ABSTRACT:
Paths Not Taken, Part 5 – Confederate law disallowed Negro combat soldiers. Hence, most historians agree that negligibly few Negroes joined the Confederate Army and fought to preserve slavery. Yet a few insist that hundreds of African-Americans did precisely that. Both are correct. The semantic trick is that the terms Negro and African-American denoted different things in 1860s South Carolina. This 16-page booklet narrates the tragedy of the South Carolina elite. They were biracial landowners, who were legally “white” in 1850, but found themselves re-labeled “black” when the color line suddenly shifted in 1895.
