Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and  enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary source material, and rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights have helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.