“He has always voted with the Democrats.”
I’ve discussed in previous posts how, when one digs a little into the stories of old African American men who attended Confederate reunions, there’s often a subtext that tells as much about the how the men were perceived at the time of the reunion as it does about their role during the war. What does this item, from the Columbia, South Carolina State newspaper from April 26, 1910, tell readers about Mr. Harper’s wartime status? What distinctions does the paper draw (or imply) between Mr. Harper and the “old soldiers?” What does it say, that this is a news item in 1910? More important, what does it suggest about how he was viewed by white Confederate veterans in 1910?
An Update on the “Last Confederate Reunion”
A couple of months ago I did a post on a 1944 event in Montgomery, Alabama that was billed as the “Last Confederate Reunion.” In late 2009, the blog Confederate Digest had posted the image above, under the triumphant headline “Black Confederate, Dr. R. A. Gwynne, among the last Confederate Veterans of Alabama.” As I posted in November, it’s a dubious claim. A long, contemporary account of the reunion in the Alabama Historical Quarterly (Vol. 06, No. 01, Spring Issue 1944) mostly ignores Gwynne’s presence relative to the seven white attendees, but also mentions that he was 90 years old at the time. If that were true, he could not have been more than 11 at the end of the war — an child even by 19th century standards. Confederate Digest apparently overlooked this detail, in its intent to establish what one commenter referred to as “the indisputable fact that thousands of blacks, both slave and free, willingly served in the Confederate armed forces, defending their homeland against a brutal, invading northern army.”
I couldn’t find much more about R. A. Gwynne at the time, but last week I reposted my November piece at The Atlantic, and in response got a lot of very interesting and helpful comments. One regular commenter there, Alabama_Girl, noted that Guinn was a common name in north-central Alabama, and asked if I’d tried alternate spellings for the name. I hadn’t, but having now done so, I think we may know considerably more about Gwynne’s personal history. It also casts further doubt on Gwynne serving in any military capacity, given that he may in fact have been even younger at the time than previously suggested. He likely had not seen his tenth birthday by the time the war ended.
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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