Oh an apparently it’s been floating around the internet since 1999. Snopes debunked it.
ugh, the Snopes article states that African-Americans fought on both sides of the civil war.
Oh does it? Boo. Sorry all. I just read the part about the supposed author of the theory, who disavows writing it.
I recently had a job writing elementary school social studies books, and while working on a book for South Carolina I learned from many source books that African Americans in the South did indeed “fight” in the Confederate army.
Many of these individuals were slaves whose owners sent them to the army in their place, which was an acceptable practice for the rich dudes to keep out of harms way. However, they were more often than not working as laborers, and not fighting on the front lines. They were also not voluntarily fighting for the cause of the Confederacy. Although, there were a few free blacks who stood with the Confederacy. (At least in South Carolina, as that was the only Southern state I’ve ever done any amount of research on.)
So, stating that African Americans “fought on both sides of the war” is incredibly overly simplistic, but it’s not entirely untrue, either.
