Black Southerners In Gray [Paperback]

Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. (Author), Thomas Y. Cartwright (Author), Ervin L. Jordan (Author), Rudolph Young (Author), Andrew Chandler Battaile (Author), Richard Rollins (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 172 pages
• Publisher: Rank & File (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963899392
• ISBN-13: 978-0963899392
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,226,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History's little "SURPRISE"!, December 15, 1999

By 

Steve Quick - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Southerners In Gray (Paperback)

When the South put down the gun they picked up the pen and have aquitted themselves handsomely in the ensuing years. This little book is an eyepopping surprise especially in the face of so much recent revisionist, politically correct "history". Blacks served willingly and honorably in the Confederate army. They appied for and received Confederate pensions. This volume is a "must have". This is a compelling volume of the most significant new research in 50 years.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book will make historical revisionists squirm!, April 14, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Merritt Island, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Southerners In Gray (Paperback)

History is written by the winners. This book is a collection of essays which present the other another and mostly forgotten side of the story regarding blacks in the South during the Civil War. Largely forgotten and often ignored by revisionists, it details the contributions of black Southerners, both slave and freemen, in the South's struggle for independence. Through their own words, this book examines not only what contributions were made, but the reasons for them.

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Peek Under the Rug At Inconvenient History, March 13, 2001

By 

Steven Fantina (Phillipsburg, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Southerners In Gray (Paperback)

The idea that the Confederate Army consisted of any black soldiers at all is a refutation to the modern notion the all Southern whites hated all Southern blacks in pre-Civil war days. That the ranks of black soldiers were more than an insignificant smattering turns conventional wisdom on its head.

According to the thoroughly documented essays in this volume, black support for the confederacy was broad and intense. Some of the black supporters were free blacks--many of whom owned slaves themselves. No doubt some were uneducated slaves duped by unscrupulous Southern partisans to back a cause they did not understand. Some must have been forced to aid the confederacy against their wills, but the majority of individuals discussed in these pages wholeheartedly agreed with the objectives of the rebellion.

To those who may dismiss the findings of this work, their legitimacy seems proven by the extensive documentation. At times the superscript weighs down the pages as assertion after assertion is annotated. Six different authors contributed to the collection and at times the facts are illogically tautological. Two essays by Richard Rollins-allegedly about different subjects--rehash much of the same data. Especially disturbing is the second offering titled "Black Confederates At Gettysburg," which barely touches on that subject. While this disorganized presentation is a sizable detraction, the work is a genuine eye-opener.

Those of us living in the twenty-first century will probably find the choices made by these slaves as impossible to comprehend as the fact that human beings could ever be bought and sold as property. One of Mr. Rollins vignettes makes an essential point concerning "the need to be sensitive to the historical figures we deal with in the context of the time they lived, rather than allow the ideological and intellectual assumptions of our own day to dictate what we have to say about the people of the civil war era-both black and white." Centuries from now common folk may very well look back at our "enlightened era" aghast that we condoned partial-birth abortion and euthanasia.

Our rightful revulsion to the slave trade should not allow us to forget that many confederate soldiers-both black and white--were noble men. Nothing in this conglomeration makes any attempt to diminish the horror that all decent people know slavery was. Perhaps it is the institutionalized unfairness of their lives that makes the profiled black patriots' sacrifices all the more doughty. The book's most challenging postulation may be Ervin L. Jordan's lament that the slaves and free black citizens served the confederacy "not as a consequence of white pressure but due to their own preferences. They are the Civil War's forgotten people, yet their own existence was more widespread than American history has recorded. Their bones rest in unhonored glory in Southern soil, shrouded by falsehoods, indifference, and historians' censorship."