THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Confederates in Civil War were more diverse than you think

Confederates in Civil War were more diverse than you think

By REED LANNOM
GUEST COLUMNIST
APR 25, 2019 AT 4:00 PM

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates proudly boast their greatest diversity ever: an Irishman who thinks he's Hispanic; a white woman who thinks she's Native American; a Senator who thinks he's Spartacus; a millionaire who thinks he's a Socialist; a senator who thinks she's a #MeToo champion, but whose top campaign aide is accused of sexually harassing a female staffer; a Senator of Jamaican-Indian lineage who's "woke" in her African-American milieu. The 1861 Confederacy had real, not pseudo, diversity: Blacks, Irish and French Catholics, Hispanics, Jews, American Indians, Creoles and Cajuns, who all fought for the South. The South had the first American Indian general, Stand Watie; and, America's first Jewish Attorney General, Secretaries of War and State, Judah Benjamin – was a Confederate. Anti-Semitism was much more pronounced in the North than in the South (e.g. General Ulysses Grant's General Order No. 11 expelling all Jews from his military district). Judah Benjamin and David Yulee, the first two Jewish U.S. Senators — representing Louisiana and Florida — were both Confederates. According to the book "Native Americans in the Civil War" by W. David Baird, six different Native American tribes fought for the Confederate cause. Over two-thirds of the nation's Hispanics fought for the South, as John O'Donnel-Rosales details in "Hispanic Confederates from the Gulf Coast States." The antebellum South had always been more ethnically diverse than the North because of the intermittent rule of the Spanish, French and British Empires; and, its much later influx of European settlers, leaving a larger presence of Native Americans in the South. Also, in the early 19th century, the immigration of free blacks fleeing to the South from the West Indies (often with their own slaves); and, the surge in "free people of color" to the South with the Louisiana Purchase and upheavals caused by the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century – created a more multiracial, multicultural South than in the North, according to "Black Southerners in Gray" by Richard Rollins. Research of the 1860 U.S. Census, reveals there were a total of 488,070 black freedmen living in the United States (10% of the entire black population). Of those, 53.7% lived in the 15 slave states of the South. At no time before the Civil War (after the first U.S. Census in 1790 and future states were added) did free blacks in the North ever outnumber those in the South. This was due to several factors including widespread emancipation by slave owners and the aforementioned immigration of free blacks fleeing to the South from the Caribbean. Another reason why the majority of black freedmen lived in the antebellum South and through the Civil War, according to Ira Berlin's "Slaves Without Masters," was the job opportunities in the larger Southern port cities (e.g. Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, Mobile and New Orleans) were better than job prospects in the North, where Northern Exclusion Ordinances barring black freedmen immigration, residency, citizenship, voting rights and employment, were pervasive. According to "North of Slavery" by Leon Litwack, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico were unwilling to take a single additional person of color — they sought to exclude slavery, black freedmen and Native Americans through local/state ordinances and state constitutions. There was a reason the "Underground Railroad" extended from the South all the way to Canada — the hostility of Northerners to the permanent residency of black freedmen in their states. When you think of slavery, everyone is conditioned to think of the South. Yet there were Northern colonies/ states that had slavery on average for over 200 years, some right through the Civil War. In comparison, there were Southern Gulf states that had practiced slavery for only approximately 50 years, up until the Civil War. That the majority of black freedmen preferred to continue living and working in the South in antebellum times and during the Civil War, is a bewildering and mystifying fact to those who believe the trite fable that the North was a welcoming place for free people of color.