Searching for black Confederates The Civil War's most persistent myth

Levin, an independent historian, provides an important corrective to a thriving, albeit bogus, subtopic of Civil War history, which claims that some African Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. Foisted on our historical consciousness through its surreptitious introduction on the television program Antiques Roadshow, the myth has been soundly refuted by leading historians, including "Mary Frances Berry … [and] James McPherson." Presented over six chapters and aptly subtitled, Levin's volume comprehensively dismantles the associated "Lost Cause" narrative celebrated by organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A key element of this account, which was "fast becoming part of the standard narrative of the Civil War," fabricates that Confederate armies employed their actual "camp slaves" as soldiers and even fielded black military squadrons. Originating in the 1970s, the myth is explained as part of the conservative backlash "to the gradual shift in popular memory of the Civil War following the [C]ivil [R]ights [M]ovement." Importantly, Levin addresses how this factual transgression persists in popular culture venues and through unfiltered primary and secondary sources in K--12 education, "especially during Black History Month." Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --James Elton Johnson, Rowan University

Levin, author of the blog Civil War Memory, incisively reveals the origins and various iterations of the "black Confederate" mythology that white supremacists, pro-Confederate memorialists, and states' righters have conjured up to insist that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War and that slaves loved their masters and "home" so much that they were willing to fight for them. He skillfully deconstructs the so-called evidence that such mythmakers have distorted and even fabricated to make their claims, and tracks the ready way the Internet has circulated such unchecked conjurations. Levin is especially persuasive in showing that slaves who worked for the Confederacy during the war always did so as slaves, and that whites then understood them only as such. Even the Lost Cause mythology of the postwar era that celebrated supposedly loyal slaves never claimed them as soldiers in the cause. That claim came in response to the modern civil rights movement as whites sought to cleanse their own history of racism by creating legions of supposed black Confederates rallying for states' rights. VERDICT Levin's timely and telling account should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the uses and abuses of history and the power and dangers of mythmaking.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia