Greg, obviously you and I have not read the same books.

Nowhere did I slander any US Colored Troops. I said their COMMANDING OFFICERS had doubts about them. That is extremely well-documented, and if you are as well-read as you would have us all believe, then you would know that, and you would also know that in the beginning of their enlistment, they were given busy work, and not combat roles. Even though they did prove their worth, they still were not paid the same as white soldiers, and they were still very often the first to be killed. Cannon fodder, I believe they call it. That was certainly no fault of theirs. Who was first over the wall at Ft. Wagner?

There are many, many personal accounts of white US soldiers complaining that they did not want to fight alongside Colored Troops. Time-Life published an excellent series a few years ago that is based almost entirely on personal accounts, and I highly recommend it as an enlightening resource. Letters and journals of the period are guaranteed to make you question what you think you know about history.

The US Army was no stranger to forced labor, either. It is well-documented that they kept "contrabands" around to build earthworks and the like. Their other choice was to be sent back to Massa. There are also documented instances of US soldiers having black "body servants" with them. (Photographs are available in the Time-Life series I mentioned.)

The Internet is not an infallible research tool, but it is at the very least, a place to start. One of the challenges with official Confederate records is that many have been lost, as there was not such a repository for those records as there was for US records. Often we are left with nothing but what someone said about this, or that.

So, who were those black Confederates that Frederick Douglass said he saw? Perhaps it was, as you say, a joke.

No free black man was ever forced to go to a Confederate soldiers' reunion, as far as I know. But they went, for whatever reason. Some of them even received pensions from the individual states.

I believe I am all pissed out now.