SEARCHING for BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR'S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH (kindle) by Kevin M. Levin
Published in August of 2019 by The University of North Carolina Press. Confederate Sergeant Andrew Silas and his slave Silas Chandler pose for a photograph in a studio. Silas Chandler was his body servant until his death. He returned to the front as the body servant of his brother. Silas Chandler received a pension at at the age of 78 - but not for being a soldier. Instead, it was a pension for "Indigent Servants of Soldiers or Sailors of the Late Confederacy". As the title states, one of the most common myths of "the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery" crowd is that thousands and thousands of African-Americans served in organized units in the Confederate Army. To be fair to the mistaken people that advocate for this position, there were African-American people traveling with the Confederate Army. They were not there as volunteers - they were there as body servants to their masters. There were also a great number of slaves that were commandeered by