Confederates in the ranks were far from being colorblind. If one of their fellow soldiers was even suspected of not being entirely white, they were discharged immediately for that reason. Creoles from the City of Mobile were not even allowed into the state militia. A battalion of Choctaw Indians which organized for Confederate service in Mississippi in 1863 was disbanded because members were not members of the white race, despite the well-known fact that several Indian regiments west of the Mississippi River were in Confederate service.

We know that black men and women served as cooks, laundresses and personal attendants. Jim Lewis, who served General Jackson so faithfully, is a great example. Their records appear in the National Archives Collection titled Unfiled Papers and Slips, usually under first name only and always clearly marked 'colored'. Records are usually pay receipts given to civilian workers for service in a particular role. The State of Tennessee has a few hundred pension applications for black men claiming service in the Confederate army. Of those which were accepted (about half), most appear to have entered the army as a body servant for a Confederate officer.

The great controversy has not been over these men, but over thousands upon thousands of slaves said to have been under arms for the Confederate cause.

Are we to assume that Congressmen and officials from Richmond never visited Confederate camps? What about people like Col. Fremantle who visited both the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia? What about Confederate nurses like Fannie Beers and Kate Cumming? Wouldn't they have reported seeing black soldiers among the Confederates that they saw during the war. What about Sam Watkins and other Confederate veterans who wrote after the war? Why didn't they mention their black comrades in arms, not just cooks and laundresses, thousands upon thousands of them?