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Re: Virginia's Black Confederates

Sorry Edward, after having heard this from so many who hold your position and recently being berated and insulted as a "traitor to the Cause" because of my desire for documentation, your "pro-Southern" remark related to this discussion, which I believe has nothing to do with good scholarship, sounded as though you were taking this position.

If you folks would post a document and then debate its veracity, then I can respect the argument. Unfortunately, whenever the proponents of the Black Confederate Myth are questioned or countered with alternative documentation or explanations, it usually generates a highly-charged emotional reaction.

Finally, let me say again, in defense of my Confederate ancestors in their time, I believe they would be horribly insulted by the insinuation that they fought shoulder to should with African-Americans in Confederate ranks. By modern standards and morality, my Confederate and Union ancestors were highly racist. I am sure we would be taken aback, according to our modern views regarding their treatment of blacks, Native-Americans, Asians and women. It's not that they were bad men, it is that they were American men of the mid-19th century with all of the customs, traditions and views that entails.

See, I don't need to take a moral stance and have my Confederate gg-grandfather sitting around the battlefield campfire with a former slave or a freedman, singin' Dixie, to justify his views and honor his memory. In his world, he held the views of most of the people of his time, that African-Americans were an inferior and alien race and deserved no more consideration than an intelligent piece of livestock. This is wrong and horrifying according to our current standards, but for his time, and I'm speaking of both my Confederate and Union ancestors, they could have cared less about the welfare of African-Americans and whether they were enslaved or free. As any serious historian knows today, Southerners feared emancipation of these amoral and uneducated "animals" into their society, Plantation owners and the economy feared the loss of this huge financial asset without compensation and Northerners viewed freed blacks as competing workers for the lower classes and feared them flooding into the open lands in the West.

I just believe we "Southerners" are going to hang ourselves with this argument and undermine the valid and substantial arguments to defend the more important arguments of the constitutionality of secession and state sovereignty.

Jim M

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Virginia's Black Confederates
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I wish we had an edit button, sorry *NM*
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