Sometimes history repeats itself.
Readers of this blog will remember the visit paid by George Purvis and the “Southern Heritage Advancement Preservation and Education” group and its website. Mr. Purvis claims he’s very interested in finding out evidence about black Confederates, and he’s currently engaged in making a list called “Negros in Gray.” Mr. Purvis assures us that he “has spent countless hours researching what we have listed on this site, and we will continue to do so for the sake of educating our visitors and guests. We ask that you the viewer join us in applying as much factual detail to our site as possible.”
Well, Andy Hall appears to have taken Mr. Purvis up on his invitation. The results are not good for Mr. Purvis. Andy picked out a fellow named Peter Phelps, who was of interest to him because he hailed from Andy’s own county. The result was a rather nice piece of research which nicely debunks Mr. Purvis’s claim that Peter Phelps was a black Confederate.
It will be interesting to see what Mr. Purvis says in response, or whether his fellow travelers, like “BorderRuffian,” scamper away again like cockroaches exposed to light. For now, however, another Black Confederate claim is debunked. Nice work, Andy.
Thanks. Peter Phelps was interesting because he was a local, but he turned out to be even more local than I imagined. His last residence is not far from my own, and some of my own family are interred at that same cemetery.
What’s intriguing, and mostly unknown to me, is the social/cultural dynamic of his interracial marriage in the Reconstruction and later Jim Crow periods. I suspect that has something to do with the fact that they lived in separate, but adjacent, residences at the time of the 1870 U.S. Census, and perhaps also that they later made their home miles outside the city.
“It will be interesting to see what Mr. Purvis says in response, or whether his fellow travelers, like ‘BorderRuffian,’ scamper away again like cockroaches exposed to light.”
Does it really add to the discussion to refer to others as “liars,” “holocaust deniers,” or “cockroaches?”
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Shape/Mr.Purvis
I do not know Mr. Purvis and am not familiar with his research. So I don’t know why I am called on to defend it.
As to discovering a supposed black/mixed race Confederate was actually white…I have a very large file of those. Want me to list some?
I’m simply responsible for the terms I use, and, yes, BR, I think the description I used fits. You’ve been challenged before, and each time you run away.
Of course you scamper away from your fellow traveler. And please don’t tell me you aren’t familiar with his work. George got a nice run on this blog, which you read frequently.
You can post your information about the racial identification of Confederate soldiers on your own blog. Thanks. While you are there you can tell everyone your definition of a veteran. You scampered away from that one as well.
The letter from the TSL staff was clear that their (unofficial) listing included both men who may have been African American themselves, as well as white men who married an African American or mixed-raced spouse. The problem here is that the author of the SHAPE site couldn’t be bothered even to attempt to distinguish between them. Such lack of interest in the accuracy of the information presented — when the original source said that both categories of men were included — does not speak well for the reliability of the claims being made there.
Well, at least Mr. Purvis has cast a wide net – “no matter what capacity…”. That leaves room to include folks who “served” in some fashion, whether “voluntarily” or not. It beats the continued effort by much of the “Black Confederates” crowd to continue pushing the obvious fraud that hundreds, if not thousands, of blacks served in the ranks of the Revel armies, unseen by their color-blind officers or by their blue-clad opponents. Faint praise, indeed.
A certain sloppiness of definitions has always been essential to the advocates of BCS. But it does seem that, with increasing pushback against the notion of African Americans in the Confederate ranks, recognized at the time as soldiers, there’s an increasing tendency to cast the net wider and wider, to include any person of color connected in any way to the Confederacy, whether they went with the army or not.
But again, it’s all about lists, and chalking up another name as a “black Southern loyalist” or whatever, without any effort to explore these mens’ lives beyond that.
I’m still awaiting a website dedicated to those selfless southern loyalists, for whom agency was all, the equine confederates…
I sometimes think Richard Adams’ penned the sharpest criticism of the BCM…