To learn. It's a mystery and I'm exploring it. And as I've said before, if people weren't so worked up about this topic and hadn't made it so controversial, I probably would never have taken any notice. I suppose I should be grateful, it's been very interesting so far.
The whole "Black Confederate" issue is used to modify history for devious aims by the biggest culprit... the pro confederate heritage sect. Those folk too often want to deviate history to take a black/slave in the ranks, and shove it down peoples throats that because of this so called "integration" in the ranks, the South didn't secede, or fight for slavery. The SCV/UDC rush to get veterans markers for so-called "black confederate soldiers" without considering the laws of the Confederate Government on arming slaves, enlistment rules.
This has been going on for a good while, nothing really new about this. Levin brings this out in his book, exposing the ploy.
It's one thing to find out what it was blacks did in the war, free, or slave, and make that known, I have stated that is OK. But it's a travesty to take that info, and work at turning it into something that wasn't true, like giving them the status of equal, enlisted, bonafide soldiers, or "negroes bearing arms", like it was fully accepted. It often denies the true relationship between the whites, and the white supremacy that ran the South, and the blacks/slaves forced subservience to that.
If in all of your newspaper compilation you had stopped from time to time and reminded folk what is reported, went against what the confederate government policy was, I'd be ok with what you are doing.
I don't remember you ever doing that, and seemingly pushed back at folk like me, that do not believe that blacks/slaves were all armed soldiers like the whites. You state from these articles that folk widely believed they were, thus making it somehow true and widely accepted, and act on that. I do not believe a black/slave who picked up a weapon and fired at a yank was a soldier, or even a combatant in the confederacy's eyes, or deserving such a title, because the confederacy sure didn't believe so.
I look at it in a historical context of the time, NOT thru a modern lense, wishing to change history.
Kevin Dally