, if you want to know how real Confederate veterans viewed the purpose and necessity of pensions for former slaves, start here:
Confederate “Body Soldier” Honored with Fake Grave, Yankee Headstone
Update, June 12: The researcher behind the stone, Julia Barnes, pushes back hard against my piece below:
Andy, as with many issues, reporters make mistakes. The reporter did a good job and was trying to do a public service. The records for Wade Childs stated that he was a “body servant,” not “body soldier.” The burial site for both men, Lewis and Wade Childs, was the West View cemetery in Anderson. This is not supposition. It is based upon the death certificates. Both were buried in the same cemetery, by the same undertaker, about 12 months apart. This is not a fake grave. It is a placement based upon the records of the Anderson Cemetery records office, the South Carolina Vital Records department, and the Pension records found in the SC Archives, which noted his burial location and date. All of this was reviewed by the City attorney for approval of the placement of the headstone.
Fair enough. More in the comments.
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Even in the muddle of half-understood documents, vague definitions and simplistic, patriotic tropes one comes to expect of news stories about black Confederates, this one’s a mess:
Childs served as a body soldier with Orrs Regiment of the South Carolina Rifles in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He carried the belongings and camp supplies of white soldiers, one of some 20,000 to 50,000 slaves who labored during the war.
[Julia] Barnes believes he might also be one of the 3,000 to 10,000 black Confederates who Harvard researchers suspect fought for the South. The Southern army did not record black soldiers, said Barnes, an Anderson County historian.
I’ve never heard the term “body soldier” before, but I suspect I will again. It’s a modern obfuscation that both sounds substantive and conveniently elides the terms used 150 years ago. It’s not a term real Confederates would have understood or used. Childs would have been known as a “body servant,” or simply as a slave. There is a passing reference to Wade Childs’ being enslaved, but no reference to soldiers Private John Chiles or Captain James S. Cothran, to whom (according to his pension record) Childs was acting as servant. Childs labored for those men, not for the Confederate army. The headstone makes no reference to Childs’ role whatsoever. That’s almost unheard of on such stones, and suggests very strongly that the folks who put it up feel like the less said about that status, the better.
Mike Barnes, the local SCV camp commander, is quoted as saying that “they are considered veterans by the state of South Carolina,” but in fact the state viewed men like Childs very, very differently than it did rank-and-file Confederate soldiers. South Carolina first awarded pensions to disabled white veterans and their widows in 1887, and gradually expanded eligibility for other white veterans in the decades following. It was almost forty more years, though, before men like Childs were made eligible:
Act No. 63, 1923 S.C. Acts 107 allowed African Americans who had served at least six months as cooks, servants, or attendants to apply for a pension. Then in 1924, apparently because there were too many applications, the act was amended to eliminate all laborers, teamsters, and non-South Carolinians by extending eligibility only to South Carolina residents who had served the state for at least six months as “body servants or male camp cooks.”
The evidence for Child’s involvement with the Confederate military seems to rest entirely on his 1923 pension application (read it here), which is fine as far as it goes. (See another example of the limits of Confederate pension records here.) But the pension application is very clear about what Childs’ (or Chiles’, as it’s given in the application) role was during the war as a servant — none of this vague “body soldier” business mentioned there.
It’s also important to note that, as is often the case with such applications, the case for Childs’ worthiness for such a pension was made not only on his wartime service to his master, but also on his continued adherence to the racial status quo antebellum in the South. “Wade has been a faithful, dependable negro [sic.],” his primary sponsor writes, “humble to white people and always willing to serve them.” Contrary to the assertions of the local SCV camp commander, this is hardly a case of Childs’ service being recognized by the state as being anything like that of white veterans, armed and in the ranks.
Make note also of the fact that, as of 1924, African Americans who had worked as laborers and teamsters, men whose activities were arguably more directly beneficial to the South’s military effort, were explicitly excluded from the pension program in favor of those men like Childs who had served individual white soldiers. Cooks and personal servants counted; the men who built earthworks and drove wagons did not. That was the policy of the state of South Carolina.
All of this is par for the course in “honoring” black Confederates, but there’s an additional element here that adds another layer of dubious research findings:
Barnes and her husband discovered that Childs’ brother Lewis was buried at Westview, a historically black cemetery. They concluded that Wade Childs must be buried there, too.
Westview’s military corner facing Reed Street is “wall-to-wall” with unmarked graves, Barnes said.
“I had been looking and found his brother there,” Barnes said. “It’s logical that he would be there since his brother is there. We don’t know where, but when we saw Lewis, we felt his was there, too.”
Yes, you read that right — they have no damn idea where Wade Childs is actually buried. They’re guessing, and placed a stone in that cemetery, on that spot, because they “felt” that was the spot, that it was “logical” to them. It’s a fake grave, just like the ones in Pulaski — with the exception that the folks in Tennessee at least added fine print noting that location of the person mentioned is unknown. No such truth-telling here.
To add an extra bit of irony, these noble defenders of Southron Honour™ put up a stone with a rounded top, like those of of U.S. veterans, not the peaked top usually used for former Confederates. How on earth did they get that one wrong?
I dare say these folks found a local African American man in the South Carolina pension rolls, and ended up so determined to commemorate their very own black Confederate that little details like, oh, actually knowing where he’s buried became irrelevant to putting up a marker and chalking up another “forgotten segment of South Carolina’s past.” Thank goodness these folks are only promoting heritage — if they called this half-baked foolishness history, they’d be laughed out of town.
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Update, May 31: I originally put this down in the comments, but it might be useful to explain further why I’m a bit exercised about this “fake grave” business, an action that I (still) consider to be so misleading as to border on willful dishonesty.
Long-time readers may recall my post just about exactly a year ago on Peter Phelps, a white Confederate soldier who’d been named as a “black Confederate” by another website. In researching Peter Phelps, I found documentation not only of the cemetery he was buried in, but also the section. Unfortunately, there is no marker there now to identify the exact spot, so I posted a photo of the area with a caption that it showed the area where he was buried, but the precise location is not known. That’s fair, that’s accurate, and that’s honest. What I did not do is take a picture of an empty patch of soil and state, “this is Peter Phelps’ grave,” which is essentially what the Barnes are doing with Wade Childs.
As for their assumption that Wade Childs is buried next to his brother, the Phelps case is also instructive. Peter’s wife, Lucinda, died several years before he did, and we know (again from interment records) that she was buried in a plot in the same part of that cemetery. But section and plot numbers also make it clear that they are not buried together, as one might assume a married couple would be. While it may seem “logical” to think that Childs is buried near his brother, in the absence of actual evidence of that, it seems foolhardy to me to make that assumption and set it in stone (literally) for future generations. Visitors to that South Carolina cemetery a week from now, a year from now, fifty years from now, are going to be left with the belief that they saw the grave of Wade Childs, when in fact they might not have been within fifty (or a hundred) yards of it. Does that sort of precision really matter? Yes, I think it does, especially when it involves placing a marker that’s intended to last for generations to come.
As I’ve said, there are many ways to recognize a person, or a burial, without setting up a fake grave. It can be done. Even the faux cemetery for black Confederates at Pulaski, which is disingenuous and misleading in so many ways, acknowledges that the men so “honored” do not actually lie under those stones.
For those who want to engage in the heritage vs. history debate, this commemoration of Wade Childs offers lots to chew on. It’s a great example of the difference between two different approaches. Serious historians know the limits of their knowledge of a subject, and are willing to say “we don’t know that; we don’t actually know where Wade Childs is buried.” A serious historian does not go around setting up a simulated gravesite as a means of “honoring” a deceased person, or making up a term like “body soldier” to muddy the waters around the man’s actual role in the war, while ignoring critical elements of the primary, documentary record that undermine the chosen narrative. “Heritage” advocates do that sort of thing all the time, and aren’t even aware they’re doing it, or understand that it’s a problem.
So by all means, “forward the Colours,” y’all. Just don’t think what you’re doing counts as history.
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Image: Jennifer Crossley Howard, IndependentMail.com.
Research a Mile Wide, and an Inch Deep
The deeply shallow “research” to prove the existence of black Confederates continues apace. This image, from the Alabama Department of Archives and History, is of men from the 15th Alabama Infantry attending a statewide Confederate veterans reunion in Montgomery, in November 1902. The 15th Alabama, many will recall, is the regiment that made repeated attempts to dislodge the Union flank on Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg, facing the famous 20th Maine Infantry. I believe the former commander of the 15th Alabama, William C. Oates, is the first man at left in the front row in the image, directly above the C in “C.S.A.”
The image has become a point of discussion online recently, particularly in reference to the dark-skinned man in the second-to-last row, third from the end on the right. The discussion seems to center around whether the man is African American, of mixed race, or perhaps is a white man with very dark, tanned skin. Whether he’s actually African American or not is critical, because the beginning and end of the question is whether or not a black man attended a Confederate reunion. That fact, in and of itself, is apparently supposed to tell us all we need to know about African Americans and the Confederacy.
Of course, it doesn’t.
Warning: The following includes historical quotes that use offensive language and themes.
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