As more Confederate monuments were being removed in the South this month, an old claim seeking to downplay the extent of slave ownership began to recirculate online. As the Confederate army reorganized in the weeks following the campaign, the thin ranks of many regiments were magnified by the absence of its enslaved. No credible documentation records Grant as having said such a thing, and he was only ever in a position to emancipate a single slave, which he did back in 1859. Just as the firing ceased late on July 2, Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander was pleasantly surprised to see his servant Charley on my spare horse Meg & with very affectionate greetings & a good haversack of rations. Alexander recalled, Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.. This is particularly useful in revealing political divisions or disputes within a state, although it takes some practice with the online query system to generate maps properly. The prevalence of slaveholding was so pervasive among Southerners who heeded the call to arms in 1861 that it became something of a joke; Glatthaar tells of an Irish-born private in a Georgia regiment who quipped to his messmates that "he bought a negro, he says, to have something to fight for.". The ocean is "flat" and "contained" by land features that jut up from a flat (not spherical) earth. These men chose not to escape, and while there can be little doubt that these stories convey evidence of strong bonds between owner and slave, the tendency of Lost Causers to frame them around the narrow motif of unwavering loyalty fails to capture other factors that may have influenced their behavior. . Find out the truth behind five common myths or misunderstandings about slavery in the United States. As a crude analogy, how many PFCs and corporals in Iraq and Afghanistan today own their own homes? Free African-Americans and fugitive slaves in Adams County (including Gettysburg) and surrounding counties fled with the news of Lees advance. She's called it a great law., Katie Hobbs voted for allowing a baby who survives an abortion that the hospital would refuse medical care and allow the baby to die on a cold metal tray.. As the Civil War progressed, desertion amongst Confederate soldiers infected the Confederate Army like a poisonous cancer. We wont tell people what to believe, but we will challenge them on what they think they know. I encourage readers to consider if our concept of 'Old South Charm' relies on the racist mythology of the Lost Cause, will that not hinder Maury Countys 'New South Progress' in the 21st century?". (This is usually followed immediately by an assertion that the speaker's own Confederate ancestors never owned slaves, either.) A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. A Note to our Readers It was not about slavery, these advocates say, but about the right to secede from the Union.