Yes, it is indeed odd how JoeB131 in one breath defends the mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung and praises Red China and then turns around and rails against George McClellan, Jefferson Davis, Joseph McCarthy, Robert Taft, etc. It is even more bizarre that he just can't grasp how thoroughly he discredits himself when he spews his anti-Semitic hatred and repeats Nazi lies about the Jews. It's just weird.
Anyway, moving on from JoeB131's ongoing nuttiness, I think it would be worthwhile to look at Frederick Douglass's entire statement about black Confederate combat troops. Some online neo-Radical apologists have claimed that Douglass was only referring to slaves who were serving in support roles, but Douglass made it clear that he distinguished between slaves serving in support roles and slaves who were serving as combat soldiers. Let's read his entire statement:
It is now pretty well established, that there are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may to destroy the Federal Government and build up that of the traitors and rebels. There were such soldiers at Manassas, and they are probably there still.
There is a Negro in the army as well as in the fence, and our Government is likely to find it out before the war comes to an end. That the Negroes are numerous in the rebel army, and do for that army its heaviest work, is beyond question. They have been the chief laborers upon those temporary defences in which the rebels have been able to mow down our men. Negroes helped to build the batteries at Charleston. They relieve their gentlemanly and military masters from the stiffening drudgery of the camp, and devote them to the nimble and dexterous use of arms. Rising above vulgar prejudice, the slaveholding rebel accepts the aid of the black man as readily as that of any other.
If a bad cause can do this, why should a good cause be less wisely conducted? We insist upon it, that one black regiment in such a war as this is, without being any more brave and orderly, would be worth to the Government more than two of any other; and that, while the Government continues to refuse the aid of colored men, thus alienating them from the national cause, and giving the rebels the advantage of them, it will not deserve better fortunes than it has thus far experienced.--Men in earnest don't fight with one hand, when they might fight with two, and a man drowning would not refuse to be saved even by a colored hand. ("Fighting Rebels with Only One Hand," Douglass' Monthly, September 1861, in Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty, Volume 3, pp. 153-154)
No rational person can read this and then argue that Douglass was merely referring to slaves who were serving as cooks and laborers.
We should keep in mind that for years during WWII, the only evidence we had of the Holocaust was anecdotal evidence, but it was rightly considered solid, credible evidence by all rational, objective people who looked at it. Our evidence of black Confederate combat troops is not limited to anecdotal evidence but also includes official Union army battle reports that did not surface until after the war. And, as I've discussed, anecdotal evidence is often rightly viewed as solid and credible, especially when it corroborated by official documents.
Of course, the biggest thorn in the side of the neo-Radical historians who deny that even a few thousand blacks voluntarily fought for the Confederacy is Lewis Steiner's detailed firsthand report of seeing some 3,000 black combat troops in Stonewall Jackson's army while it marched through Frederick, Maryland, in September 1862. Steiner was a highly educated man (in fact, he was an academic) and was staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union, which is not surprising since he was a Republican. His two-page account of Jackson's black combat troops is contained in his sober 43-page report on his activities as the chief inspector of the U.S. Sanitary Commission for the U.S. Army of the Potomac.
The one and only argument that neo-Radical historians have made against Steiner's account is that it must be wrong because Steiner supposedly vastly overestimated the size of Lee's army (which included Jackson's force). But many scholars have pushed back against the traditional figure of 43,000 for the size of Lee's army, arguing that considerable evidence indicates it was much larger. Moreover, even if we assume that Steiner's estimate was off by a whopping 50%, that would still mean he saw about 1,500 black Confederate combat troops in Jackson's army.
Even this figure is wholly unacceptable to neo-Radical scholars, because they claim there were absolutely no more than perhaps two or three dozen such soldiers in the entire Confederate army and that these were informal, unofficial recruits who agreed to serve in their masters' units in exchange for freedom.
This whole controversy started way back when, when you had some Lost Cause apologists claiming that tens of thousands, or even over 100,000, blacks volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. When more careful, scholarly people in the Southern heritage camp looked at the evidence, they drastically reduced that figure down to around 10,000, give or take. Scott Williams, one of the more credible pro-Confederate authors, puts the figure at 13,000. I put the figure at no more than 7,000. Even 13,000 would be a small drop in the bucket compared to the size of the Confederate army, and especially compared to the 180,000 blacks who served as soldiers in the Union army.
