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Re: Interesting "Black Confederate" story
Well, here we go again. Cranking up for reprise of the thread initially asserting 20,000 blacks cheerfully shouldered muskets, fighting for the Confederacy and, thus, their right to sing "We are A Band of Brothers" and, concurrently, for their right to have their families sold down the river.
Comrade Pelty: as to whether Lee's Army looted and kidnapped black people during the Gettysburg Campaign, well, yes it did. On an heroic scale. One reason Lee was short of cavalry July 1st, 1863 was because too many of his horse soldiers were busy escorting coffles of Pennsylvania Black men, women, and children, some who had never been slaves, back down the Valley Pike and into the joys of involuntary servitude (where, one supposes, large numbers of the males Saw The Light, enlisted, and thereafter fought them dispicable Yankees). A Confederate officer's contemporary writing reports being sickened by this abject misery his own army was visiting upon these terrified people and as cavalrymen offered him and others private roadside sales of Black flesh.
As to the looting, Kent Brown's "Retreat from Gettysburg" (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005) makes a telling argument that it was a chief purpose of the raid: for the Army of Northern Virgina to gather a season's worth of sustenence from the northern populous. And gather they did. forty-five MILES of wagons creaking south, most of them Pennsylvania and Maryland farm wagons, along with the up to 20,000 farmers' horses and mules that pulled them. Along side this train were 30,000 head of noncombatants' cattle, 25,000 sheep, and uncounted hogs. There were thousands of tons of Pennsylvania and Maryland hay and grain, and thousands of barrels of flour. Then there were the incidentals: leather, harnesses, saddles, tack, bellows, forges, coal, coal oil, iron, tools, tar, pencils, pens, paper, cloth, hats, clothing, etc. And this doesn't include what individual soldiers lifted. Almost all this plethora of property came from citizens who were either not paid at all or received utterly worthless script which cost the Confederacy nothing. This is why Lee could report to Jeff Davis that his army "achieved a general sucess, though it did not win a victory" ("Retreat", page 388).
Well, here we go again. Cranking up for reprise of the thread initially asserting 20,000 blacks cheerfully shouldered muskets, fighting for the Confederacy and, thus, their right to sing "We are A Band of Brothers" and, concurrently, for their right to have their families sold down the river.
Comrade Pelty: as to whether Lee's Army looted and kidnapped black people during the Gettysburg Campaign, well, yes it did. On an heroic scale. One reason Lee was short of cavalry July 1st, 1863 was because too many of his horse soldiers were busy escorting coffles of Pennsylvania Black men, women, and children, some who had never been slaves, back down the Valley Pike and into the joys of involuntary servitude (where, one supposes, large numbers of the males Saw The Light, enlisted, and thereafter fought them dispicable Yankees). A Confederate officer's contemporary writing reports being sickened by this abject misery his own army was visiting upon these terrified people and as cavalrymen offered him and others private roadside sales of Black flesh.
As to the looting, Kent Brown's "Retreat from Gettysburg" (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005) makes a telling argument that it was a chief purpose of the raid: for the Army of Northern Virgina to gather a season's worth of sustenence from the northern populous. And gather they did. forty-five MILES of wagons creaking south, most of them Pennsylvania and Maryland farm wagons, along with the up to 20,000 farmers' horses and mules that pulled them. Along side this train were 30,000 head of noncombatants' cattle, 25,000 sheep, and uncounted hogs. There were thousands of tons of Pennsylvania and Maryland hay and grain, and thousands of barrels of flour. Then there were the incidentals: leather, harnesses, saddles, tack, bellows, forges, coal, coal oil, iron, tools, tar, pencils, pens, paper, cloth, hats, clothing, etc. And this doesn't include what individual soldiers lifted. Almost all this plethora of property came from citizens who were either not paid at all or received utterly worthless script which cost the Confederacy nothing. This is why Lee could report to Jeff Davis that his army "achieved a general sucess, though it did not win a victory" ("Retreat", page 388).
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