Zach Foster: On the Confederate Flag, Part 2

This is one in a series of articles being featured on the Political Spectrum as part of Secession Week.

Click to view On the Confederate Flag, Part 1

From “On the Confederate Flag” 2^nd Edition, December 2010

By Zach Foster

Political Correctness and the Myth of the White Confederacy

Though a great majority of the soldiers in the Confederate armed forces were Caucasian, by no means should the ethnic minorities who called themselves Southerners be omitted from mention.  Historical records and unit rosters show that between 50,000 and 80,000 African-American men fought in gray uniforms.  Ironically enough, the first African-American military unit in American history was the First Louisiana Native Guards, formed in 1861 and disbanded in 1862 when Louisiana was re-conquered by the Union (the first United States Colored Troops weren’t formed until January of 1863).  Only ten to twenty percent of the black Native Guardsmen switched sides.  The overwhelming majority of them remained Confederate patriots.  Throughout the course of the war over 10,000 Native Americans and 5,000 Hispanics fought in gray.  The latter statistic only includes those who did not pose as white men.

Though slavery existed throughout America—it was simply a fact of life—it would be ludicrous to say that every single black man or Native American or Hispanic was a slave, forced by a white master to fight in his stead.  Despite its many shortcomings in social advancement, there was much diversity among the Confederate states, though the Anglo-Celtic culture was dominant.  In 1861 two Mexican states offered to secede from Mexico and join the Confederacy.  Though the offer was tempting, Jefferson Davis turned their governors down, since he couldn’t afford to lose the much-needed Gulf ports operated by the French, who ruled colonial Mexico at the time.  Some Mexican citizens looking for opportunities to advance themselves financially or socially went north to fight as Confederate Army or Texas Militia soldiers.  No small portion of the Hispanic rebel soldiers were Cubans from Florida.  To this day no one knows how many black rebel soldiers were Dominican.

Many would wonder why so many Hispanics would fight for the Confederacy if they were often treated as second class citizens?  First and foremost, war has historically offered young men the opportunity for adventure and, if they could make heroes of themselves, social advancement.  The second and especially powerful reason that many Hispanics were eager to join the rebel army is because they simply had no love for the United States.  Many of the Cuban and Spanish ethnic groups of Florida were never happy about being sold into the United States by the motherland and then greeted as citizens by a military occupation in 1821, only to be caught up fifteen years later in the chaos of the Second Seminole War.  In regards to the ethnic Mexicans in Texas and New Mexico, this was a crop of men whose fathers most likely fought and died to keep those areas in Mexico in the Mexican-American War between 1846 and 1848 and they never forgave the United States for the conquest of northern Mexico only thirteen years before.  This reasoning explains how many ethnic minorities enlisted—military service during a time of war offered them adventure and opportunities to climb ladders that wouldn’t have come otherwise, fueled by grudges against the United States.

Of the estimated one million-man-strong Confederate armed forces, nearly a tenth of the personnel were documented non-whites.  This doesn’t include the thousands of fair-skinned soldiers who passed for white.  Though they were a minority in the military, at least one third of the Confederate civilian population was African American—slaves mostly—yet the overwhelming, almost complete majority of Confederate voters were white.  The requirement for voting was to be a male land owner.  By these standards, over ninety percent of white men did not even qualify to vote.  A fact often overlooked is that Southern America was a class society.  The bottom class consisted of slaves.  Above the slaves were the impoverished free people—this class accounted for most Southern whites and nearly all free-people of color (this was the politically correct term of the time) who labored to earn their living. The next class consisted of merchant shopkeepers, or non-wealthy people who were lucky to own some land.  The top class consisted of the planters, who owned much land and many slaves.

A minority of non-white plantation owners existed, but few were former slaves.  Most had inherited their possessions and status as wealthy descendants of black Frenchmen (Creoles) and Spaniards who had achieved noble status before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, or the descendents of wealthy Hispanics who achieved nobility before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.  Any Native Americans who held a high status were most likely born into the elite within their tribes, or were descendants of a union between a Native American and US citizen.

Native Americans are a fascinating ethnic group to study in the context of this time period.  The vast majority of Native Americans who participated in the Civil War fought for the Confederacy, as well as many nonaligned tribal nations that fought independently against the United States.  The most notable union whose vast majority fought for the Confederacy was that of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole).  The traditional Cherokee High Chief, John Ross, sided with the Union in the opening months of the conflict, disassociating himself and trying to disassociate the Cherokee nations with renegade Chief Stand Watie.  Oddly enough, the American Civil War broke out in time to engulf a civil war between the Cherokee.  Before 1862 came along, Stand Watie was the leader of the majority of Cherokee.  Watie was made a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army, leading his people to fight the Union Army and Union tribal warriors in the West.  Watie also drafted every able bodied Cherokee male between the ages of seventeen and fifty into Confederate military service.  Watie’s forces were among the last to surrender in June of 1865.  All Native American Confederates fought especially hard, knowing after well over a century of Ango-Indian wars that they had everything to lose.  Native Americans were the group whose grievances against the United States most likely far outweighed all others’.  This was especially true for the Seminoles, who by 1858 (three years before the Civil War) had lost their third war against the U.S.

There were many other tribes that were caught up in the war, or capitalized on it.  The Sioux nation in Minnesota came together in a major uprising that tied up Army units for five months, resulting in the deaths of 100 tribal warriors, 100 soldiers, and hundreds of civilian Natives and settlers.  Out in the West, there were dozens of tribes that loosely and independently aligned themselves with one side, North or South, firing on their and their ally’s common enemy during chance encounters (especially in the Arizona and New Mexico territories).  There were also tribes (like the Apaches, for example) who fired indiscriminately at any Anglo soldiers they encountered.  Throughout the war years and the antebellum years, thousands of slaves were owned by Native Americans.

Many poor Southerners did aspire to own land and slaves, including black and Hispanic citizens, since to own land and slaves was a sign of wealth and social status.  Slaves especially were a good commodity to own, since the ownership of slaves was more prestigious than the ownership of land.  Any man who owned a slave was well respected, and the various blacks and Hispanics who owned both land and slaves were treated as equals to their white counterparts.  Slavery is an immoral institution regardless of what race claims ownership over what other people; but this is just the way life was back then, and the acquisition of human property was tolerated as a sign of prosperity.

It just happened that the majority of slaves were in the South because the need for them to work the land far outweighed the need for their labor in the industrial north.  Despite the large abolitionist sentiment in the North, it is often overlooked that many wealthy people owned slaves in the North, and most kept their slaves until the surrender of Confederate forces in 1865.  The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed only the slaves in occupied rebel territory, but not those in the states still loyal to the Union.  Northern slaves were freed in 1865, while Southern slaves were freed as Southern territories fell to the Northern Army.  Again, slavery was wrong, but it was simply an everyday fact of American life.

Continued in Part 3

The first image is considered to be in the public domain, courtesy of Flickr.com. The second image is used courtesy of Rebelstore.com.  The men in the photo are soldiers from the 3rd Texas Cavalry, CSA. They are from left to right: Refugio Benavides, Atanacio Vidaurri, Cristobal Benavides and John Z. Leyendecker.  Images are used via fair use and are the property of their respective owners, not the article author.