Black Confederates & Black Slave Owners: Truth VS Myth

Let’s start with Black Confederates, because there are two groups of people who get it wrong.

On the Lost Cause side, some say thousands of Black men fought as Confederate soldiers. Harvard historian John Stauffer, for example, has estimated 3,000 to 6,000 Black soldiers, plus about 100,000 laborers, servants, and teamsters, most of them enslaved [7].

Meanwhile, the other side says there were no Black Confederates at all.

Historian Kevin Levin, in Searching for Black Confederates, argues the large numbers are a modern myth that military service records and pension files don’t support [6]. But “not thousands” isn’t the same as “none.”

So what is the truth behind it?

The Louisiana Native Guard and Confederate Policy on Black Soldiers

The most cited evidence of Black Confederate units comes from the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a militia regiment of free men of color formed in May 1861. Governor Thomas Overton Moore accepted it into state service, but the Confederacy never armed it or sent it into combat [4]. In fact, about 1,500 free men of color signed its muster roll, and most bought their own uniforms and weapons [14]. However, in January 1862, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring militia members to be white [14].

Shortly after, New Orleans fell to the Union in April 1862. Some former Guardsmen then joined new Union regiments that kept the Native Guard name, though muster rolls show those Union regiments were made up mostly of men who had escaped slavery [15][20].

For most of the war, Confederate policy barred Black men from enlisting as soldiers, and state slave codes already forbade enslaved people from carrying firearms without permission. When arming enslaved men was debated in the war’s last winter, Confederate general Howell Cobb wrote to Secretary of War James Seddon in January 1865: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong” [10].

Richmond, 1865

The Confederate Congress finally authorized enlisting enslaved men on March 13, 1865, just weeks before the war ended [11]. Even so, enlistment still required the enslaver’s consent. Only two companies were raised and drilled in Richmond before the city fell in early April, and they never saw meaningful combat [11][6].

Confederate State Laws on Free Black Volunteers, and the Jobs They Actually Got

On paper, several Southern states made room for free men of color in 1861. In practice, almost every one of those laws put them to work, not into combat.

State Laws in 1861

• Tennessee, June 1861. The legislature authorized the governor to receive free men of color into military service [25]. In practice, the law worked as a draft of free Black men as military laborers [22]. In fact, a company of Tennessee Rangers had petitioned for exactly that: free men of color, impressed if necessary, sent to the camps to do “menial service” [21].
• Louisiana, 1861. Governor Moore accepted the Native Guard into the state militia [4]. About 1,400 of them marched in a New Orleans review of Confederate troops in November 1861 [24]. But the Confederacy never armed them, and by January 1862 state law limited the militia to white men [14].
• Virginia, 1861. In April, free Black men in Lynchburg and Petersburg enrolled to offer their services to the governor [24]. Then in July, the state convention passed an ordinance to enroll free Black men “in the public service,” which meant labor [26].
• Alabama. The legislature authorized enrolling the Creoles of Mobile into the militia to defend the city and county of Mobile [27].

Confederate Laws in 1864 and 1865

• The Confederacy, February 1864. A national law made every free Black man aged 18 to 50 liable for war work: fortifications, producing war materials, and military hospitals. The pay was $11 a month plus rations and clothing. Moreover, free Black men were to be impressed before enslaved men [23].
• The Confederacy, March 1865. Only then did the Confederate Congress authorize Black soldiers [11].

So when someone tells you the Confederacy welcomed free Black volunteers, ask: as what? The laws answer that question. Shovels, wagons, and hospital wards, not rifles.

Union Battle Reports of Armed Black Men in Confederate Ranks

Still, despite Confederate law and the beliefs of many officers, Union battle reports describe Black men firing on Union lines from the Confederate side.

Lt. Col. John G. Parkhurst, 9th Michigan Infantry, reporting on Forrest’s attack at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on July 13, 1862:

“There were also quite a number of negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, and took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day.” [8]

Brig. Gen. David Stuart, during the Chickasaw Bayou campaign in Mississippi, December 1862:

“…but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men.” [9]

Of course, these are only two Union reports out of a handful. So what were these men doing, and why were they there?

Who Were These Armed Men?

Most Black men with Confederate armies were enslaved “body servants” brought by their enslavers, or laborers forced into service to build fortifications, drive wagons, and cook. Indeed, the Confederacy depended on this labor, which is why it was there in such numbers [6][7].

In the chaos of a fight, an enslaved man might pick up a weapon under orders, under threat, to protect himself, or out of personal ties to the men around him. A few free men of color, as Arthur Bergeron documents, served in units on their own [4].

How the Black Confederate Myth Grew

After the war, “faithful slave” stories, reunion photos, and Southern state pensions paid to former servants were later reread as proof of soldiers. From the 1970s on, heritage groups and then the internet amplified the claim [6].

Free Men of Color Who Volunteered for the Confederacy

So let’s take a turn here. It’s easy to understand why enslaved people ran to Union lines to seek freedom, or submitted for the sake of survival.

But what about the opposite side of this? What about the small minority within the free community who owned slaves? What about the ones who willingly volunteered for Confederate service?

This is where it gets interesting. Before the Civil War, letters and records tell us a lot about what Black slave owners were up to. However, once the war starts, it gets fuzzy.

The Confederate Volunteers We Can Name

These are the free men of color we can trace by name in Confederate service records [4][19]:

• Alphonse and Joseph G. Perot, 6th Louisiana Cavalry. The brothers from Natchitoches Parish enlisted in 1862 using false conscription papers. When they were discovered, they were allowed to stay only if they served under a white officer.
• Leufroy Pierre-Auguste, 16th Louisiana Infantry. Company K’s first two muster rolls list him as a “free man of color.” He fought at Shiloh, Farmington, and Perryville, then was discharged on December 8, 1862, because he was a “colored man.” His brother Jean Baptiste also served alongside him.
• Lutz, 8th Louisiana Infantry. He enlisted on June 23, 1861, and fought from Winchester through Fredericksburg. He was captured twice, severely wounded at Gettysburg, and later received a Louisiana Confederate pension in 1900.
• John Wilson Buckner, 1st South Carolina Artillery. We’ll come back to him.

Two Statements, Two Masters

When the Louisiana Native Guard formed in 1861, free men of color in New Orleans published a pledge of loyalty to Louisiana. It said plainly that they owned slaves and were dearly attached to their native land [12].

A year later, however, Union troops held the city. Some of the same men then said they had joined only out of fear, and some put on Union blue [14][20].

Were they lying the first time, or the second? Maybe neither. Both statements were made under pressure, to whoever held power at the moment. That’s why the question of “willingly” is so hard to answer.

Before the war, these families wrote mostly about business, property, and family. They bought land, bought people, made money, and worried about keeping their freedom. During the war, every public word became a statement of loyalty that could be used for or against them. And the private record thins out, whether because they wrote less or because their letters didn’t survive. Either way, many free Black Southerners kept a finger on the pulse of power, standing where they had to stand to survive.

How Many Black People Owned Slaves? A Minority Within a Minority

To understand these men, you have to shrink the picture.

1. Enslaved people: In 1860, the United States held about four million enslaved people [13].
2. Free people of color: About a quarter of a million lived in the South, already a small minority [3].
3. Black slaveholders: The only national count comes from the 1830 census, which Carter G. Woodson studied: 3,776 free Black people owned 12,907 enslaved people, out of more than two million enslaved nationwide [12]. Historians also estimate Black-owned slaves may have reached about 20,000 by 1860 [13].
4. Family, not profit: About 42% of Black slaveholders in 1830 owned just one person, which suggests many were holding a wife or child they couldn’t legally free [12][13].
5. Planters who owned people for profit: A few hundred. In 1850 there were an estimated 242 Black planters with more than 20 enslaved people [18]. William Ellison was one of them.
6. Free men of color in Confederate ranks: The ones we can actually name fit on a single page [4].

They weren’t the Lost Cause’s thousands, and they weren’t the zero the other side insists on. They were a minority within a minority, and every one of them has a story.

William Ellison: The Black Slave Owner Who Bought the System

Okay, so we can understand why someone would own a family member. But we’re going deeper into the unusual, because the psychology of Black slave owners who owned people for profit fascinates me.

There are only a few case studies here. I chose William Ellison because he is the exact opposite of the Frederick Douglass archetype.

Douglass and Ellison started life in almost the same place. Both were born enslaved. Both were likely fathered by the white men who owned them [3]. Douglass escaped, renamed himself, and spent his life fighting slavery. By contrast, April Ellison bought his freedom, took his master’s name, William Ellison, and became a master himself [3][16].

So what kind of man buys his own freedom and then buys 63 human beings [2]?

William Ellison never left us a confession. He never wrote a word about how it felt to own people. Instead, what he left us is what he did, and that says plenty.

How Ellison Saw Himself

Start with how he saw himself. Ellison never called himself black. He called himself “a freed yellow man” [3]. His friends were brown. So was his family. His children married into Charleston’s brown elite, a small circle of mixed-race tradesmen who held all the slaves owned by free people of color in that city [3]. The people Ellison owned were all black. In his mind, that was a line, and he stood on the right side of it.

He bought his wife and daughter out of slavery so his sons would be born free [3]. Clearly, he knew exactly what freedom was worth, because he had paid for it. And then he never offered it to anyone else. Instead, he hired a slave catcher. He also sold off enslaved girls to raise money for more men and more land [3]. Local legend said his slaves were the worst fed and worst clothed in the district. However, the historians who studied him found he was no better and no worse than any white master [3].

He was ordinary.

Respectability in a Slave Society

Everything he had depended on white approval. Ellison moved to Stateburg, South Carolina, the same year a slave revolt plot was uncovered nearby. A few years later, Denmark Vesey, a free man of color, was discovered planning a rebellion in Charleston [3]. As a result, free Black men were watched closely. One wrong word, one bad bill, one moment that looked like “insolence,” and it could all be gone [3].

So Ellison played the game perfectly. In 1820 he dropped his slave name, April, and took his old master’s name, William [3][16]. The local Episcopal church gave his family a pew on the main floor, behind the white gentry, while every other person of color sat upstairs in the gallery [3][16]. He bought a former governor’s mansion and named it Wisdom Hall [3][16]. In his world, the surest proof of respectability was owning slaves and managing them well [3]. So he owned more and more of them.

Frederick Douglass looked at the enslaved and saw his brothers. Ellison’s freedom, however, depended on never seeing them that way.

Going All In: The Ellison Family and the Confederacy

Then came 1860, and the walls started closing in.

That summer, Charleston authorities began enforcing old laws against free people of color. Anyone who couldn’t prove they were free had to wear a slave badge or risk being sold. Soon, families sat up at night waiting for a knock on the door. The historians who uncovered this compared it to Kristallnacht [3].

Not surprisingly, the Ellison family’s own letters from that year are fixated on proving they were free [2].

What saved the brown elite? Their slaves. When white lawmakers moved to shut down free Black businesses, the elite’s white allies pointed to how much taxable wealth these families held, and a big piece of it was human beings [3]. In other words, their slaveholding literally protected their freedom.

Could the Ellisons have left? They thought about it. But how do you quietly sell 80 people and 900 acres without announcing you’re broke or disloyal [3]? They were trapped by what they owned. So they stayed. And when the war came, they didn’t hedge. They went all in.

William Ellison didn’t live to see much of it. He died in December 1861, eight months after Fort Sumter, with his world still standing [3][16]. However, his family carried on without him. They turned the plantation from cotton to food crops for the Confederate war effort and met every obligation the new government put on them [3]. By every measure, they were model Confederates.

And one of them put on the uniform.

John Wilson Buckner: A Black Confederate Soldier at Battery Wagner

Free men of color weren’t allowed to serve [3]. But on March 27, 1863, John Wilson Buckner, William Ellison’s grandson, enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Artillery [19][17].

On July 12, 1863, he was severely wounded at Battery Wagner, the sand fort guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor [19]. Six days later, Union troops stormed that same fort, led by the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts. Think about that. Black men in blue charged the fort where a Black man in gray had already bled.

The Fall: The Ellisons After the Civil War

Then it all collapsed.

The Confederacy lost. Slavery ended. The Ellison fortune fell to about a tenth of what it had been, though a credit agency still rated them rich by postwar Southern standards [3]. Afterward, they opened a general store that served white customers. They also joined the local Democratic Club, the party of white Southern resistance to Reconstruction. And toward the freedmen who now worked their land for wages, they showed no more kindness than the old man had shown his slaves [3].

But the thing they had sacrificed everything to protect, their special status as “free people of color,” was gone. After all, emancipation made every Black Southerner free. Overnight, the Ellisons were just Black Southerners, in a South about to make life very hard for Black Southerners [3]. Within a few years the family came apart. Quarrels, deaths, children scattered north, west, and into Canada [3].

John Wilson Buckner stayed. When he died in 1895, he was buried in the Ellison family cemetery in Stateburg and remembered (by secondary sources) as a “faithful soldier” [17][19].

Final Thought

Faithful to what, exactly? To the Confederacy, yes. But perhaps more to the bargain his grandfather struck in 1820: stay loyal to the men in power, and they’ll let you keep your freedom. By 1895, that bargain had nothing left to protect.

This is why I write: to look at the sacrifices we make in the name of survival, chiseling away at ourselves until, sometimes, there’s nothing left. To look at the masks we wear while our very being rots behind them.

Most of us are doing just that: trying to survive. It takes a very strong character not to become that person.

One thing is certain: none of us leave life the same way we came in. The work is to understand that, and to be able to sit alone in a dark room with our thoughts. That’s the first step to overcoming ourselves, and to making sure we don’t become the monsters we’re trying to fight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were there Black Confederate soldiers?

A small number, yes, but not thousands. A handful of free men of color served in Confederate units, mostly in Louisiana [4]. However, most Black men with Confederate armies were enslaved laborers and servants, not enlisted soldiers [6].

What was the Louisiana Native Guard?

A Louisiana militia regiment of free men of color formed in May 1861. The state accepted it, but the Confederacy never armed it or sent it into combat [4][14].

When did the Confederacy allow Black soldiers?

Only on March 13, 1865, weeks before the war ended. Even then, just two companies were raised [11].

Did Black people own slaves in America?

Yes, but rarely. The 1830 census lists 3,776 Black slaveholders holding 12,907 people, a tiny share of more than two million enslaved Americans. Many owned family members they couldn’t legally free; others, however, owned people for profit [12].

Who was William Ellison?

A formerly enslaved cotton gin maker from Stateburg, South Carolina, who bought his freedom and owned 63 people by 1860. He was also the wealthiest free person of color in the state [2][3].

References

Sources 1–13

1. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984). Background source for the whole Ellison section.
2. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, eds., No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press). Publisher page
3. C. Vann Woodward, “The Free ‘Brown’ Slaveholders,” New York Review of Books, February 14, 1985 (review of refs. 1 and 2). Link
4. Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., “Free Men of Color in Grey,” Civil War History 32, no. 3 (1986): 247–255.
5. Richard Rollins, ed., Black Southerners in Gray (1994). Further reading.
6. Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
7. John Stauffer, “Yes, There Were Black Confederates. Here’s Why,” The Root, January 20, 2015.
8. Report of Lt. Col. John G. Parkhurst, 9th Michigan Infantry, Official Records, Series I, Vol. XVI, Part 1, p. 805.
9. Report of Brig. Gen. David Stuart, Official Records, Vol. XVII, Part 1, p. 636.
10. Howell Cobb to James A. Seddon, January 8, 1865, quoted in Andy Hall, Dead Confederates blog. Link The original letter is in the Official Records, Series IV, Vol. 3; confirm the page.
11. Confederate Congress, “An act to increase the military force of the Confederate States,” March 13, 1865.
12. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Did Black People Own Slaves?” The Root, March 4, 2013. Link
13. Louis Jacobson, “Viral post gets it wrong on extent of slavery in 1860,” PolitiFact, August 24, 2017. Link

Sources 14–26

14. “1st Louisiana Native Guard, CSA (1861–1862),” BlackPast. Link
15. “Every Free Able-Bodied Male Citizen, Part IV,” Emerging Civil War, February 23, 2021. Link
16. “Ellison, William,” South Carolina Encyclopedia. Link
17. Norman Dasinger Jr., “The Historic Connections of the Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg, South Carolina,” Blue & Gray Education Society, May 31, 2021. Link
18. “African-American slave owners,” Wikipedia. Link Trace the 242-planter figure to its original source before publishing.
19. John Wilson Buckner, compiled Confederate service record, 1st South Carolina Artillery, and Ellison family papers, University of South Carolina.
20. “Black Virginians and the Louisiana Native Guards,” University of Virginia. Link
21. Petition of Capt. F. M. McNairy, Tennessee Rangers, Tennessee State Library and Archives, via the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, UNC Greensboro. Link
22. “Blacks in the Union Army of Tennessee (1861–1866),” Tennessee State University Library. Link
23. Confederate Congress, “An Act to increase the efficiency of the Army by the employment of free negroes and slaves in certain capacities,” February 17, 1864, Official Records, Series IV, Vol. 3, via the Portal to Texas History. Link
24. “Army Slaves,” GlobalSecurity.org (a compilation of period sources; confirm against originals). Link
25. Acts of the State of Tennessee, 1861, “An Act for the Relief of Volunteers” (June 1861).
26. Virginia State Convention, ordinance “to provide for the enrollment and employment of free Negroes in the public service,” July 1861.
27. Alabama Legislature, act “to authorize the enrollment of the Creoles of Mobile” into the militia.