Beauregard: General I’m not able to fight in the war against the Northern aggressors because of my foot spurs… however my boy Othello will fight in my stead…
General: We can’t give that boy a gun to use against white people man!!
Beauregard: Don’t worry General.. he has implicit instructions to close his eyes when he shoots at white folks…
March 18, 1865.. a day that will live in (fill in the word). On this date just weeks before his surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Lee put his southern prestige and honor on the line when he back a proposal by Patrick Cleburne to arm the slaves to help the confederate army. Cleburne was a Major General who rose through the ranks starting out as a private. Now, I am going to tell you something. Some folks was talking about hanging him without it. Yep that was a really raw subject especially in light of John Brown’s Raid at the Harpers Ferry Armory in 1859. Brown wanted to get the guns at the armory and mount an insurrection against slavery. He was stopped by then Colonel Robert E. Lee, who would go on to become commander of the Confederate Army. As an aside, a lot of Civil War movies give you the impression that Lee was in charge during the entirety of the war, however Lee was not made commander of the confederate army until January of 1865, three months before the war ended. So back to John Brown. Well out of the seven blacks who participated in the raid, all who were not killed in the assault by Lee were hanged. Ten white men were also hanged and six escaped. Among those killed in the assault were three of Brown’s children. In addition 17 others were either killed or wounded defending the armory. One of the first ones killed was a negro baggage handler named Heyward Shepherd. Shepherd came out to defend the armory against Brown and the other uppity nigra’s who thought they was better than the white man and had the nerve to fight for their freedom. They shot him to pieces. I heard the only thing left was his hat and a whistle. I wrote a story about him which you can read here. There is a monument dedicated to Shepherd in Harpers Ferry entitled the Faithful Negro. It was put up by the Daughters Of The Confederacy. Shepherd is buried at the African-American cemetery in Winchester, Virginia, in an unmarked grave… with his faithful self. Like I said in the beginning, arming slaves was not something the confederates were comfortable with. We not even going to talk about Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831 in Virginia…. okay let’s talk about it… In the Turner Rebellion around 55 whites were killed, including women and children. Of course after they caught Turner, you just knew it was going to be “a party over there.” He was sentenced to death and drawn and quartered. A report in 1921 recounted by John Cromwells, “History Of the Negro”, said that “Turner was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms.” For weeks after the rebellion retribution was meted out to innocent blacks accused of involvement with the attacks. Militias beheaded dozens of slaves and stuck their heads on poles alongside frequently used roads as a warning to any other would be freedom fighter. To this very day there is a section of the Virginia State Route 658 named “Blackhead Signpost Road” which references one of those events. Even though their retribution was harsh… still these two rebellions and other rebellions made southern confederates question the notion of arming slaves.
General: Sargent I leave this boy under your command.
Sargent: Yes sir!! ( The general leaves..) Well boy what have we got here?
Othello: Suh, I am Private …
Sargent: Aw no.. no. no… boy… You is Public Othello… P.U.B.L.I.K… Publik… Now what’s yo rank boy??
Othello: Sir I am Public Othello…
Sargent: Public come with me… (The sargent takes Othello close to the front lines) This is your post.. if you see the enemy you are to report it at once.
Othello: Sargent suppose the enemy fires on me… what am I supposed to do? I don’t have a gun…
Sargent: Here.. take this banjo…
One of the obstacles that prevented blacks from fighting on the side of the Confederacy was that it forbidden by law. That is it was forbidden until they started getting their asses shot off. So while they were primarily concerned with the obvious threat of arming people who they regularly abused, another inherent digress was the fact that they would have to admit that blacks were equal in mentality and stature. As Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs put it, “The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.” Yep… not to mention the regiment might turn and fire on them. The fact is that southern based racial identity in which blacks were relegated to the lower echelons of humanity were at stake. Southern masculinity was at stake. Southern honor was at stake. White women and children being saved by strong black men with guns was not gonna be tolerated. Of course history doesn’t report that the feeling was also mutual on the Northern side. Blacks were not allowed to fight on the Union side until 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation, a full two years after the first battle at Bull Run. The Confederates know the battle as the First Battle of Manassas. In January of 1864 after the defeat at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Confederates started handing out watermelon and chicken sandwiches to the slaves. They were getting desperate. It was said that a couple of rebs even allowed some nigras to look them right in the eyeballs. Afterwards they say the general was so mad he had those men flogged! As for the rebel soldiers… well they were put on report. You didn’t think they was going to flog a white men because of something a black man did… did you? Sherman was burning everything in sight on his march to the sea and Grant was chasing Lee’s army day and night without abate. It was a war of attrition. The Union Army simply outnumbered the rebs. They could absorb devastating losses. Not so much for the Confederates, where each battle put another proverbial nail in the coffin. The commanders understood that they needed the black man if they were to win the war or even fight to a draw for a favorable negotiation. It was at this time that Patrick Cleburne circulated the letter calling for the arming of slaves. “Northern successes on the battlefield threatens the South with the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood. Sacrificing the first could save the rest. The Confederacy could check Union advances by recruiting an army of slaves and guaranteeing freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy.”
Othello: (Bang!! bang!! bang!!, Swoosh!! Boom!! bang!! bang!! bang!! The sound of war was all around him.. Othello pick up what was left of his banjo and hauled ass..) Sargent the enemy is advancing.. they will be here any minute!!
Sargent: Give the order to move out corporal… (The sargent looked at what was left of the banjo he had given Othello… Only the neck and a back piece remained..) Public… report!!
Othello: Sargent they moved in real fast.. I hid behind a tree and figured I would ambush them when they got closer.. They were about 50 yards out when I jumped from behind the tree and started playing,” I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten … look away Dixie Land..” They kinda got riled up and I heard someone saying something that sounded like.. “that #@@!!!. “ Then they opened fire…
Sargent: (The sargent looked at Othello real hard and then smiled…) Look Public, I’m promoting you to “Private!!” (Othello dropped the banjo and stood at attention.) I want you to cover our retreat. Take this rifle and hide behind that rock. When you see the enemy, I want you to fire!! Here is your blindfold.. you know it’s against the law for a boy to knowingly fire on a white man.. good luck boy… Troops…move out!!
So like I was saying earlier.. Cleburne saw the handwriting on the wall. It said, “We gonna be free and invent rap music a hunnert years from now so we can cuss y’all out with gold teeth in our mouths while wearing 5 carat diamonds rings in our noses…” Okay.. I’m just kidding around, but yeah Cleburne knew he had to do something. Sometime around the end of 1864 when Lincoln started planning a vacation in Georgia… Cleburne called together the leadership of the Army of Tennessee. He wanted to tell them about his proposal to emancipate “all the slaves in the South.” Now although he took a couple in the shoulder, he manage to calm them down so he could continue. Cleburne said that Emancipation did not mean equality. (Now that’s a big surprise.. coulda knocked me over with a feather..) Furthermore he said by freeing the slaves, it would gain their sympathy and they would be more willing to fight on behalf of the South. He reasoned that the state legislatures could enact laws which would ensure relations between blacks and whites would not fundamentally change. (Bang!! Bang!! That one almost got him… What do you mean not fundamentally?) The following is a transcript from his letter detailing the proposal: “Satisfy the negro that if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war he shall receive his freedom and that of his race … and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength. Will the slaves fight? The helots of Sparta stood their masters good stead in battle. In the great sea fight of Lepanto where the Christians checked forever the spread of Mohammedanism over Europe, the galley slaves of portions of the fleet were promised freedom, and called on to fight at a critical moment of the battle. They fought well, and civilization owes much to those brave galley slaves. It is said that slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.” Cleburne also talks about the ass whipping the slaves in Jamaica and Haiti had given the British and the French. Lastly he talked about the few untrained uncle’s who had taken up arms against the North and who stood with the Confederates as being on par with and being just as brave as many of the half trained Yankee’s. (Bang!! bang!! bang!! … We said ain’t no black man as good as a white man!!) Cleburne’s was vilified as being a nigg@r lover and for promoting abolitionist conspiracies, primarily by one General William H.T. Walker, who strongly supported slavery and also saw Cleburne as a rival for promotion. Walker was a fierce fighter and had been wounded severely many times during the war. They finally got him during Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea in the Atlanta Campaign. Yep shot his ass 25 times… (Wanna make your neighborhood racist mad.. name your son after Tecumseh Sherman.. then move to Africa… To this day there are some southerners who consider Sherman a terrorist war criminal, who raped, burned, and pillaged an innocent South.) Anywho neither Walker or Cleburne ever obtain the rank of Corp Commander and both remained Division Commanders until their deaths. A Confederate Corp leader usually commanded about 36,000 men, while a Division Commander lead around 12,000 men. Cleburne died in 1864 at the battle of Franklin near Nashville, Tennessee. Now I know I joke a lot, but this is a true account of the circumstances of Cleburne’s death. “On November 30, 1864, he was last seen advancing on foot toward the Union line with his sword raised, after his horse was shot out from under him. Accounts later said that he was found just inside the Federal line and that his body had been carried back to an aid station. When Confederates found his body, he had been picked clean of any valuable items, including his sword, boots and pocket watch. Cleburne was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States in 1849. He was buried in his adopted town of Helena, Arkansas, in the Confederate section of Maple Hill Cemetery, overlooking the Mississippi River…” Yahoo!!
Union General: Did he fall for it Agent Othello?
Othello: Like a breakdancer on ice… I wish you could have seen the guard’s eyes when I hit him across the head with that banjo! Then I high tailed it back here and started shucking and jiving.. I asked did he have any watermelon or chicken… He smile and then he promoted me.
Union General: What is that white rag tied between the branches of that tree?
Othello: That there sir is called a tripod…
Union General: A tri.. what?
Othello: A tripod sir… I use it to steady my rifle so my aim is more accurate..
So you might be thinking after what you have just read, that there were no blacks officially fighting under the Stars and Bars. Well sorta kinda… “The “Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,” a collection of military records from both sides which spans more than 50 volumes and more than 50,000 pages, there are a total of seven Union eyewitness reports of black Confederates. Three of these reports mention black men shooting at Union soldiers, one report mentions capturing a handful of armed black men along with some soldiers, and the other three reports mention seeing unarmed black laborers. There is no record of Union soldiers encountering an all-black line of battle or anything close to it.”
Now some Black men were undoubtedly force to go with their masters or as in Othello’s case, served in their master place. Legally Black men were not allowed to serve as combat soldiers in the Confederacy. Instead in their official duty as a slave, they were cooks, teamsters, and manual laborers. What they had a union for slaves??? Naw.. a teamster back in them days was a person responsible for the handling on animals. (“Now massa we ain’t gonna work no more till we git what’s coming to us… right boys? Master: How bout I tie you too that barn door and give you fifty lashes with that braided monkey tail?” So massa you want us in the field over yonder or we can dig you a new field..?”) Lol… So despite a few eyewitness accounts of Black Confederate soldiers, there were no black Confederate combat units in service and no documentation exists for any Black man being paid a pension as a Confederate soldier. The Department of Veterans Affairs did not start giving pensions to Civil War era Veterans until 1930. The last surviving recognized Civil War veteran was Walter Williams, who reported served under General Hood’s command. He was eight years old. He died in September of 1959 at the age of 117. He is buried at the Mount Pleasant Church Cemetery near New Baden in Robertson County, Texas. Anywho it seems I left the tracks for a minute… some blacks did receive a pension for their work as laborers in the Civil War. Accordingly… in a time of war… the bond’s men forge in the crucible of battle remain steadfast no matter what your color. A lot of the former slaves later attended regimental reunions with their wartime comrades. Some estimates put the number of non combatant blacks confederate surrogates at around 200. Of course hundreds were employed in the burying of soldiers after major battles… and I am using the word “employed” loosely. Now I want to go back to when I said that you might be thinking that there were no Black men officially fighting under the Stars and Bar and I said.. “Well sorta kinda…” On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a law to allow black men to serve in combat roles, although with the provision “that nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear toward their owners.” This meant that you would still be a slave, shooting at the people trying to free you. Sounds a little bit like some of the Trump supporters. Anywho, active fighting ended less than three weeks after the law was passed, and there is no evidence that any black units were accepted into the Confederate Army as a result of the law. Sorta kinda…. so no matter what you hear or how many black people you see in a Confederate uniform… you can bet your macaroni and cheese… not now a one of them pick up a gun to shoot at another white man in front of any Confederate soldier and lived to tell about it. The myth of black men fighting for the Confederacy is just that… a myth.
Meanwhile at Fort Fallback Ritenow:
General: Sargent I heard you had to retreat because the enemy was over running your position?
Sargent: Yes sir, We managed to escape with the help of a nigra.
General: A Nigra!!
Sargent: Yes sir General.. but don’t worry… I left that nigra there and told him to put on a blindfold before he started shooting at the enemy. He must be in watermelon heaven by now!! ( Both men laugh haughtily!!)
General: (Still chuckling..) What are your casualties sargent?
Sargent: I’m glad to report no fatalities General. We do have some wounded sir. Including myself… I got twelve men down.. we all been shot in the ass…
Happy Veterans Day!
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