The museum now  houses  5,ooo square feet of exhibits that commemorates the sacrifice of African-American soldiers in the war, compared to its original 700 square feet.

Read more at BET.com

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There’s No Debating It Americans, Slavery Caused The Civil War

WASHINGTON — In the Confederate circles he navigated, John Scobell was considered just another Mississippi slave: singing, shuffling, illiterate and completely ignorant of the Civil War going on around him.

Confederate officers thought nothing of leaving important documents where Scobell could see them, or discussing troop movements in front of him. Whom would he tell? Scobell was only the butler, or the deckhand on a rebel sympathizer’s steamboat, or the field hand belting out Negro spirituals in a powerful baritone.

In reality, Scobell was not a slave at all.

He was a spy sent by the Union army, one of a few black operatives who quietly gathered information in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot. These unsung Civil War heroes were often successful, to the chagrin of Confederate leaders who never thought their disregard for blacks living among them would become a major tactical weakness.

“The chief source of information to the enemy,” Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, said in May 1863, “is through our negroes.”

Little is known about the black men and women who served as Union intelligence officers, other than the fact that some were former slaves or servants who escaped from their masters and others were Northerners who volunteered to pose as slaves to spy on the Confederacy. There are scant references to their contributions in historical records, mainly because Union spymasters destroyed documents to shield them from Confederate soldiers and sympathizers during the war and vengeful whites afterward.

“These kinds of spies and operatives come up over and over again, many of them unnamed and rarely do they receive glory,” said Hari Jones, curator of the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, who lectures on the Civil War’s African American spies.

Jones and other experts are hoping the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will include some measure of remembrance for these officers.

Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union Intelligence Service at the onset of the Civil War, detailed his recruitment of black spies in his autobiography, including a couple of successful missions by Scobell and the extraction of valuable papers from a Union defector. Scobell in particular, Pinkerton said, was a “cool-headed, vigilant detective” who easily duped the Confederates around him by assuming “the character of the light-hearted, happy darkey.”

“From the commencement of the war, I have found the negroes of invaluable assistance and I never hesitated to employ them when after investigation I found them to be intelligent and trustworthy,” Pinkerton said.

Harriet Tubman is the most recognizable of these spies, sneaking down South repeatedly to gather intelligence for the Union army while also leading runaway slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. Often disguised as a field hand or poor farm wife, she led several spy missions into South Carolina while directing others from Union lines.

Another spy, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, was born a slave to the Van Lew family, who freed her and sent her to school. Bowser then returned to Richmond, where Elizabeth Van Lew was running one of the war’s most sophisticated spy rings.

Somehow, Van Lew got Bowser a job inside the Confederate White House as a housekeeper. Bowser then proceeded to sneak classified information out from under Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ nose.

According to the memoirs of Thomas McGiven, the Union spymaster in Richmond whose cover was that of a baker who delivered to the Confederate White House, Bowser “had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President’s desk she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made the point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis’ home to drop information.”

Stories about Bowser, who is also known as Ellen Bond, Mary Jones or Mary Jane Richards, show up as early as May 1900 in Richmond newspapers, and her name was revealed in 1910 in an interview with Van Lew’s niece, according to Elizabeth Varon, author of a book about Van Lew.

There is no proof that Bowser existed beyond these recollections. Van Lew, like Pinkerton before her, requested that Union forces turn over all her intelligence records at the end of the Civil Warand destroyed them, leaving no proof of her vast network.

Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, publicly denied that a black female spy could have infiltrated their White House.

But Varon’s book suggests that Bowser’s true name was Mary Richards, she survived the Civil Warand married a man named Garvin. Richards even writes in an 1867 letter that during the Civil Warshe was “in the service … as a detective.”

Others are not as well-known.

Take, for example, the three slaves who escaped the Confederate army on Morris Island, outside Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863 and went to Union Brig. Gen. Q.A. Gillmore with crucial information.

“They were officers’ servants, and report, from conversations of the officers there, that north and northwest faces of Fort Sumter are nearly as badly breached as the gorge wall, and that many of our projectiles passed through both walls, and that the fort contains no serviceable guns,” Gillmore said in a report to his army superiors.

Using African American troops, Gillmore later ordered the attack on Fort Sumter that was fictionalized in the film “Glory.” The Union retook Fort Sumter in February 1865, almost four years after the Civil War began with the Confederates firing on the federal facility and taking it over.

One such informant was Marie Louvestre (sometimes spelled Touvestre in historical records), a former slave working for a Confederate engineer who was transforming the USS Merrimac into the Virginia, the first Confederate ironclad warship. Realizing the importance of her employer’s breakthrough, Louvestre took some of the paperwork, headed north and requested a private meeting with Navy Secretary Gideon Wells.

The Union navy was working on a similar ship, the USS Monitor. Louvestre, Wells said in an 1873 letter, “told me the condition of the vessel, and took from her clothing a paper, written by a mechanic who was working on the ‘Merrimac,’ describing the character of the work, its progress and probable completion.”

The Union navy intensified its construction of the Monitor and sailed it down to Virginia, leading to the world’s first ironclad naval battle, a stalemate that kept the rebel navy from breaking the federal blockade of Norfolk.

Union forces weren’t the only ones operating a black spy network in the South.

Black abolitionists also ran a vast private network called the “Loyal League,” ”Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League” or the “4Ls,” which spied for the North and spread word about the war among the black slaves. Scobell was a member of the 4Ls, Pinkerton said, and used the network to get information to Washington, D.C.

“I traveled to about the plantations within a certain range, and got together small meetings in the cabins to tell the slaves the great news. Some of these slaves in turn would find their way to still other plantations — and so the story spread. We had to work in dead secrecy,” with “knocks and signs and passwords,” said George Washington Albright of Holly Springs, Miss., in 1937.

Utmost secrecy was needed for these spies because of the consequences for those who were caught.

James Bowser, a free black from Nansemond County, Virginia, decided to help the Union army by spying on the South, according to Virginia Hayes Smith of Norfolk, Virginia, an elderly black lady who related Bowser’s story to Virginia Writers Project field interviewers in 1937. Her recollections were subsequently published in the book “Virginia Folk Legends.”

Bowser’s white neighbors, some of whom coveted Bowser’s farmland, heard rumors of his activities, Smith said. A mob of planters attacked Bowser’s house at night and dragged out Bowser and his son.

“After severely beating both father and son, the horde made Bowser lie on the ground and stretch his neck over a log like a chicken on a chopping block,” said Smith, “Then someone cut his head off. The plan was to kill the boy in the same manner, but the more thoughtful ones disagreed. They suggested that he be left to carry the news of this ghastly example back to the other Negroes. The mob gave in.”

Another Virginian, a free black bricklayer named Martin Robinson, was killed on the spot.

Robinson was considered “faithful and reliable” by the Union hierarchy, and already had helped Union officers escape from the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, wrote Louis M. Boudrye, chaplain of the 5th New York Calvary.

Union forces wanted to attack Richmond in 1864 to free Union soldiers and spies held by Confederates at Belle Isle, a small island in the middle of the James River. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was to cross the James River eight miles to the south and press north into the city while other Union forces attacked from other directions. Robinson, who lived in the area, was sent by the Bureau of Military Intelligence to take Dahlgren’s troops and horses to the best place to cross the river.

When they arrived, the river was impassable. Robinson panicked. Dahlgren decided Robinson had deliberately deceived him. However, the river normally would have been passable had it not been for flooding from heavy rains, Confederate veteran Richard G. Crouch said in 1906.

“The colonel ordered him to be hung — a halter strap was used for the purpose, and we left the miserable wretch hanging by the roadside,” Boudrye said.

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It arose last year when a Virginia textbook was yanked over protests that it inaccurately claimed thousands of blacks served as Confederate soldiers. More recently, a North Carolina community turned down an effort to erect a monument to 10 black men who served the Southern army and later collected Confederate pensions.

Confederate law prohibited slaves from serving as soldiers until March 1865, when it was changed in a last-gasp effort to strengthen troop numbers.

Yet the debate continues bubbling to the surface in many ways.

Gregory Perry of Monroe, N.C., who learned recently that an ancestor was awarded pension for Confederate service, says it’s hard to reconcile that fact with what he knows firsthand about being a black man in the South.

“I grew up in the era of Malcolm X and militancy, and would never have considered something like this possible,” said Perry, 46, reflecting on the life of his great-great-grandfather, Aaron Perry.

“I wonder: If Aaron Perry knew the Union Army was coming to free him, why did he join the other side?”

Most Civil War historians agree black slaves and even some free blacks contributed crucial manpower to the Southern war effort — but it was mostly menial work done under duress or for survival, not out of support for the secession movement.

John David Smith, professor of American history at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and a member of North Carolina’s Sesquicentennial Academic Advisory Committee, said the South’s 11th-hour effort to recruit black soldiers was “too little, too late.”

“There’s no evidence of any real mobilization of slaves,” Smith said. At most, a company or two — including one of hospital workers — was ever organized.

Yet efforts to depict blacks as Confederates persist.

The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond once sold black toy soldiers, clad in Confederate gray. They were pulled from shelves in fall 2010 after several complaints.

Historian and library director John Coski posted an explanation in the gift shop.

“There is much wartime and postwar evidence of African-Americans acting in ways that suggest loyalty to the Confederacy — staying `home’ even when there was an opportunity to run away, even burying the family silver,” Coski wrote. But as to whether significant numbers of black men enlisted as combat soldiers, Coski says “the answer is a resounding `no.’”

Smith says he believes painting African Americans as Confederate sympathizers plays down the real causes of the Civil War.

“What gets professional historians concerned is when certain people start calling these people soldiers. It all goes back to how you define soldier. And for me, the story of so-called black Confederates is not as important as the story of why it keeps coming back.”

He added, “I think it keeps coming up because there are certain people who resist the idea that slavery and white supremacy were the cause of the Civil War.”

One such group is the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a Southern heritage organization whose members say state’s rights, not slavery, was the primary motivation for succession. Through a steady stream of website commentaries, blog posts and printed articles, Sons of Confederate Veterans members frequently promote the idea of black support for the Southern Army.

The author of Virginia’s recalled textbook, Joy Masoff, said articles by Sons of Confederate Veterans members helped convince her to include information in the fourth-grade history book that said “thousands” of black Confederate soldiers fought in the war.

Slaves undoubtedly worked for the Confederate troops, especially in the early years before food and supplies were scarce.

Workers like Gregory Perry’s great-great grandfather were brought onto the battlefield to drive horses, cook and even serve as valets. Slaves also were occasionally conscripted from their owners to help work on roads and other infrastructure needed by the army, Smith said.

“African Americans built bridges, erected fortifications, worked on the docks — all kinds of support work to free whites up to go and fight,” he added. “That’s nothing new.”

In the 1920s, 2,807 Southern blacks were approved for pensions authorized for black Confederates. In most states, each applicant was required to report the nature of the work performed and to which unit his “master” had been assigned.

In North Carolina, Sons of Confederate Veterans member Tony Way researched historical records and found that 10 black men from Union County received Confederate pensions. All were listed as having served the Southern Army as guards, servants, cooks and in other supporting roles.

Way proposed a marker on the courthouse square to recognize their contributions. He said he wasn’t trying to make a political statement.

“There are no African American monuments in Monroe County, so, being a Civil War buff, I thought the marker might highlight a unique and un-talked-about part of this region’s history,” Way said.

Jerry Surratt, chairman of the Union County Historical Commission, said the commission voted against the marker mainly because of the existing Confederate veterans’ monument nearby. It bears the titles of local regiments — not individual names as Way wanted.

“If we were going to list the names of those who served from Union County, there could be 1,800 names up there, 500 of whom didn’t return living,” Surratt said.

Earl Ijames, curator of African American and community history at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, helped Way with his research.

Ijames, who is black, said it is unrealistic to maintain that no people of color took sides against the Union. A seventh-generation North Carolinian, Ijames said some blacks may have pledged allegiance to the Confederates as a means of self-preservation.

This is something Gregory Perry has begun to consider about his ancestor.

“I can only think there must have been something more about this war, something we don’t know about, for him to have had such a connection to the Southern people or to the land,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ed Smith, an American University professor who has spoken widely on the subject, says today’s audiences can’t really gauge the societal, economic and other pressures that played on blacks and whites during slavery.

He said that’s why it is so hard for anyone to imagine that a slave’s Southern identity could have been at odds with his ideas about freedom.

“In today’s world, it’s hard to look back on slavery with any kind of clarity,” Ed Smith says. “Frankly, I think it’s going to be quite messy for the next four years.”

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Groups organized to maintain memories of the Confederacy without the stain of human bondage have been pushing to have their traditions integrated into the mainstream. Of particular note are the activities of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), which lobbies extensively to protect the rights of drivers to display Confederate flags on license plates (that they sell for a profit). According to USA Today, nine states allow drivers to display the rebel flag, with SCV being largely behind this accomplishment. The organization is now seeking similar protection in Florida, Kentucky and Texas, furthering its cause. Talk about special rights.

Now SCV is one step closer to reaching its Florida goal. On March 30, in response to a law suit filed by the loyal southern sons, a Florida court ruled that the state cannot control what residents display on vanity plates. This paves the way for SCV to promote their bill for specifically ensuring protection for the contentious flag on cars.

Is this madness – or American fairness at its finest? Of course the NAACP has spoken out against these trends. But groups like SCV argue that times have changed along with the emotions behind this symbol. American cultural historian Tim Stanley makes an interesting argument on their behalf:

The debate has become tragically bound up with questions of race. Opponents of the displaying of the Stars and Bars on government property say that it symbolizes racial discrimination. The SCV reasonably counters that the meaning of symbols can change over time. In the mid 19th century, most Protestant Americans would have shuddered at the sight of the Irish harp. It represented the mass immigration of hordes of Catholics, which prudish WASPs associated with drunkenness, idleness, gambling and prostitution. Nowadays, the harp means Guinness, and it is hoisted joyously on St Patrick’s Day – a day on which all Americans discover some hidden Irish heritage, hit the pubs and drink as if they don’t want to live.

Likewise, the Stars and Bars now represents something much more than racial hierarchy. To most people who hoist it in their front yards, it stands for honor and tradition and the Old World chivalry of Gone With the Wind. They revel in its outrageous defense of vanishing values, its uncompromising statement against the decadence of modern life and the voluminous size of federal government. The Civil War is as potent to many white Southerners as the Blitz is to a Brit. Regardless of the historical reality, it is their finest hour. To take that away from them seems rather cruel.

Of course, there is an ugly side to Confederate heritage. The refusal to forget has become obstinacy in some quarters. In others it is a socially acceptable way to express “white pride”, that strange belief that there’s something exceptional about our pinky-grey race of pot-bellied Europeans.

Stanley, writing as a British “pinky-grey pot-bellied European,” cannot understand the pain with which the Confederate flag pierces our souls. From our perspective, that flag is the continuous thread that unites the period of the Civil War to modern expressions of race hate such as the Klan. Our very recent ancestors were routinely terrorized by neighbors under that banner while struggling under the hypocritical “freedom” of Jim Crow law served from the back doors and segregated water fountains of southern communities. The Stars and Bars emboldened the perpetrators of beatings and lynchings with vicious pride. This emblem is a potent sign in the south of today that if you are black, you are not welcome where it is flown.

So, the answer is no. No group has the right to re-paint American history in layers of fantasy that only serve to bolster a backwards-looking community’s fragile relationship with a complicated past. If people want to claim “free speech” in order to willfully white-wash a period of institutionalized rape, murder, slavery, psychological oppression, economic destruction (and more!) right up until the 1960s – they DO NOT have the right to use government-issued license plates as the canvas for this bizarre re-imagining. The history SCV wants to diminish are the deepest wounds rendered as eternal evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. And they want us to just forget it?

It’s highly alarming that so many Americans are electing mass denial as the means of coping with social difficulties of complex origins. In case people haven’t noticed, we seem to have a problem dealing with something called REALITY in this country when race and politics mix. This new movement is a rebirth of the birthers pain, the outcries of a disturbed citizenry wanting to remain infantile when it comes to letting go of dim recollections of an all-powerful past. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and groups like them are using any means necessary to avoid burning racial memories, while denying the conflicts they continue to spawn.

SCV needs to keep their fantasy role-playing at home, where they can engage in all the denial they want (and perhaps a little BDSM, slavery-inspired whipping), and out of the public sphere. This means keeping the confederate flag off license plates. It is a shame that this is already a protected “right” in nine states. I avoid the south for reasons just like this.

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If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny that people actually argue that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery, and that, indeed, it was fought over “states’ rights.”

Geniuses; the Civil War was fought over states’ rights to own slaves!

That’s what the whole secession from the Union deal was about. That’s what gave birth to the Confederacy.

People that try to downplay the importance of slavery on all of American history must also conveniently forget that the issue was so important that it was actually written into the United States Constitution.

1787’s Three-Fifths Compromise guaranteed that as far as distribution of taxes and the appointment of members to the House of Representative were concerned, 3/5ths of the population of slaves would be taken into account in slaveholders’ favor.

Think they gave any of those slaves the votes or the tax money?

Nope.

Still, I guess it’s embarrassing to admit that a country that was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” (a slave owner’s quote) and describes itself as the “land of the free” (you guessed it, another slave owner’s quote) actually had to fight a war over whether or not it was the right thing to do to free men from chattel slavery.

But there had to be more causes for the Civil War than slavery, right?

Well, depends on who you ask.

Ask.com writer Martin Kelly actually gives the Top Five Causes for the Civil War.

1)      Economic differences between the North and South—that were brought about due to slavery.

2)      States Rights vs. Federal Rights—as they pertained to the hotly contested issue of slavery.

3)      The Fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents—need I?

4)      Growth of that Abolition Movement—are you noticing a theme here?

5)      The Election of Abraham Lincoln—who had already declared that he was “personally” anti-slavery. He was “professionally” pro-Union. Work that out however you have to.

So yeah, slavery was the only true cause of the Civil War.

And anybody that tries to tell you otherwise deserves to get screamed on by Joe Wilson.

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The events marked the 150th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, an engagement that plunged the nation into four years of war at a cost of more than 600,000 lives.

Several hundred people gathered on Charleston’s Battery in the pre-dawn darkness, much as Charleston residents gathered 150 years ago to view the bombardment of April 12, 1861.

About 4 a.m., a single beam of light reached skyward from the stone works of Fort Sumter. About a half hour later, about the time the first shots were fired, a second beam glowed, signifying a nation torn in two.

Nearby, a brass ensemble played a concert entitled “When Jesus Wept” as hundreds listened, some in folding chairs, others standing.

Fifty years ago during the centennial of the Civil War, there was a celebratory mood. But on Tuesday, the 150th anniversary events were muted. Even the applause seemed subdued.

Of about 1,200 people attending two main commemorative events, only a handful were black. One man whose Confederate ancestor is credited with firing the first shot of the war acknowledged his family legacy as a “mixed blessing.”

“I think it signifies the mood of the nation. I think we’re much more sensitive to other people and the diversity in this country,” said Linda Marshall, a 58-year-old registered nurse from Charleston as she waited for the second beam of light as dawn creeped up.

A little over two hours later, as a red sun rose on James Island across the harbor, Confederate re-enactors fired an authentic 1847 seacoast mortar, signaling about 30 other cannons ringing the harbor.

Those cannons quickly thumped and smoke rose in a re-enactment of the Sumter bombardment.

In a dispatch to The Associated Press in 1861, an unnamed correspondent observed the fort’s parapets crumbling under the pounding of artillery. He wrote of gun emplacements being “shot away” and shells falling “thick and fast.”

“The ball has opened. War is inaugurated … Fort Sumter has returned the fire and brisk cannonading has been kept up,” the dispatch said.

Sumter fell after a 34-hour bombardment.

One of those on hand on James Island was John Hugh Farley of Roswell, Ga. Many historians credit Farley’s ancestor, Lt. Henry Farley, as firing the first shot at Sumter.

“It’s a real big honor. We are very proud of our family,” said Farley, who had two other ancestors fight for the South. “It certainly is a mixed blessing because it’s bringing back a memory from way back but it also helps us to look at history and learn from history.”

Later in the morning, Danny Lucas, 53 and black, was walking out after visiting Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Museum, where the history of Charleston’s role as an urban slave trading center is recounted.

“I have no problem with the Civil War being honored as long as it is inclusive,” said Lucas, a Ridgeland, S.C. resident. “I don’t think whites should be so defensive and I don’t think blacks should feel they are unwelcome to these kinds of things. I think it will fade over time.”

Lucas does think last December’s secession ball in Charleston, during which South Carolina’s leaving the Union was commemorated, may have soured some blacks on the 150th events.

“The secession ball discouraged them because in their minds, they saw the ball as a celebration,” he said. With other events they may decide “I’m not going to go because there will be a whole lot of rebel yelling and carrying on.”

“In this moment of remembrance, let us all do the tough truth telling necessary for our nation to finally heal from the sins of slavery and fratricide,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a statement released by the civil rights group.

“Commemorative events must neither ignore slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War, nor romanticize those who fought to keep African Americans in slavery,” he said. “This is a time for the nation to reflect and repent, not ignore – let alone celebrate – the atrocities that tore our country apart.”

State Sen. Glenn McConnell, president pro tempore of the South Carolina Senate and a Civil War re-enactor, told the audience of about 700 on James Island that the effects of the war are still being felt.

“The War Between the States triggered generations of disputes and controversies between regions, races and cultures,” he said.

“Why was the war fought? Was it about slavery or states’ rights? What does the Confederate battle flag stand for? Is it a symbol of bigotry or a memorial to the valor of fallen soldiers,” he asked about 700 people gathered at a ceremony commemorating the first shots of the war. “Many of the emotional issues still rage.”

He said the South has moved on and “the time has come to move beyond the petty disputes of the past.”

Later a black Union re-enactor representing a soldier from the 54th Massachusetts, the company of black troops that fought at Battery Wagner on Charleston Harbor in 1863 in an attack memorialized in the movie “Glory,” threw a wreath into the water and saluted.

Then seven re-enactors in Confederate gray fired a 21-gun salute in memory of all who died on South Carolina soil. Two buglers then echoed “Taps.”

As the event broke up, a small group of Confederate re-enactors in the back of the crowd took up singing “Dixie,” although only a handful joined them and not very enthusiastically.

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South Carolina — The NAACP will be protesting the 150th anniversary secession ball in Charleston, South Carolina. State reports:

NAACP members and supporters plan to hold a peaceful march in downtown Charleston the day of the ball, on Dec. 20, followed by a meeting and question-and-answer session focusing on slavery. Participants will watch segments of “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 silent film that portrayed Ku Klux Klan members as heroes.

Nearby at Charleston’s Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, ball attendees, who will pay $100 a ticket, will don formal, period dress, eat and dance the Virginia Reel as a band plays “Dixie.” The evening’s highlight will be a play reenacting the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, which severed the state’s ties with the Union and paved the way for the Civil War.

“This is nothing more than a celebration of slavery,” Randolph said of the event.

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ATLANTA-The New York Times is reporting on the plans of many white southerners to celebrate the Confederacy with the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaching.

The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation), which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy.

That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.

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Kentucky (PittPostGazette)– Several veterans and historians gathered in Alleghany, Kentucky to honor the 180,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

Local African-American veterans and officials from the History Center gathered at the cemetery Sunday to honor more than 100 Civil War-era African-American soldiers who are buried there.

Mr. Masich said the men, called U.S. Colored Troops, are “forgotten heroes.” Fighting for a place where they were treated as the lowliest of citizens, many met harsh discrimination after their service, too.

“These men went before us and laid the pathway which we are still treading on,” said Staff Sergeant Michael E. Flournoy, an African-American Vietnam War veteran and a readjustment counselor for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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No one says that about the Nazis. You might hear statements about the effectiveness of the German army, but you don’t hear talk about their honor or valiance in mainstream history classes. The way American history is taught in the South, at least, shuts African Americans out of the Civil War. In the early 90s at a majority black high school, I learned that many factors whose roots all returned to slavery caused the war, and I learned about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but the war itself was presented (though never explicitly stated to be) a whites against whites affair. In other parts of the South, students learn that two virtuous armies fought and by the way slavery is bad. Again, it’s generally presented as whites against whites. The movie Glory came out while I was in high school, and it was the first significant representation of African American participation in the war.

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Last month the former executive of the Council of Churches, together with academic Dr. Clara L. Small (pictured above), released a book titled, ‘Men of Color, To Arms: Manumitted Slaves and Freed Blacks from the Lower Eastern Shores of Maryland.’

It traces the lives and demographic information of 1300 freemen who volunteered or former slaves who were sold by their owners to participate in the Civil War.

Rev. Briddell said the data he discovered had not been fully pursued in any other research project.

“The book brings to the surface what only few scholars knew,” he said. “But nothing has come out that we know profiles these soldiers.”

Now a New Jersey retiree, Rev. Briddell said it was crucial to the legacy of those who fought that he discover more about black Civil War heroes.

“The role of African Americans in the War has almost perished,” he said. “And even now, if you go to a Memorial Day Service, our attention would be on World War I or World War II.”

He suggested there was also a need to inform the black community about these men so that their roles in the triumphs of the Civil War were not underestimated.

“I’m beginning to say that had it not been for these soldiers the Union would not have achieved what it did,” he said.

A few years ago, a series of events led Rev. Briddell to discover that his great, great uncle, Isaiah Fassett, had been enlisted to fight in the Civil War.

A local Maryland newspaper profiled Fassett and expressed how encouraged they were that a black man had happily fought in the War.

But Rev. Briddell corrected them, indicating that Fassett had no choice.

“He lived to be 102 so there was some consciousness of him being in the Civil War,” Rev. Briddell said. “But it was not his decision to go. He was sold by his owner for a bounty.”

This was the case for many of Maryland’s Black Civil War soldiers and so along with Isaiah Fassett, Rev. Briddell and Dr. Small profiled 1300 of the state’s most forgotten black Civil War heroes.

They used as many as 5 sources to unveil their names, places of origin, ranks, regiments, entry and exit dates, transfer dates, and bounty information.

These sources included the Formal Roster of the Civil War, muster rolls, bounty rolls, land records and the deeds that set the men free after the war.

The book also relied on data from the 1890 Census to discover information about pensions, injuries and the future prospects of Civil War veterans.

Rev. Briddell noted that upon discharge the lives of some black Civil War heroes were marred with struggle.

“It would be a difficult task given that you had just been given a life,” he said. “You didn’t have a profession, a job and there was no equity for you.”

In order to fully pay homage to their contribution to freedom in America, Rev. Briddell hopes the book will give a name to the nameless.

Along with others scholars, he estimates that around 150,000 unknowns soldiers were killed in the Civil War, never to be recognized by name or any other background information.

Rev. David Briddell and Dr. Clara L. Small’s book is available for $25 online at publisher Arcadia’s website or at the Salisbury State University Book Store in Maryland.

Click here to find the book at BuyArcadia.com.

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For you history buffs, The 54 named their band after the first official all black unit in the United States Armed forces during the Civil War, The 54th Regiment. And considering they started their punk band while attending the historically black all-male school, Morehouse College in Atlanta, they said they felt like they were going against the traditional “conservative” brand of the HBCU when they came together with their group. Now playing together for the last three years, The 54 will join the 2010 Afro-punk Festival at Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn, NY on June 26, 2010.

Morehouse alums, The 54, are joining the Afro-punk 2010 Festival

Hear the guys say hello……

Now living in Atlanta, the guys of The 54 said they had to battle off campus police while they practiced their music in the Morehouse College parking lot, with bassist Mercury saying in an interview to Afro-punk that it was sometimes a struggle practicing on campus grounds, but they found some support from Morehouse teachers who started to take their music seriously when they started booking heavy gigs on the Atlanta circuit.

Despite the fact that Morehouse has been noted for their traditional and conservative values, it seems like it may have an affect on black alternative musicians, considering it is the home to artists such as Martin Luther, who will also be playing at the 2010 Afro-punk festival, as well as Saul Williams, who headlined the 2009 Afro-punk tour.

Hear The 54 invite you out to the 2010 Afro-punk festival, they’ll be performing on June 26th. Buy your tickets and see The 54 and many other acts on June 26th and 27th here.

Click here to read the interview.

OR ENTER TO WIN FREE TICKETS HERE!

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RALEIGH, N.C. – A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.

Art historians believe it’s an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated.

The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of American history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s photographs department at the Smithsonian Institution.

“It’s a very difficult and poignant piece of American history,” he said. “What you are looking at when you look at this photo are two boys who were victims of that history.”

In April, the photo was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of John for $1,150, not a small sum in 1854.

New York collector Keya Morgan said he paid $30,000 for the photo album including the photo of the young boys and several family pictures and $20,000 for the sale document. Morgan said the deceased owner of the home where the photo was found was thought to be a descendant of John.

A portrait of slave children is rare, Morgan said.

“I buy stuff all the time, but this shocked me,” he said.

What makes the picture an even more compelling find is that several art experts said it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer known for his portraits of historical figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Stapp said the photo was probably not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O’Sullivan, one of Brady’s apprentices. O’Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War.

In 1862, O’Sullivan famously photographed a group of some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Such photos were circulated in the North by abolitionists to garner support for the Union during the Civil War, said Harold Holzer, an author of several books about Lincoln. Holzer works as an administrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Most of the photos depicted adult slaves who had been beaten or whipped, he said.

The photo of the two boys is more subtle, Holzer said, which may be why it wasn’t widely circulated and remained unpublished for so long.

“To me, it’s such a moving and astonishing picture,” he said.

Ron Soodalter, an author and member of the board of directors at the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington, D.C., said the photo depicts the reality of slavery.

“I think this picture shows that the institution of slavery didn’t pick or choose,” said Soodalter, who has written several books on historic and modern slavery. “This was a generic horror. It victimized the old, the young.”

For now, Morgan said, he is keeping the photo in his personal collection, but he said he has had an inquiry to sell the photo to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He said he is considering participating in the creation of a video documentary about John.

“This kid was abused and mistreated and people forgot about him,” Morgan said. “He doesn’t even exist in history. And to know that there were a million children who were like him. I’ve never seen another photo like that that speaks so much for children.”

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The GOP has a neo-confederate problem. Rather than viewing slavery as a genocidal crime, many in the Republican party seem to view it as a romantic, proud way of life defended by noble warriors who were defending their states’ rights, culture and way of life in the Civil War.

Recently the governor of Virginia, declared April, Confederate History Month. To many African Americans, the Confederacy is a reminder of slavery, brutality, dehumanization, rape and murder. Still, many southern white Americans hold the Confederacy, its history and its flag in high acclaim.

Can you imagine if states in Germany began showing off the Nazi flag? What if a state in Germany declared Nazi history month or people began bringing Nazi flags to protests supported by a political party like Tea Party protesters use Confederate flags. The confederate flag has been used as symbol for racism both before and after the Civil War and to African Americans, shares the same connotations as the Swastika.

Still it seems as if the Republicans, especially southern members of the party, are holding on to Confederate history and pride. Despite the fact that both slavery and the Confederacy are viewed as being on the wrong side of history, many right wingers have their own revisionist history in which the South was the victim and the north was to blame for the war, while ignoring slavery.

Several prominent republicans have attached themselves to the Confederacy, they are known as neo-confederates. One neo-confederate who has recently come to prominence is South Carolina congressman, Joe Wilson. Wilson gained national media exposure by yelling “You Lie!!!” during Obama’s speech.

Wilson is a member of Sons Of Confederate Veterans, the group that lobbied for Confederate History Month in Virginia. The group started off to preserve southern heritage but has recently been taken over by neo-confederate extremist “lunatics” who want to secede from the union again, see slavery as a benign institution and belong in camps named after Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth (the man who assassinated Lincoln).

Joe Wilson is not the only Republican with neo-confederate ties. Republican congressman, Ron Paul has also has several ties to neo-confederates and has expressed neo-confederate ideas. Paul told Tim Russert that he believes that the Civil War was unnecessary and that the north should have bought the slaves back from the south to end slavery.

Ron Paul is also closely tied to the Ludwig Von Mises institute. The SPLC labels the Ludwig Von Mises a neo-confederate organization. Ron Paul’s former chief of staff, Lew Rockwell, Paul’s close friend and former chief of staff heads the organization. Of the Civil War, Rockwell said it “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.” Ludwig Von Mises publications have been very supportive of southern secession.

Several members of the racist League of The South, which credits Rockwell as a founding member, have spoken and give presentations at the Von Mises Institute. The SPLC labels the League of The South as a hate group and that they believe the “godly” nation it wants to form should be run by an “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate blacks and other minorities.”

Paul has also been publicly endorsed the works of Thomas Dilorenzo. Dilorenzo is a senior faculty member at the Von Mises institute and also an affiliated scholar of the racist League Of The South. Dilorenzo has published several books about the civil war. In “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War,” Dilorenzo argues that the Civil war was a war to prevent southern independence and blames Lincoln for the war while defending the Confederacy. Ron Paul would use that book to back up his claim that the Civil War was an unnecessary war that Lincoln was to blame for on MSNBC.

The problem with Ron Paul, Joe Wilson and the many neo-confederates who support or work in the Republican party is that you can not separate slavery and the Confederacy, once you defend one, you defend the other. That is like separating Nazis and the holocaust.

The history of the south that should be celebrated, is the noble Blacks and Whites who fought against slavery, not those who fought for it. In order for the south to move past its history, it must condemn the practice of slavery and those who fought to preserve it. I know this may be hard for people whose relatives may have fought in the war, but they must respect the many more people whose relatives who were enslaved, murdered and raped due to slavery.

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From BelfastTelegraph.com:

Climate change could increase the likelihood of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa by 50% within the next 20 years, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, it has been claimed.

Researchers at Stanford University in California combined historical data on civil wars with rainfall and temperature records across Africa.

They found that between 1980 and 2002, civil wars were significantly more likely to break out in warmer than average years. A 1C increase in temperature in a given year increased the incidence of conflict by almost 50%.

This trend was then applied to future projections from 20 global climate simulations. The results suggested that the incidence of African civil wars could increase by 55% by 2030, causing an estimated 390,000 extra conflict-related deaths.

Economist Professor Edward Miguel, one of the US researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, said: “The large majority of the poor in most African countries depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and their crops are quite sensitive to small changes in temperature. So when temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms.”

To mark the Civil War’s centennial 50 years ago, some whites donned Confederate uniforms or hoop skirts and paraded to sentimental notions of the Old South, partly in answer to the civil rights struggle exploding around them. Blacks quietly met apart to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.

In Alabama, whites held beard-growing contests and mixed in speeches defying the federal government’s push for integration.

“It was a safe haven to get nostalgic about the past,” said Kristopher Teters, author of “A Contested Path: Commemorating the Civil War in 1960s Alabama.”

Half a century later, commemorations of the war’s 150th anniversary of the war’s start are shaping up to be multicultural and inclusive as a country takes new stock of its greatest domestic conflict.

Fought from 1861 to 1865, the Civil War pitted northern and southern states against each other over slavery in the South and other issues. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in the South free.

In planning for observances starting this year and continuing for at least two years, historians, scholars, artists and writers are reassessing the war with zeal, inviting fresh viewpoints on the reasons for the country’s harrowing slide into a conflict that dragged on for years, claiming more than 1 million lives.

Witness the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the state’s official theater, which has commissioned two plays for the 150th — one by a white female playwright from the South and one by a black male Northerner.

Geoffrey Sherman, producing artistic director at the festival, is himself an Englishman who knew little about the Civil War until he began gathering information for the two playwrights. He said both will use identical material about Montgomery in that period to produce their own take on those times.

“They’ll write their own view of that material and of those people and then we are going to produce those plays back to back,” Sherman promised.

In Virginia, more than 1,000 scholars and others have launched a series of historical conferences to scrutinize the war. Little-heard perspectives are welcome and no subject is barred. One conference scheduled for next year: “Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History.”

That more thoughtful approach will distinguish the state’s commemorations from those it held 50 years ago, said House Speaker William J. Howell, the chairman of Virginia’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. A college student during the centennial observances, Howell said he recalls hearing the cannons during a re-enactment of the Battle of Manassas.

“There’s an awful lot more to the war than just that,” Howell said.

In Maryland, Bill Pencek, the director of heritage tourism, says sesquicentennial events will highlight diverse viewpoints on the war, a departure from centennial observances that mainly honored Confederate veterans. First activities will commemorate an event that helped ignite the war — John Brown’s raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry — launched from a farmhouse near Dargan, Md.

Plans in South Carolina, where the war began, call for re-enacting the bombardment of Fort Sumter and also for the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to free local slaves when Beaufort was occupied by federal troops.

Fifty years ago, Alabama’s Legislature created the Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission to organize celebrations. That commission sidestepped the issue of slavery, Teters said, and presented a romanticized version of the Civil War that hailed Southern troops as brave souls who soldiered on outnumbered and ill-equipped.

People filled a large rodeo arena in Montgomery for a weeklong program recreating the birth of the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as president there 100 years earlier. Those festivities came the same year white Southerners beat Freedom Riders for trying to desegregate buses across the region.

With the 150th anniversary, many of the activities planned will acknowledge the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement.

“The focus should be more on understanding how these events made us what we are today,” Alabama State Archivist Ed Bridges said.