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What's interesting about this picture is that both men are seated next to each other while almost all known ACW pictures of black and white southerners show whites seated and blacks standing because they were slaves and/or bodyservants. This difference in stance was to emphasize their servile status. On top of that, Silas is armed with a Bowie knife, a pepperbox revolver tucked in his jacket and a shotgun clutched in his hand. Seemingly armed and ready to take on the union?
Please keep comments civilized and free of bigotry!
(c) Library of Congress (USA)
Update:
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In 1861 at the outbreak of the American Civil War, the 17 year Andrew Chandler from Palo Alto, Mississippi went of to war to fight for the southern states that had just formed the Confederate States of America. His concerned mother advised him to take one of the 36 family slaves with him. That slave was Silas who was seven years his senior. According to the Chandler family story, Silas received his freedom papers before leaving and stayed by Andrew's side because of their close relationship.
No legal documents have surfaced to support that claim. Moreover, the Manumission Law of 1842 made it illegal for a slave to be freed in the state of Mississippi.
Nevertheless, they went off and joined the "Palo Alto Confederates", a local militia unit that was absorbed into the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. It is uncertain if Silas saw much or any combat because the Confederate and states goverments barred coloreds from combat posts. The reason for this is that it would have undermined the validity of the institution of slavery and "the servile nature of the Negro". Still, many leading military men like Jackson, Lee and Cleburne saw the use of black troops as a viable proposition, but politicians and the ruling/slaveholding class thought otherwise and the enlistment of blacks and other minorities wasn't approved until the near end of the war.
What Silas did do for certain was the procurement of supplies for Andrew. He shuttled back and forth from encampments in Georgia and elsewhere to the plantation in Palo Alto in Mississippi on his own. This gave him ample opportunities to escape to Union held territory, but he never did. No account exists that Silas ever attempted to flee to Union-held territory.
Fast forward to 1863, the Battle of Chickamauga where the 44th Miss. Inf. Reg. was part of Patton Anderson’s Brigade, Hindman’s Division. It was during this battle that Andrew, now a Sergeant, was hit in the leg. An army surgeon examined the 19-year old Andrew's leg and sent him to a makeshift hospital where other surgeons determined that the leg would have to be amputated. Joined by Silas who distrusted the army surgeons, persuaded the men to leave Andrew alone by allegedly bribing thim with a gold coin. Somehow he managed to hoist his master into a convenient boxcar. They rode the rails to Atlanta, where Silas sent a request for help to Chandler’s relatives. An uncle came to their assistance, and brought both men home to Palo Alto, Miss., where they had started out two years earlier. A home town doctor prescribed less drastic measures and Andrew's leg was saved.
Andrew was able to do Silas a service as well. During one campaign, Silas “constructed a shelter for himself from a pile of lumber, the story goes. A number of calloused Confederate soldiers attempted to take Silas’s shelter away from him, and when he resisted threatened to take his life. At this point Andrew and his comrade Cal Weaver, came to Silas’s defense and threatened the marauders with the same kind of treatment they had offered Silas. This closed the argument.
Chandler’s Chickamauga wound ended his combat service. But Silas went back to the front lines with Chandler’s younger brother, Benjamin, who enlisted in the Ninth Mississippi Cavalry in January 1864.
Silas accompanied the younger Chandler and the rest of the Ninth as they skirmished with advance elements of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army through Georgia and the Carolinas. Then, during the Confederacy’s final days, Benjamin Chandler and a detachment of his fellow Mississippians joined the military escort that guarded President Jefferson Davis as he and his entourage fled Richmond.
By the time Davis reached Georgia, fears that his large escort would draw the attention of numerous Union patrols crisscrossing the countryside in search of him prompted commanders to act. On May 7, 1865, most of the escort was disbanded. Davis continued to ride south with a much smaller and less conspicuous guard.
Benjamin Chandler and Silas were part of the group ordered to disband. Three days later, Chandler surrendered to federals near Washington, Georgia. Silas was by his side.
Post-war Silas lived within a few miles of his former masters, the Chandler brothers. In 1868, Silas and other freedmen constructed a simple Baptist altar near a cluster of bushes on land adjacent to property owned by Andrew and his family. The freedmen soon replaced it with a wood-frame church.
In 1888, Mississippi established a state pension program for Confederate veterans and their widows. African-Americans who had acted as slave servants to soldiers in gray were also allowed to participate. Over all, 1,739 men of color were on the pension rolls, including Silas.
Benjamin Chandler died in 1909. Silas passed away in September 1919 at age 82. Andrew Chandler survived Silas by only eight months. He died in May 1920.
In 1994, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy conducted a ceremony at the gravesite of Silas in recognition of his Civil War service. A Southern Cross of Honour and Battle Flag were placed next to his monument.
The event prompted mixed reactions from descendants of Silas and Andrew. Silas’s great-granddaughter, Myra Chandler Sampson, denounced the ceremony as “an attempt to rewrite and sugar-coat the shameful truth about parts of our American history.” She added that Silas “was taken into a war for a cause he didn’t believe in. He was dressed up like a Confederate soldier for reasons that may never be known.”
But Andrew Chandler Battaile, great-grandson of Andrew, met Myra’s brother Bobbie Chandler at the ceremony. He saw the experience a bit differently. “It was truly as if we had been reunited with a missing part of our family.”
Bobbie Chandler, for his part, accepts the role his great-grandfather played in the Confederate army. He observed, “History is history. You can’t get by it.”
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It was for show. Silas was what was called a "camp slave." I've listening to an audio book about this very subject. It's a myth. Only a few black orderlies were drafted into the fight a few weeks before Lee's surrender. Most of the revisionism comes in the 70s.