"Communities of Dissent"

"McCurry correctly points out that enlisting blacks in the Confederate army and offering them freedom did not necessarily mean the end of slavery. Both the British and the Americans had used slave soldiers in the War of Independence, yet slavery survived. It did so as well in the West Indies, where the British raised and freed slave regiments. Had the Confederacy emerged victorious, slavery would certainly have continued. In any event, a few days before the war ended, two companies of Confederate black soldiers from Richmond were sent to the front. Most of these men had already been impressed to work in a Confederate hospital; whether they were truly volunteers may be doubted. Certainly, as McCurry makes clear, the idea that legions of slaves fought for the slaveholders' republic—a notion propagated by neo-Confederate organizations and widely disseminated on the Internet—is a myth."

In The Nation, Eric Foner reviews Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning and Victoria Bynum's The Long Shadow of the Civil War.