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10 Facts About Enslaved Africans in the Civil War They Don’t Teach in School

Posted byBy Curtis Bunn | Published on: CommentsComments (0)

Unidentified-black-soldie-002Enslaved Africans Gave Their Lives

Nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. The reason dysentery and so many other diseases were able to spread so rapidly through both armies was primarily because of a lack of sanitation practices and contaminated water, according to civilwaracademy.com. Sanitation and hygiene were not a big issue when it came to health care during this time. This was not because doctors and nurses were negligent. They just did not know any better.

 

blacksoldierscivil-warVaried Contributions

Enslaved Africans served in multiple facets of the war: carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons and teamsters. They are almost never even acknowledged, much less seen or heard in the library films and recordings, according to Smithsonianmag.com. Ironically, however, the most surprising film of African-American “veterans,” a few minutes of silent footage made at a Confederate reunion in 1930, shows a dozen elderly Black men wearing fragments of gray uniforms, flourishing miniature battle flags and wearing lapel buttons representing Robert E. Lee.

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