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From: Chaltas, David – David.Chaltas@letcher.kyschools.us
Date: Thu, May 14, 2009
Ms. Carol,
This is wonderful! I will Cc to some of my friends who are compiling information about Blacks serving the cause of the South…You are the greatest…
The Old General
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From: Campbell, Carol [mailto:Carol.Campbell@lmunet.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009
David, in doing some research today, I ran across a paragraph in Wilma A. Dunaway’s The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation that I thought you might like to know about.
From Page 194.
“Not all black mountain soldiers served in the Union army. In Virginia, Lee’s recruiting officers solicited and organized black regiments from the Appalachian Counties of Wythe, Patrick, and Franklin. In western Maryland, a Union officer reported the capture of black Appalachians among the defeated Rebel troops. ‘Most of the Negroes . . .were manifestly an integral part of the Southern Confederacy Army,’ for they bore rifles; rode on horses, mules, or caissons; and were led by blacks playing bugles, drums, and fifes. Levi Miller escorted his Rockbridge County owner to war, ‘regularly enlisted in the Confederate Army,’ and saw combat in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The WPA narratives describe twelve mountain slaves who served in (continuing on Page 195) the Confederate army and another three males who first served with Confederate forces and then escaped to the Union army. For example, Jim Threat recalled that his owner ‘went to the war and as he was so used to having somebody to wait on him he took my mother’s brother with him to be his special servant. Uncle took smallpox and died and was buried at the camp.’ Tom Singleton ‘wuz in de War ‘bout two years’ with his master. The slave ‘waited on him, cooked for him, an’ went on de scout march wid him, for to tote his gun, an’ see after his needs.’
George Kye served as a military substitute for his master. ‘I went off to serve because old master was too old to go, but he had to send somebody anyways.’ For two years, he served in the Confederate army, under his master’s name. According to George, ‘they was eleven negro boys served in my regiment for their masters.’ One Blue ridge Virginia slaveholder routinely sent twelve-year-old Ben Brown ‘with the young recruits going to de army headquartahs at Charlottesville to take care of de horses an show de way.’ Tom McAlpin recalled that
Jeff Davis’ officers would go th’ough de streets, an’ grab up de white mens an’ put ropes ‘roun’ dere wrists lak de
was takin’ ‘em off to jail . . . .Dey made all de white mens go. It was called de ‘scription. Some [slaves] went too.
Dem [slaves] fought right side of dere masters. Some went as body guards an’ some went as soldiers.
At age nineteen, McAlpin himself was conscripted as part of a black regiment that was sent ‘to Richmond to bring some of the wounded Federates.’”
So much for there not being any Confederate African American soldiers!
CC
