Imagine if one of the first things we acknowledged about the Confederate army, when it entered Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, is that it included thousands of enslaved men.
What is great about the Lincoln legacy of “Malice for none, charity for all”, has been bastardized by the southern apologists… What if all southern civilian and military leaders would have been rounded up, indicted, convicted, and punished for their “treachery”? People do not understand that Lincoln was being magnanimous in victory while the southern gentry was spiteful and vindictive in defeat, blaming freedmen and “states’ rights”, eventually morphing I to The Lost Cause school of thought.
I can see that some who like to do re-enactments and wear a Confederate uniform to do so may for whatever reason just do it to cosplay. Maybe an ancestor served in the Confederate army. Lots of people like to be part of battle re-enactments and naturally if they’re going to hold a re-enactment they need people to cosplay as Confederates. But. A Gettysburg Address commemoration is not a battlefield re-enactment. Lincoln was not in Gettysburg that day to memorialize the Confederate soldiers who died there alongside the thousands of Union troops who lost their lives. There is no reason for Confederate cosplayers to be there for this ceremony. I 💯 agree with you, they should be disinvited henceforth.
There are plenty of opportunities for living historians, who portray Confederate soldiers, to share the relevant history of the rank and file in Gettysburg. I agree. This is not the place, but it does reflect something important about how the Civil War has been remembered and commemorated in Gettysburg and beyond.
Keep the “history & heritage” under a roof at a given museum where patrons would pay homage to the symbols of slavery out of the public square of decent citizens that are abhorred by them.
So the right way to commemorate a historical event is to erase one of the major participants? If what you don’t like is white supremacists, then this framing is grossly misleading and toxic to historical understanding. All people who were in the Confederacy have been dead for more than a century. Judging them or equating them with the unpleasant antics of living misbehaving people who have appropriated their symbolism might please your friends but does nothing for helping Americans to an understanding of ourselves as a people. Which is what the rest of us pay historians to do.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I am arguing that the history of the flag and the Confederate army specifically is connected to the history of racial violence. That is exactly what has been lost in the "reconciliationist"--themed commemoration of Lincoln's address in Gettysburg.
I am not suggesting that we "erase" anything. What I am suggesting is that this commemoration itself erases important history about the battle of Gettysburg and the town itself. Thanks again.
What do you think is being erased? The fact that the Confederacy had slavery and bad racial attitudes is hardly a secret. I feel that there are lot of meaningful things to be said about this part of our history in addition to the race-and-civil-rights narrative. I just think we should focus on saying them, without taboos. Getting caught up in a contest of politics with this strange supremacist subculture doesn’t help that end. It’s doing their work for them, and impoverishing the rest of us in the process.
The museum in Gettysburg has an excellent exhibit on the soldiers’ reunions that took place at the battlefield after the war. There is a nice photograph of Union and Confederate veterans of Pickett’s Charge (now old men, the Southerners with impressive beards) shaking hands over the high-water mark of the Confederacy. The exhibit does a great job of putting it in the wider context of the meaning of the war as that generation aged, and how this became part of the reconciliation of the two sections. I found it one of the most interesting things there.
I think the background of Lincoln’s theme of reconciliation is poorly understood today, because we don’t teach our history as our forebears actually understood it. The Revolutionary War generation knew from experience that our unique, prophetic republic could not survive unless we were united. The wickedness of the secessionists in seeking to destroy our country through the breaking of this unity, was a driver of the Civil War, which became the revolutionary struggle for emancipation later, as Lincoln had warned. The Gettysburg Address can only be understood in this context. It is entirely reasonable that reconciliation should be the major theme of a Gettysburg Address commemoration. It doesn't erase anything. You could say it’s a kind of civic Passover, a time when we remind ourselves of what befell us, and of the importance of our unity as a nation.
I would argue that reconciliation is what Lincoln and Grant (wisely) gave at Appomattox, and what the Radical Republicans took away a few years later, with very poor results. Reconstruction was not just an episode in the civil rights narrative, but a fundamental experience of defeat and mourning and resistance for white Southerners, one that formed the postwar South as a society apart and impoverished for many decades. The Civil Rights movement was Martin Luther King’s gift to the white people of the South, because it finally made it possible for them to let that other stuff go. To be complete, Americans need to know this history, too.
I appreciate the response. There is no question that former veterans met in public and shook hands on former battlefields. That public stance is important to acknowledge as part of the postwar history, but as Caroline Janney and other historians have shown this outward show of reunion masked lingering bitterness. Reconciliation was never complete. For Black veterans reconciliation was tantamount to a betrayal of the "emancipationist" goals of the war. We need to understand reunion/reconciliation as part of a wide spectrum of postwar attitudes. Singling out does little more than distort postwar history.
Thanks for engaging me on this, and so patiently and kindly. I’m not sure what ‘singled out’ means: does it mean that you’re objecting to the theme of reconciliation being discussed independently of other themes that you think are important? Or that the discussion of reconciliation itself is in some sense actually wrong, by excluding those themes?
Lincoln, at Gettysburg, was talking about reconciliation of the Northern and Southern peoples to reunify the United States. He was not talking about citizenship and civil rights of freed slaves, not least because this issue was not even on the participants’ radar in late 1863. The people who were there didn’t know what Reconstruction was going to be, or the problems that it would present to the fulfillment of the wider ideals of the nation. I don’t think it’s wrong to build a narrative or a ceremony rooted in the issues and expressions at hand, in their time and place. It's a choice.
Black soldiers and their families were promised emancipation in return for their service, and they got that, and would have gotten that even if the 13th Amendment had not been passed. There were some (including Grant) who believed that black soldiers had also earned the vote and full civic participation by their service and valor. There were very many Northerners who did not, and of course this idea did not compute at all for the Southerners, who viewed it as attempt by the victors to subjugate them and destroy their society. And they were not wrong about this: it was a civil war, with all the vengefulness and toxicity of one.
Ben Tillman’s speech on the subject in the Senate (in the late 1880s) is, for me, the most succinct and clear expression of the realities of the South at this time, and why the Southerners thought and behaved as they did. If we are taking a wider view of reconciliation, this has to be in the mix, I think. It may not be what many people had in mind, though. Since the discrediting of the lost cause, there is nobody to speak up on this.
I am simply suggesting that reconciliation was not the only sentiment among veterans during the postwar period. It existed tenuously alongside a Black memory of the war that emphasized emancipation and a continued insistence among white northerners and southerners that their causes remained just.
I think Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address with its emphasis on "malice toward none" offered a reconciliationist sentiment, but not the Gettysburg Address, which I read as addressed more to the white North than the South. It was a rallying cry at a low point in the Union cause. The war could still be lost.
I realize this comment is about a month late but I have been thinking about this post. 1. Anyone who thinks secession and the War was not about slavery needs to read the state secession ordinances. They leave no doubt the states were leaving the Union to protect slavery.
2. I too thought this post was going to be about removing Confederate memorials until I read the article. Reconciliation was and is important. But, reconciliation and honoring those who fought against us are two different goals. I think what is going on at Gettysburg is more about the later than the former and I have very mixed feelings about this. In a time when we invite Japanese veterans to Pearl Harbor observances and German veterans to D-day observances I wonder I we are not being hypocritical by fussing about honoring Confederate veterans. But, then thinking as both an historian and US Army officer I think no. The Japanese and the Germans were not of our culture, the Confederates were. The Confederates turned against that culture with both sides waging a bitter war (despite what Darell said the North did not have a corner on waging harsh war) to put forward remarkably different visions of what that culture should be. The visions that triumphed has not been perfect but it has been way better than that offered by the other side. So my thought is it is time to stop Confederate participation in the Gettysburg address observation event. To allows this was and continues to be an insult to the Untied States soldiers who died there to protect what the country stood for, even if it had not achieved an acceptable end state at the time of the battle.
This is a really good point. In the immediate postwar period the African American community came out in large numbers to commemorate Decoration Day before Confederate veterans were invited to participate. I can't help but wonder how the racial makeup of Civil War commemorations would be different today had the Emancipationist narrative been more present at battlefield commemorations and monument dedications like Gettysburg during the postwar period. How might it be different if African Americans themselves felt more welcome at such events?
I am 100% in favor of this post. It must have been twenty-five years since I asked indignantly why Confederates should be allowed to march, all the while, shouting “Kill the Yankees.” I was outraged. But my liberal friends laughed at me and reminded me about free speech. Now look where we are. Multiculturalism does NOT extend to traitors. It’s up to every one to speak up and make these people know they’re not welcome. Social pressure forms the societies we live in —what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t. So many things to criticize. We’ve been too polite.
I grew up in Lancaster County which is about 30 miles east of Gettysburg. Lancaster became the true ‘high water mark' of the Confederacy when Jubal Early and his troops were denied passage over the Wrightsville Columbia Bridge bridge spanning the Susquehanna River when the citizens of Columbia along with the US burned it to its pilings. Had they secured the bridge the road to Philadelphia would have been open to them.
Unable to cross the Susquehanna the Confederate forces then proceed to kidnap hundreds of Pennsylvanias dragging them south to bondage and enslavement. Many who resisted were murdered.
That fact that these Pennsylvanians were of full or partial African descent is irrelevant - the only point should be that citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were murdered and kidnapped by looters wearing the uniform of the Confederacy.
These were criminals operating outside any possible military justification. What needs to be understood is that these were not the actions of a few bad apples in an otherwise fine barrel - this was what the barrel was all about.
This is documented in a dispatch from Lieutenant General James Longstreet - Lee’s second in command - to General George Pickett on July 1, 1863 (the first day of battle)
"the captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition."
“Further disposition" here refers to imprisonment, auction, enslavement, and (often) severe punishment at the hands of a former-and-once-again master*
And captured contraband; newly enslaved Pennsylvanians.
In light of these crimes, how could anyone march down a street in Pennsylvania wearing the uniform of the Confederacy and not expect to run a gauntlet? A protester with a sign? A much better reception than they deserved.
Thanks for giving space to the opinion of “a Local”
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment. I understand your point re: the racial identity of the victims of the Confederate invasion, but the fact that they were Black is absolutely relevant. It's why they were kidnapped in first place. Acknowledging this helps us to better understand *how* Confederate armies functioned as slave-catching armies.
I’m of two minds on this. In one respect you are, of course, absolutely correct. This incident is the ultimate proof of the racism that drove the south stripped of any possible legal niceties around recovering personal property. The Army of Northern VA killed and kidnaped all the way into central PA based solely on skin color.
The kidnapped were simply ‘contraband’ - a word that Longstreet chose carefully.
At the same time I'm also trying to look at this through a somewhat different lens and here is why. As far as I know the laws of the Commonwealth made no distinction as to their status and I doubt their communities did either. They were citizens and neighbors.
As an (expat) Pennsylvanian I’d like to see a different perspective brought to this incident View them as neighbors, locals, farmers, who were kidnapped and murdered by invading soldiers. Not as ex-slaves/ freedme; property or contraband to be retrieved. This frames the argument - and by extension justification - in the language of the enslavers.
If we did view them that way I suspect this incident would be remembered as an injustice on par with the Boston Massacre; not an obscure historical footnote.
As far as I know there are no monuments to this in Pennsylvania, not even one of those ubiquitous blue roadside plaques. I wonder why. Perhaps because these was framed as an incident involving ‘former slaves’ and this was therefore to be expected during a war over slavery. Collateral damage.
Its labels like this obscures their humanity and the rage we should feel at this crime. ‘Slaves ex- slaves’ clearly doesn't get us there. Neighbors - imho- might.
I hope this helps you see where I’m coming from and welcome your thoughts.
At first I thought this was going to be a post about removing Confederate monuments from Gettysburg. I didn’t realize Confederates were allowed to march in the parade. That is just wrong on every level.
That war is call the lost cause only by democrats and Yankees there was nothing civil about it neither it was a war for southern independence. Simply put the north was all industry and all the south was farming making millions off foreign trade when the south declared themselves to become an independent country the north knew they couldn't make anymore money from the south they invaded the south and we had nothing to do but fight back. And to put the record straight it had nothing to do with slavery there were plenty of free black men that fought side by side with confederates believing the south had a right to become their own country enslaved men were not forced to fight. Oh by the way the black men the fleet to the north thinking of a better free life were joked when they were enslaved to work in factories for free eating off scraps and sleeping just where ever they could.
One of the things that gives away the belief that enslaved men and "plenty of free black men ... fought side by side with confederates" is that there is no consistency in the numbers that did so. I've heard 30,000; 50,000; 90,000; 100,000; and even 1 million (good grief).
The actual number of African American Confederate soldiers is something that can be known. I work for the National Archives. Since 2015, I have worked at the Archives in Washington, DC, and I've worked directly with Civil War Union and Confederate soldiers' records. In seven years, I've seen a research team come in to go find all of the Jewish Civil War soldiers for a database they are creating. Another group is working to document all of the Civil War soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery. My point is that someone could go through the Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs) and find out exactly how many there were. But I know this will never happen because for some people, it's just easier to believe in an arbitrary number than to do the kind of real work I've seen dedicated researchers do for years.
I can also say that in seven years, I've never seen any African American person- or any person of any color come to the Archives and request the CMSR of a Black Confederate soldier. Granted, Confederate CMSRs are on fold3, ancestry, and I think a few other sites, but when I have located these records for researchers, none of them have ever said "Colored" or "Negro" or anything else referring to a man being of African descent. Meanwhile, there are always people requesting CMSRs and pension files of Black Yankee soldiers. I've seen all kinds of people request their records, either in person or by e-mail inquiry.
In the end, as I told someone a few days ago, it doesn't matter how many African American Confederate soldiers there were. It does not, nor will it ever change, what the Confederacy said about itself- that their rebellion was about preserving White Supremacy and Black slavery. It's really not hard to understand this at all.
I agree that it doesn't matter to the larger picture, but uncovering a free Black soldier who passed as white or who was allowed to serve would tell us quite a bit about the racial dynamics in specific regiments and companies. Thanks for the comment, Bryan.
In Hampton Newsome's new book "Gettysburg's Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond," the author writes about an incident where refugees from slavery are described by Brigadier General George H. Gordon, as they came into the safety of his camp. "One mother had four children, another two, and so on; whitish children with light hair and blue eyes, and children as black as night" (p. 33). I think the best instance of a Black Confederate soldier is the "whitish man with light hair and blue eyes," like the children escapng slavery as described here in Gordon's account. I also think there are many White Americans who have no idea one of their ancestors came to this country from Africa on a slave ship. So we can imagine the irony of a neo-Confederate today who purports Black Confederate soldiers but has no idea his own ancestor was an enslaved person.
Retired General Ty Seidule, with his history PhD, chaired the history department at West Point at the end of his infantry career. More recently, he wrote Robert E. Lee and Me, about Civil War memory. No doubt that book has been addressed in this forum, and maybe also the five-minute YouTube that my comment is actually about: “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” It’s the best short history lecture I ever saw. And it utterly devastates the goofball foolishness of persisting claims that the Civil War was not about slavery.
"And to put the record straight it had nothing to do with slavery there were plenty of free black men that fought side by side with confederates believing the south had a right to become their own country enslaved men were not forced to fight."
With all due respect, you live in a fantasy world. This would have been news to real Confederates, who debated this issue throughout 1864 and early 1865 with absolutely no recognition that thousands were already serving. You make the people that you purport to defend look stupid.
The seceding states and the Vice-President of the CSA said the reason for secession and the foundation of the CSA was slavery. I take their word over yours.
African Americans not only escaped to the North and even Canada in search of freedom; 200,000 also literally fought for it in the US Army. Enslaved people played a large part in securing their own freedom.
Also, consider discovering the comma, as well as the full stop and a few capital letters.
The longer we allow such “recognition” the longer the ugly wounds of the confederacy stay open. This is an abomination. Shame on anyone carrying that banner! Gettysburg, you owe it to history to tell the whole truth, not pretend all soldiers and causes are equal.
There is a Confederate flag flying in someone’s yard less than a mile from my house in Massachusetts. The Union did not do nearly enough to excise this cancer from our country immediately after the war.
In Massachusetts! Needs re-education on the critical role Mass played in saving the Union!... Not that they would probably listen because facts don't matter.🙄
Gettysburg needs a reckoning with its place in Civil War memory. It had been the setting for reconciliation stagecraft for 125 years, including distorting Lincoln’s address into a call for reconciliation not for continuing to fight the war. This was done in part for commercial reasons, to make sure southern tourists were made to feel welcome in this northern town as Gettysburg sought to cash in on the battle almost from the moment it ended.
Two memories as someone who formerly donned a CS uniform to march in that parade:
1. I didn't see this, but a friend told me that he was walking around and a Black woman drove by, rolled down her window, and shouted "War's Over!" at him, and drove off. I still think about that, A LOT.
2. I was present when Governor Gerald Baliles spoke, and riled up a bunch of Lost Causers. (It was 1988 and I was too new at it all to know what the fuss was all about.)
“Doing the little I can to remind people what the Confederacy was all about is not fun. 50-50 btwn abuse & affirmation. But this was off the chain! USCT yelling “REMEMBER FT. PILLOW” at confederate reenactors & giving me some uplift. Thank you USCT men!”
What is great about the Lincoln legacy of “Malice for none, charity for all”, has been bastardized by the southern apologists… What if all southern civilian and military leaders would have been rounded up, indicted, convicted, and punished for their “treachery”? People do not understand that Lincoln was being magnanimous in victory while the southern gentry was spiteful and vindictive in defeat, blaming freedmen and “states’ rights”, eventually morphing I to The Lost Cause school of thought.
I can see that some who like to do re-enactments and wear a Confederate uniform to do so may for whatever reason just do it to cosplay. Maybe an ancestor served in the Confederate army. Lots of people like to be part of battle re-enactments and naturally if they’re going to hold a re-enactment they need people to cosplay as Confederates. But. A Gettysburg Address commemoration is not a battlefield re-enactment. Lincoln was not in Gettysburg that day to memorialize the Confederate soldiers who died there alongside the thousands of Union troops who lost their lives. There is no reason for Confederate cosplayers to be there for this ceremony. I 💯 agree with you, they should be disinvited henceforth.
There are plenty of opportunities for living historians, who portray Confederate soldiers, to share the relevant history of the rank and file in Gettysburg. I agree. This is not the place, but it does reflect something important about how the Civil War has been remembered and commemorated in Gettysburg and beyond.
Keep the “history & heritage” under a roof at a given museum where patrons would pay homage to the symbols of slavery out of the public square of decent citizens that are abhorred by them.
So the right way to commemorate a historical event is to erase one of the major participants? If what you don’t like is white supremacists, then this framing is grossly misleading and toxic to historical understanding. All people who were in the Confederacy have been dead for more than a century. Judging them or equating them with the unpleasant antics of living misbehaving people who have appropriated their symbolism might please your friends but does nothing for helping Americans to an understanding of ourselves as a people. Which is what the rest of us pay historians to do.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I am arguing that the history of the flag and the Confederate army specifically is connected to the history of racial violence. That is exactly what has been lost in the "reconciliationist"--themed commemoration of Lincoln's address in Gettysburg.
I am not suggesting that we "erase" anything. What I am suggesting is that this commemoration itself erases important history about the battle of Gettysburg and the town itself. Thanks again.
What do you think is being erased? The fact that the Confederacy had slavery and bad racial attitudes is hardly a secret. I feel that there are lot of meaningful things to be said about this part of our history in addition to the race-and-civil-rights narrative. I just think we should focus on saying them, without taboos. Getting caught up in a contest of politics with this strange supremacist subculture doesn’t help that end. It’s doing their work for them, and impoverishing the rest of us in the process.
The museum in Gettysburg has an excellent exhibit on the soldiers’ reunions that took place at the battlefield after the war. There is a nice photograph of Union and Confederate veterans of Pickett’s Charge (now old men, the Southerners with impressive beards) shaking hands over the high-water mark of the Confederacy. The exhibit does a great job of putting it in the wider context of the meaning of the war as that generation aged, and how this became part of the reconciliation of the two sections. I found it one of the most interesting things there.
I think the background of Lincoln’s theme of reconciliation is poorly understood today, because we don’t teach our history as our forebears actually understood it. The Revolutionary War generation knew from experience that our unique, prophetic republic could not survive unless we were united. The wickedness of the secessionists in seeking to destroy our country through the breaking of this unity, was a driver of the Civil War, which became the revolutionary struggle for emancipation later, as Lincoln had warned. The Gettysburg Address can only be understood in this context. It is entirely reasonable that reconciliation should be the major theme of a Gettysburg Address commemoration. It doesn't erase anything. You could say it’s a kind of civic Passover, a time when we remind ourselves of what befell us, and of the importance of our unity as a nation.
I would argue that reconciliation is what Lincoln and Grant (wisely) gave at Appomattox, and what the Radical Republicans took away a few years later, with very poor results. Reconstruction was not just an episode in the civil rights narrative, but a fundamental experience of defeat and mourning and resistance for white Southerners, one that formed the postwar South as a society apart and impoverished for many decades. The Civil Rights movement was Martin Luther King’s gift to the white people of the South, because it finally made it possible for them to let that other stuff go. To be complete, Americans need to know this history, too.
I understand. I agree. Where I live, some people are waving the bloody shirt even today!
I appreciate the response. There is no question that former veterans met in public and shook hands on former battlefields. That public stance is important to acknowledge as part of the postwar history, but as Caroline Janney and other historians have shown this outward show of reunion masked lingering bitterness. Reconciliation was never complete. For Black veterans reconciliation was tantamount to a betrayal of the "emancipationist" goals of the war. We need to understand reunion/reconciliation as part of a wide spectrum of postwar attitudes. Singling out does little more than distort postwar history.
Thanks for engaging me on this, and so patiently and kindly. I’m not sure what ‘singled out’ means: does it mean that you’re objecting to the theme of reconciliation being discussed independently of other themes that you think are important? Or that the discussion of reconciliation itself is in some sense actually wrong, by excluding those themes?
Lincoln, at Gettysburg, was talking about reconciliation of the Northern and Southern peoples to reunify the United States. He was not talking about citizenship and civil rights of freed slaves, not least because this issue was not even on the participants’ radar in late 1863. The people who were there didn’t know what Reconstruction was going to be, or the problems that it would present to the fulfillment of the wider ideals of the nation. I don’t think it’s wrong to build a narrative or a ceremony rooted in the issues and expressions at hand, in their time and place. It's a choice.
Black soldiers and their families were promised emancipation in return for their service, and they got that, and would have gotten that even if the 13th Amendment had not been passed. There were some (including Grant) who believed that black soldiers had also earned the vote and full civic participation by their service and valor. There were very many Northerners who did not, and of course this idea did not compute at all for the Southerners, who viewed it as attempt by the victors to subjugate them and destroy their society. And they were not wrong about this: it was a civil war, with all the vengefulness and toxicity of one.
Ben Tillman’s speech on the subject in the Senate (in the late 1880s) is, for me, the most succinct and clear expression of the realities of the South at this time, and why the Southerners thought and behaved as they did. If we are taking a wider view of reconciliation, this has to be in the mix, I think. It may not be what many people had in mind, though. Since the discrediting of the lost cause, there is nobody to speak up on this.
I am simply suggesting that reconciliation was not the only sentiment among veterans during the postwar period. It existed tenuously alongside a Black memory of the war that emphasized emancipation and a continued insistence among white northerners and southerners that their causes remained just.
I think Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address with its emphasis on "malice toward none" offered a reconciliationist sentiment, but not the Gettysburg Address, which I read as addressed more to the white North than the South. It was a rallying cry at a low point in the Union cause. The war could still be lost.
I realize this comment is about a month late but I have been thinking about this post. 1. Anyone who thinks secession and the War was not about slavery needs to read the state secession ordinances. They leave no doubt the states were leaving the Union to protect slavery.
2. I too thought this post was going to be about removing Confederate memorials until I read the article. Reconciliation was and is important. But, reconciliation and honoring those who fought against us are two different goals. I think what is going on at Gettysburg is more about the later than the former and I have very mixed feelings about this. In a time when we invite Japanese veterans to Pearl Harbor observances and German veterans to D-day observances I wonder I we are not being hypocritical by fussing about honoring Confederate veterans. But, then thinking as both an historian and US Army officer I think no. The Japanese and the Germans were not of our culture, the Confederates were. The Confederates turned against that culture with both sides waging a bitter war (despite what Darell said the North did not have a corner on waging harsh war) to put forward remarkably different visions of what that culture should be. The visions that triumphed has not been perfect but it has been way better than that offered by the other side. So my thought is it is time to stop Confederate participation in the Gettysburg address observation event. To allows this was and continues to be an insult to the Untied States soldiers who died there to protect what the country stood for, even if it had not achieved an acceptable end state at the time of the battle.
This is a really good point. In the immediate postwar period the African American community came out in large numbers to commemorate Decoration Day before Confederate veterans were invited to participate. I can't help but wonder how the racial makeup of Civil War commemorations would be different today had the Emancipationist narrative been more present at battlefield commemorations and monument dedications like Gettysburg during the postwar period. How might it be different if African Americans themselves felt more welcome at such events?
I am 100% in favor of this post. It must have been twenty-five years since I asked indignantly why Confederates should be allowed to march, all the while, shouting “Kill the Yankees.” I was outraged. But my liberal friends laughed at me and reminded me about free speech. Now look where we are. Multiculturalism does NOT extend to traitors. It’s up to every one to speak up and make these people know they’re not welcome. Social pressure forms the societies we live in —what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t. So many things to criticize. We’ve been too polite.
This was an excellent post, thanks Kevin
I grew up in Lancaster County which is about 30 miles east of Gettysburg. Lancaster became the true ‘high water mark' of the Confederacy when Jubal Early and his troops were denied passage over the Wrightsville Columbia Bridge bridge spanning the Susquehanna River when the citizens of Columbia along with the US burned it to its pilings. Had they secured the bridge the road to Philadelphia would have been open to them.
Unable to cross the Susquehanna the Confederate forces then proceed to kidnap hundreds of Pennsylvanias dragging them south to bondage and enslavement. Many who resisted were murdered.
That fact that these Pennsylvanians were of full or partial African descent is irrelevant - the only point should be that citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were murdered and kidnapped by looters wearing the uniform of the Confederacy.
These were criminals operating outside any possible military justification. What needs to be understood is that these were not the actions of a few bad apples in an otherwise fine barrel - this was what the barrel was all about.
This is documented in a dispatch from Lieutenant General James Longstreet - Lee’s second in command - to General George Pickett on July 1, 1863 (the first day of battle)
"the captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition."
“Further disposition" here refers to imprisonment, auction, enslavement, and (often) severe punishment at the hands of a former-and-once-again master*
And captured contraband; newly enslaved Pennsylvanians.
In light of these crimes, how could anyone march down a street in Pennsylvania wearing the uniform of the Confederacy and not expect to run a gauntlet? A protester with a sign? A much better reception than they deserved.
Thanks for giving space to the opinion of “a Local”
*https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/we-have-received-provocation-enough/61276/
Hi Charles,
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment. I understand your point re: the racial identity of the victims of the Confederate invasion, but the fact that they were Black is absolutely relevant. It's why they were kidnapped in first place. Acknowledging this helps us to better understand *how* Confederate armies functioned as slave-catching armies.
Hey Kevin,
I’m of two minds on this. In one respect you are, of course, absolutely correct. This incident is the ultimate proof of the racism that drove the south stripped of any possible legal niceties around recovering personal property. The Army of Northern VA killed and kidnaped all the way into central PA based solely on skin color.
The kidnapped were simply ‘contraband’ - a word that Longstreet chose carefully.
At the same time I'm also trying to look at this through a somewhat different lens and here is why. As far as I know the laws of the Commonwealth made no distinction as to their status and I doubt their communities did either. They were citizens and neighbors.
As an (expat) Pennsylvanian I’d like to see a different perspective brought to this incident View them as neighbors, locals, farmers, who were kidnapped and murdered by invading soldiers. Not as ex-slaves/ freedme; property or contraband to be retrieved. This frames the argument - and by extension justification - in the language of the enslavers.
If we did view them that way I suspect this incident would be remembered as an injustice on par with the Boston Massacre; not an obscure historical footnote.
As far as I know there are no monuments to this in Pennsylvania, not even one of those ubiquitous blue roadside plaques. I wonder why. Perhaps because these was framed as an incident involving ‘former slaves’ and this was therefore to be expected during a war over slavery. Collateral damage.
Its labels like this obscures their humanity and the rage we should feel at this crime. ‘Slaves ex- slaves’ clearly doesn't get us there. Neighbors - imho- might.
I hope this helps you see where I’m coming from and welcome your thoughts.
At first I thought this was going to be a post about removing Confederate monuments from Gettysburg. I didn’t realize Confederates were allowed to march in the parade. That is just wrong on every level.
That war is call the lost cause only by democrats and Yankees there was nothing civil about it neither it was a war for southern independence. Simply put the north was all industry and all the south was farming making millions off foreign trade when the south declared themselves to become an independent country the north knew they couldn't make anymore money from the south they invaded the south and we had nothing to do but fight back. And to put the record straight it had nothing to do with slavery there were plenty of free black men that fought side by side with confederates believing the south had a right to become their own country enslaved men were not forced to fight. Oh by the way the black men the fleet to the north thinking of a better free life were joked when they were enslaved to work in factories for free eating off scraps and sleeping just where ever they could.
One of the things that gives away the belief that enslaved men and "plenty of free black men ... fought side by side with confederates" is that there is no consistency in the numbers that did so. I've heard 30,000; 50,000; 90,000; 100,000; and even 1 million (good grief).
The actual number of African American Confederate soldiers is something that can be known. I work for the National Archives. Since 2015, I have worked at the Archives in Washington, DC, and I've worked directly with Civil War Union and Confederate soldiers' records. In seven years, I've seen a research team come in to go find all of the Jewish Civil War soldiers for a database they are creating. Another group is working to document all of the Civil War soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery. My point is that someone could go through the Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs) and find out exactly how many there were. But I know this will never happen because for some people, it's just easier to believe in an arbitrary number than to do the kind of real work I've seen dedicated researchers do for years.
I can also say that in seven years, I've never seen any African American person- or any person of any color come to the Archives and request the CMSR of a Black Confederate soldier. Granted, Confederate CMSRs are on fold3, ancestry, and I think a few other sites, but when I have located these records for researchers, none of them have ever said "Colored" or "Negro" or anything else referring to a man being of African descent. Meanwhile, there are always people requesting CMSRs and pension files of Black Yankee soldiers. I've seen all kinds of people request their records, either in person or by e-mail inquiry.
In the end, as I told someone a few days ago, it doesn't matter how many African American Confederate soldiers there were. It does not, nor will it ever change, what the Confederacy said about itself- that their rebellion was about preserving White Supremacy and Black slavery. It's really not hard to understand this at all.
I agree that it doesn't matter to the larger picture, but uncovering a free Black soldier who passed as white or who was allowed to serve would tell us quite a bit about the racial dynamics in specific regiments and companies. Thanks for the comment, Bryan.
In Hampton Newsome's new book "Gettysburg's Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond," the author writes about an incident where refugees from slavery are described by Brigadier General George H. Gordon, as they came into the safety of his camp. "One mother had four children, another two, and so on; whitish children with light hair and blue eyes, and children as black as night" (p. 33). I think the best instance of a Black Confederate soldier is the "whitish man with light hair and blue eyes," like the children escapng slavery as described here in Gordon's account. I also think there are many White Americans who have no idea one of their ancestors came to this country from Africa on a slave ship. So we can imagine the irony of a neo-Confederate today who purports Black Confederate soldiers but has no idea his own ancestor was an enslaved person.
It had nothing to do with slavery?
Retired General Ty Seidule, with his history PhD, chaired the history department at West Point at the end of his infantry career. More recently, he wrote Robert E. Lee and Me, about Civil War memory. No doubt that book has been addressed in this forum, and maybe also the five-minute YouTube that my comment is actually about: “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” It’s the best short history lecture I ever saw. And it utterly devastates the goofball foolishness of persisting claims that the Civil War was not about slavery.
Darrel is pushing a confused and discredited Lost Cause narrative. Thanks for the comment, Steven.
"And to put the record straight it had nothing to do with slavery there were plenty of free black men that fought side by side with confederates believing the south had a right to become their own country enslaved men were not forced to fight."
With all due respect, you live in a fantasy world. This would have been news to real Confederates, who debated this issue throughout 1864 and early 1865 with absolutely no recognition that thousands were already serving. You make the people that you purport to defend look stupid.
The seceding states and the Vice-President of the CSA said the reason for secession and the foundation of the CSA was slavery. I take their word over yours.
African Americans not only escaped to the North and even Canada in search of freedom; 200,000 also literally fought for it in the US Army. Enslaved people played a large part in securing their own freedom.
Also, consider discovering the comma, as well as the full stop and a few capital letters.
Please give it a rest. Stop spouting nonsense.
You must be a yank that just can't handle the real truth
Yes, and I don’t believe in fiction.
If you don't believe in fiction don't belive what you read in history books about the war between the states
The longer we allow such “recognition” the longer the ugly wounds of the confederacy stay open. This is an abomination. Shame on anyone carrying that banner! Gettysburg, you owe it to history to tell the whole truth, not pretend all soldiers and causes are equal.
Amen, Kevin!
There is a Confederate flag flying in someone’s yard less than a mile from my house in Massachusetts. The Union did not do nearly enough to excise this cancer from our country immediately after the war.
In Massachusetts! Needs re-education on the critical role Mass played in saving the Union!... Not that they would probably listen because facts don't matter.🙄
Gettysburg needs a reckoning with its place in Civil War memory. It had been the setting for reconciliation stagecraft for 125 years, including distorting Lincoln’s address into a call for reconciliation not for continuing to fight the war. This was done in part for commercial reasons, to make sure southern tourists were made to feel welcome in this northern town as Gettysburg sought to cash in on the battle almost from the moment it ended.
Two memories as someone who formerly donned a CS uniform to march in that parade:
1. I didn't see this, but a friend told me that he was walking around and a Black woman drove by, rolled down her window, and shouted "War's Over!" at him, and drove off. I still think about that, A LOT.
2. I was present when Governor Gerald Baliles spoke, and riled up a bunch of Lost Causers. (It was 1988 and I was too new at it all to know what the fuss was all about.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/08/18/baliles-boldness-at-gettysburg-gettysburg/e088f625-3259-4e6e-97f0-b9a823cd4619/
And, yeah, having CS march in that event is just... dumb and it should stop. I need to get up there sometime and hold signs with Dr. Hancock.
Thanks for sharing this, Chris.
I am going to make an effort next year to join Scott as well.
Scott Hancock is doing important work on behalf of us all. https://twitter.com/scotthancockot/status/1594054191705628672?s=61&t=mzMZRNd7Dj_ufIk0pXTcbQ
“Doing the little I can to remind people what the Confederacy was all about is not fun. 50-50 btwn abuse & affirmation. But this was off the chain! USCT yelling “REMEMBER FT. PILLOW” at confederate reenactors & giving me some uplift. Thank you USCT men!”
Tried to add Scott’s picture of the USCT reenactors taking pictures with him. THEY should always be represented in Gettysburg!
I noticed Marvin Alonzo-Greer was in the crowd yesterday. He does a fine job of interpreting the USCT experience.
I couldn't agree more.
Sadly, the streets of Gettysburg are no stranger to Klan activity as well…
Here is a photograph from 1927.
https://digital.library.emory.edu/catalog/187pnvx0mn-cor