They were just taking orders.
First I find out Jews fought for Hitler, and now this:
"Confederate reenactors to mark life of slave’s daughter" by Martha Waggoner | Associated Press October 18, 2014
RALEIGH, N.C. — The lives of Mattie Clyburn Rice, the daughter of a slave, and her father, Weary Clyburn, who was in his early 80s when she was born, illustrate the tangled threads of history in connection to slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath; he was a slave who went to war to serve his master.
‘‘There’s really no debate about the question of whether African-Americans fought for the Confederacy. We know they didn’t,’’ said author and historian Kevin Levin of Boston, who blogs about the rise of the belief in black Confederates.
But Rice, who was 91 when she died in September, dismissed historians who consider black Confederates a myth.
‘‘A lot of people ask me if I’m angry,’’ she told The Charlotte Observer. ‘‘What do I have to be angry about? There’s been slavery since the beginning of time. I’m not bitter about it, and I do not think my father would be bitter about it.’’
Some people still are.
A paternalistic 1930 obituary for Weary Clyburn said he was buried ‘‘in the Confederate uniform of gray’’ — yet it also called him ‘‘Uncle Weary Clyburn’’ and described him as ‘‘a white man’s darkey.’’
As opposed to a dark man's whitey?
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Records show Clyburn received a soldier’s pension, yet they also classify him as something else. The pension records say ‘‘his services were meritorious and faithful toward his master and the cause of the Confederacy.’’ They describe Clyburn as a bodyguard for his master who performed personal services for Robert E. Lee and ‘‘that at Hilton Head, while under fire of the enemy, he carried his master out of the field of fire on his shoulder.’’
Yet a letter dated June 18, 1930, and signed by state Auditor Baxter Durham, refuses to award Clyburn’s pension to his widow because ‘‘negro pensioners are not classed as Confederate Soldiers.’’
‘‘It’s unfortunate that we can’t remember these men for who and what they were,’’ said Levin. ‘‘They lived through the end of slavery. Now imagine being dragged into war. Because they were enslaved, they were forced to deal with the horrors of war. These were men forced to comply with their master’s wishes as they had always been forced to do.’’
Just like the military.
‘‘This is not a story about the Confederacy as a progressive nation in terms of relations’’ he added. ‘‘If they had won the war, they would have furthered slavery and extended it. Thank God they lost.’’
Actually, slavery would have eventually faded due to its inefficiency and the coming industrial revolution, and within 20 years things would be even worse for blacks due to sharecropping.
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Related: Night at the Oscars
Even the causes of the Civil War have been distorted by my received history.
