Today’s must read
by digby
Adam Serwer has written a fantastic, fascinating long form piece about the most famous black confederate soldier. Let’s just say that it’s highly unlikely slaves were signing up for the rebel cause:
The Secret History Of The Photo At The Center Of The Black Confederate Myth
A 160-year-old tintype depicting Andrew Chandler and his slave Silas, both in Confederate uniform, has long been used as evidence that slaves willingly fought against the army that aimed to free them. Following the national backlash against Confederate iconography, Silas’s descendants seek to debunk this once and for all.
The so-called Southern Heritage movement loves to claim that there were many black confederate soldier which is supposed to prove that the war wasn’t about slavery. But the truth is that most of these “soldiers” were slaves forced into serving as their owners servants and bodyguards. And because their masters still held their families back home it wasn’t exactly easy for them to desert.
There’s no end to the excuses for slavery. And the fact that people still spend so much time and energy trying to find ways to evade the fact that their vaunted heritage was built on that institution tells you that we haven’t really dealt with it yet.
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