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Read A Good Book Lately?

Mike

Well-known member
One that everyone should read:

Forgotten Confederates: An Anthology About Black Southerners, Vol. 14 (Journal of Confederate History Series) (Paperback)

The common conception of black Southerners in the Civil War has described a people unified by their opposition to the Confederacy and resisting the Southern war effort, either passively and actively.
This view can only be maintained by ignoring a mass of research material that strongly suggests that black opinion, like other opinion, was represented across the spectrum, and was strongly influenced by sectional, local, and family loyalties which have largely disappeared in the modern world, but which were of paramount importance in the nineteenth century. Many blacks, free and slave, in fact, considered themselves Southerners first and blacks second, and served the Southern cause enthusiastically.
This unconventional view is supported here by a wealth of clippings, rosters, memoirs, photos, archival records, and other data to convincingly demonstrate that the matter is more complex than the simplifiers of history would have it, and to show that the actual record of the black Southerner leaves no firm ground for those who would cite his experiences for modern political purposes.
 
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