Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause.
What did black leaders propose as the purpose of war with the Confederacy? The complete abolition of slavery.
Confederate Army. Blacks did not serve in the Confederate Army as combat troops. Blacks were not merely not recruited; service was actively forbidden by the Confederacy for the majority of its existence. Enslaved blacks were sometimes used for camp labor, however.
The American Civil War was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, a collection of eleven southern states that left the Union in 1860 and 1861. The conflict began primarily as a result of the long-standing disagreement over the institution of slavery.
The South was using enslaved people to aid the war effort. Black men and women were forced to build fortifications, work as blacksmiths, nurses, boatmen, and laundresses, and to work in factories, hospitals, and armories.
What role did blacks play in winning the Civil War and in defining the war's consequences? BLACKS were allowed as SAILORS but not SOLDIERS for a while, for fear of 1. white soldiers' unwillingness to fight alongside blacks and 2. alienation of border slave states that remained in the union by enlisting BLACK SOLDIERS.
One school argues that the aristocracy favored the Confederacy, while the abolitionist Union was championed by British liberals and radical spokesmen for the working class. An opposing school argues that many British working men—perhaps a majority—were more sympathetic to the Confederate cause.
Confederates feared the Emancipation Proclamation would lead to slave uprisings, an occurrence which even northerners did not desire. Although most people at that time had not been born at the time of the Nat Turner Revolt or the revolution in Haiti, insurrections were greatly feared.
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust observed that "leaders of the secession movement across the South cited slavery as the most compelling reason for southern independence". Although most white Southerners did not own slaves, the majority supported the institution of slavery and benefited indirectly from the slave society.