9/27/2001

By Steve Fry
The Capital-Journal

Before William Clarke Quantrill and hundreds of his Missouri guerrillas raided Lawrence in 1863, John Noland rode ahead to scout out the town.

Noland, Quantrill's primary scout, is just one of many blacks who served in Confederate units during the Civil War, said historian Ed Kennedy, who will speak at 6:30 p.m. today to the Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Kansas at the Koch Education Center at the Kansas History Center, 6425 S.W. 6th. Admission is free and the event is open to the public.

Noland joined Quantrill because his family in Missouri had been abused by Jayhawkers, Kansas guerrillas who raided Missouri and later were mustered into the Union forces, Kennedy said. Photographs of Quantrill's raiders as they attended reunions after the Civil War show Noland sitting prominently with white members of the group.

In the 1999 movie "Ride With the Devil," Noland is the basis for the character Daniel Holt, the freed black who along with his former owner rides with Quantrill's bushwhackers, Kennedy said.

It is difficult to determine how many blacks fought in the Confederate forces, in part because many Confederate records were destroyed. Kennedy estimates seven percent to eight percent of the Confederate forces might have been black.

Kennedy cites a number of sources, including diaries, letters, private publications, the "Official Records of the War of the Rebellion" and writings of black scholars.

For instance:

• A Union sanitary commission officer saw 3,000 black armed combatants in the Confederate Army moving through Fredricksburg, Va., in 1862.

• An 1862 letter from Frederick Douglass to President Abraham Lincoln in which Douglass writes that many blacks serve in the Confederate Army as "real soldiers having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."

• Pensions were paid to black Confederate soldiers.

• And photographs showed black veterans, who "wore their veterans badges as proudly as any whites."

Blacks served in the Confederate Army "for the same reason they defended the United States colonies in the Revolutionary War," Kennedy said. "They were patriots," who thought their homes were being invaded by the Union. They felt like this was their home, that this was their country. They weren't fighting for slavery."

The black Confederates were a combination of free blacks and slaves who were house servants accompanying white masters, Kennedy said. Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest freed 44 of his slaves after they served Forrest's cavalry forces, Kennedy said. Unlike blacks in the Union Army who served in all-black regiments, blacks in the Confederate Army fought in mixed units, he said.

The topic of black Confederate soldiers is rarely talked about because "it's not politically correct," Kennedy said. Some people who hear about black soldiers fighting in the Confederate Army "just go ballistic," Kennedy said. He likens their reaction to people who didn't know blacks served in the Union Army before release of the 1989 movie "Glory," the film about the 54th Massachusetts, an all-black unit Union regiment. (The first black regiment to fight in the Civil War was the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry.)

Steve Fry can be reached at

(785) 295-1206 or sfry@cjonline.com