This is not an era in American history which I have studied deeply, so I'm not intending to address many of the presented facts. I think mine and others strong negative response has been caused, not by the implication of some slaves or Black slave owners having supported/fought for the Confederacy, but by the sentimentality that has been injected into those implications, the suggestion, intended or not, that a good many slaves were content with their lot and wished to continue it, because they had such kind and loving owners, or because slavery was familiar and comfortable, or they 'loved' their homeland.

" There are petitions from free persons of color who owned slaves, controlled large tracts of land, and attempted to conceal their African heritage; there are petitions from slaves who, in economic terms, were better off than their white neighbors; there are even petitions from free blacks who wished to return to slavery. In short, these documents portray, in vivid and personal terms, the contrasts, ambivalences, contradictions, ironies, and ambiguities that comprise southern history."
" - Michael Morris

Here we see a few of the more pragmatic reasons for Black persons, slaves or free, to support what was the status quo. They are primarily economic in nature; even the free man wishing to return to slavery may have had economic (or psychological) reasons for doing so.

Certainly fear of change is also a part of human nature, and rightly, no intelligent person thinks that having a war in one's back yard will improve the lot of the most vulnerable. If I were a Black man with a family in the 1860s, owned by someone who was generally humane, I might reasonably conclude that my family's current interests would be best protected by my fighting to keep an invading, plantation-burning, looting army away from them. 'Love' of my white owners would not enter into it, regardless of my throwing in my cause with theirs.

These pragmatic responses resulting in some Black men fighting for the South should not, IMO, be interpreted as some kind of sentimental, romanticized, nostalgic, patriarchal affection for slavery and one's 'kind' owners (and that is the undertone several posters have insinuated, consciously or not). Instead they should be recognized as the considered and intelligent decisions they most likely were, given the facts available to and the circumstances of the individuals.

Undoubtedly, some slaves had affectionate personal relationships with members of their owners' families - it's what people do, and especially when they are in daily personal contact with each other for a lifetime. But relationships where one human has the power of life and death over another are intrinsically unhealthy, and we have plenty of stories, fictional and historic, to show why that is and how terrible the results can be for the powerless.

It should be kept firmly in mind, as well, that the majority of Black enslaved men did not fight for the Confederacy, whether for their own reasons or those enforced by their owners.

There are to this day among some groups of white people horrible traces of nostalgia for the days of slavery, or at least for the pre-Civil Rights era. I refuse to support this by not speaking up when I see the mischaracterization of Civil War Black slaves as complicit for reasons of unthinking servile affection in their own continued enslavement.