It is, the families had lived together for a long time and these 2 were childhood friends.
Without slavery, that would not have happened. Silas's wife was not a legal wife and his son was not his. All could have been sold and sent separate directions. Silas' owners could have impregnated the so-called wife and sold the offspring.
The leg incident seems to be problematic.
A 160-year-old tintype depicting Andrew Chandler and his slave Silas, both in Confederate uniform, has long been used as evidence that slaves willingly fought against the army that aimed to free them. Following the national backlash against Confederate iconography, Silas's descendants seek to...
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Andrew was shot in the leg during the battle. Family legend has it that the Confederate surgeon recommended amputation, and Silas, using a gold coin sewn into his jacket for emergencies, bought a crate of whiskey to bribe the surgeon to let him take Andrew away. He managed to smuggle Andrew onto a boxcar to Atlanta. Genealogy notes passed down by Andrew’s family contain the recollections of Mary Ivy Chandler, Andrew’s daughter. Mary Ivy says in the notes that Andrew’s uncle, Kyle Chandler, was waiting in Atlanta with a carriage and a nurse to bring Andrew and Silas back.
A Confederate medical document from 1864 uncovered by PBS confirms the story of Andrew’s injury, showing a gunshot wound to his right leg and ankle at Chickamauga, but nothing beyond family lore supports the gold coin story — neither Mary Ivy’s account nor his obituary in Confederate Veteran magazine mentions it. In fact, the genealogy notes raise the possibility that it may have been Kyle, not Silas, who got the whiskey, and for the hometown doctor rather than the army surgeon. “Uncle Kyle paid the doctor $40 a day for his services in caring for Papa, and that was what one quart of whiskey cost him,” Mary Ivy says in the notes. “I often wonder if the whiskey was for patients or if the doctor drank it.”
