A Different Sort of “Black Confederate”
Via Michael A. Schaffner, from John Mead Gould’s History of the First-Tenth-Twenty-Ninth Maine, on marching through Opelousas during the Red River Campaign:
We noticed many able bodied white men in the town, and learned that they escaped army service by being ‘black’ in the eye of the law; — the law’s eye is sharper than ours, that is sure.
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Interesting story. Kind of reminds me of Henry Clay Work’s masterful parody of the plantation owner who when the Lincoln gunboats approach “gets so dreadful tan that he tries to convince them Yankees that he’s contraband.” (From memory may be slightly paraphrased)
Here is the case of Suzie Guillory Phipps:
http://www.frenchcreoles.com/CreoleCulture/creoleexperience/Creoles%20We%20Are%202010.html
This nonsense continued into the late 20th Century in Louisiana. To allow Mrs Phipps to change her birth certificate to “White”, the state legislature had to repeal the law that 1/32nd Black made you Black. She had lost her appeal to the Louisiana State Supreme Court.