Soloist wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 12:17 pm
John posted about a slave Louis Napoleon Nelson. The truth is never quite so simple,
A very thorough look at this black man and his history with the confederate army. I’ve looked at these sources and I’m impressed with the details that he dug out and he actually sources these claims.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/deep- ... 343/?amp=1
What the Facts and sources support:
Louis Nelson's background:
Louis Nelson was enslaved by the Oldhams, a prominent Episcopalian family. James and Helen Oldham owned 40 slaves. They lived with their sons E.R.(18), Sidney (16), and James. Louis was one of 19 enslaved children. Louis would have been 12 at the time. I wonder how many of these people were related to him.
At the time of the war, Louis was enslaved and 14 years old. His owner's sons were 2 and 4 years older than him. The law of the land at the time was that slaves did not have rights that white people were bound to respect. So, hopefully this informs your thought process as you think about “Louis being a bodyguard” for his owner’s sons.
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/no-r ... o-respect/
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/no-r ... o-respect/
The Company Louis’ owners were a part of, Company M was not integrated. The area of Lauderdale these young men came from was very affluent. One of the soldiers who served with E.R. and Sidney, CSO Rice, said that almost every soldier brought slaves/ servants.
https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital ... 6/id/12244 - pg 7 of 52
Confederate armies were full of slaves who worked as cooks, orderlies, and so forth. That has been well documented. Slaves were also widely used by the Confederate army for manual labor such as digging trenches and building fortifications. So there were no doubt many slaves wearing Confederate gray and working along side the Confederate army.
But there is no contemporary documentation in either Union or Confederate records of Black confederate soldiers who enlisted to serve as soldiers. Nor is there any contemporary record in the form of letters, memoirs, or enlistment documents of any Black soldiers serving in combat. In fact, arming Black soldiers was explicitly prohibited by the Confederacy until the very last weeks of the war. And there are no records showing that any Black solders were ever enlisted during those last few weeks of the war, much less armed, trained, and deployed into combat.
In fact, when one thinks about it. The notion that Confederate authorities in the face of approaching Union armies of emancipation during the last weeks of the war would have thought "hey, I know, let's arm the slaves"
That just sounds ridiculous to even write it.
I had hundreds of Black students in class during the decade that I taught HS in Central Texas. I didn't teach history, but historical discussions and topics like the Confederate flag, Civil War, and slavery would sometimes come up.
If you are talking to Black students in Texas about who won the Civil War do you think they are going to tell you that "THEY" won the Civil War? Or that "WE" won the Civil War. Think about it. Notwithstanding the odd old conservative guy who gets caught up in Civil War nostalgia like the guy in this article. I have found that it is pretty universal among the Black students I knew that "WE" won the Civil War.