Holt Collier was a black man, a slave, a bear-hunter extraordinaire, a cowboy and a Confederate soldier.

His parents were the house slaves of Howell Hinds of Jefferson County, Mississippi, and as a child, he was assigned to be the manservant and constant companion of Hinds’ son, Thomas. Having developed close ties of friendship and loyalty with the Hinds over the years, he accompanied them to the front when war began in 1861. There, the teenaged bondsman joined the Confederate Army, seeing action at Shiloh and eventually serving in the Ninth Texas Cavalry.

His is a very interesting story, all the more interesting because it was, by law, an oddity. State-level slave codes as well as wartime confederate edict prohibited the arming of slaves, for any purpose at any time. Southern slaveholders’ consuming obsession, after all, was not that slaves would fight alongside them in battle, but that they would fight against them in rebellion.

There were, as always, exceptions. The comparatively privileged Holt Collier was one. Out of four million slaves, the overwhelming majority of them non-privileged field hands, there were few others. From Yale’s David Blight to Harvard’s John Stauffer to USM’s John Hollandsworth, the estimate is that genuine “black confederates” made up less than 1 percent of those mustered into confederate armies over the course of the war.

Nevertheless, from those shiny, rare nuggets of fact some have spun a fantasy — legions of black slaves fighting valiantly for the confederacy, shoulder to shoulder with their masters. Neo-confederates have claimed that up one hundred thousand served, which would make up one-tenth of all confederate forces, a percentage matching that for the Union Army by 1865.

However, by far, most of those tens of thousands of “black confederates” of legend were coerced slaves — laborers, teamsters, cooks. They may have traveled with the army on campaign, but they weren’t confederate soldiers; they were slaves to the Confederacy.

Being so perverse, this neo-confederate “interpretation” is clearly not just an honest error. The elevation of this insignificant molehill into a highly significant mountain has been done deliberately. The aim is to soften the moonlight and sweeten the magnolias of the Old South myth by implying that the masses of slaves were content with their enslavement and devoted to their masters. They were not. It is a classic example of the use of a partial-truth to obscure the whole truth. The intent is to deceive rather than to inform.

Still, in all the controversies about blacks in gray, one fact is too often overlooked. In the context of the history of human bondage, there is nothing unusual about arming slaves during the crisis of wartime. Throughout human history, it has been common for masters to deploy their slaves not only as laborers, but as frontline fighters.

Those soldiers sometimes remained slaves while being granted higher, even elite, status. Usually, though, the incentive for slaves to fight their masters’ wars was a promise of personal freedom. For thousands of years, when faced with a choice between clinging to slavery while being annihilated by invading hordes, or freeing and arming slaves to prevent that annihilation, masters had always opted for mass emancipation. In a time of dire danger, to spurn this pool of enthusiastic manpower would have been suicidal.

But that is exactly what the Confederacy did. From a global, historical perspective, it is astonishing that the manpower-strapped Confederacy, one of the largest slave societies in world history, with millions of slaves within its territory, did not mobilize such armies. The crucial question is not why a few Holt Colliers may have “volunteered” for confederate service; it is why, with its very existence at stake, the Confederacy didn’t recruit hundreds of thousands of them into slave regiments.

Next time, we’ll see.
Jim Wiggins is a retired Copiah-Lincoln Community College history instructor.