I suppose if I wasn’t also as interested as I am in Civil War history, I’d be wondering what any of this had to do with music history.  Nonetheless, here we are talking about the Civil War, and whether there were black confederates. I think it’s impossible that there were as many as 3,000 black SOLDIERS in the confederate army which marched from Frederick to Antietam in 1862.  I think it is, however, possible that 3,000 black men were with that army, mainly as servants and cooks and porters, and that Steiner very cleverly avoids giving an exact number of how many of the negroes were armed or even how many were wearing confederate uniforms. He says they were wearing “not only…cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, state buttons, etc.” and that “MOST [emphasis mine] of the negroes had arms.”  I believe Steiner is deliberately inflating the number of actual black soldiers, of which there may well have been a few, at Frederick in order to make the confederates look bad.  Indeed, even Frederick Douglass’ assertion that there were black soldiers at Bull Run is dubious, as he certainly had the ulterior motive of wanting the Union to allow black soldiers, and the report of the battle upon which he relied is suspect, as it comes from a report of the battle riddled with other inaccuracies, as the analysis in the link from the email (http://deadconfederates.com/2011/07/30/frederick-douglass-reads-the-paper/) clearly shows.  Ultimately, it shows that if someone were to claim “well, if Frederick Douglass said there were black confederates, there must have been black confederates”, they don’t understand the aim of skepticism.  Frederick Douglass, though educated, esteemed, and a reliable source on many things, also had biases, motives, and faulty source material as much as anyone else of the period did. It would be wrong to claim that his words are unassailable simply because he’s black, and wouldn’t have had the same biased reason to claim there were black confederate soldiers as a white man.   As one last note, it’s worth noting that most of the sources I could find (such as http://www.marinersmuseum.org/blogs/civilwar/?p=2873, which may be a blog, but it’s one run by a museum and it also cites its own sources throughout the post) seem to agree that there were probably around 3,000 blacks who were actually official or semi-official soldiers ever in the Confederate army, which amounts to less than half a percent of either the total confederate forces or the black men of serving age in the south at the time, whichever way you want to look at it.  They also acknowledge that the reasons for serving would have been far more complex than merely supporting the cause, such as the blacks who were tasked with defending Richmond but never got the chance, who were promised their freedom.  Also, a large number of this comparatively small number were probably coerced. So, while it’s probably pretty factually accurate to say blacks fought as soldiers for the confederacy, it’s not like that undermines the claim that the war was fought over slavery. It manifestly was.