Browse Items (18 total)

Photograph of two headstones for former camp slave, Shadrick Searcy

This is an excellent example of how the Sons of Confederate Veterans have manipulated the history of former camp slaves. Notice that the older marker refers properly to Searcy's…

Civil War artists capitalized on the popularity of the black Confederate myth. In the Grim Harvest of War, Bradley Schmehl features a “black Confederate” cradling a Confederate officer as Stonewall Jackson looks over the battlefield.

The use of Robert E. Lee and his camp slave to sell washing machines in the early twentieth century points to the popularity of the Lost Cause and the memory of the loyal body servant beyond the former Confederacy.

Journal article on the myth of the black Confederate soldier

Article about the history of Confederate camp slaves and the myth of the black Confederate soldier.

co-authored article with Myra Chandler Sampson about Silas Chandler and the myth of the black Confederate soldier.

Three former camp slaves participate in a Confederate veterans’ reunion in an unknown location in the 1930s.

In 1914 the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a monument on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. The design by Moses Ezekiel included the image of the loyal “Mammy” figure as well as a uniformed camp slave marching off with…

The presence of African Americans at reunions reinforced the Lost Cause even as late as the 1940s. Dr. R. A. Gwynne, seated center, attended the final Confederate veterans’ reunion in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1944. He would have been roughly ten…

Former camp slaves attend a veterans’ reunion in Tampa, Florida, in 1927. Steve Perry (“Uncle Steve Eberhart”) is fifth from the left and holds a Confederate flag, while Louis Napoleon Nelson sits on the far right with his bugle. The individual in…