|
Amos Rucker---A Soldier Remembered
By: Calvin E. Johnson, Jr., Author of
When America stood for God, Family and Country.
1064 West Mill Drive
Kennesaw, Georgia 30152
Phone: 770 428 0978
Remember the American soldiers who defend our great nation.
A article recently appeared in a Charlotte, North Carolina newspaper about
Wary Clyburn, a Black Confederate, who will be remembered on August 26, 2007
during a reunion of his descendants in Monroe, North Carolina. August 10th
will also mark the 102nd anniversary of the death of a Black Confederate,
Amos Rucker, of Atlanta, Ga.
Black Confederates, why haven't we heard more about them?
"I don't want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of the Blacks, both
above and below the Mason-Dixon Line, but it was definitely a tendency that
began around 1910"---Ed Bearrs, National Park Service Historian
Is American history still taught in our schools?
Today, the news focus is on Michael Vick's troubles and Barry Bond's home
runs. In 1905, newspapers led with the opening of Woolworth's stores, the
Atlanta, Ga. Terminal Railroad Station dedication with the US Army Band
playing "Dixie."..... And on August 10th, Atlanta grieved the loss of a
beloved soldier.
The movie "Glory" enlightened people of the role played by African-Americans
serving in the Union Army during the War Between the States, 1861-1865.
And books like, "Forgotten Confederates---An Anthology about Black
Southerners" by Charles Kelly Barrow, J.H. Segars and R.B. Roseburg, further
enlightened us to the role played by African-Americans who served the
Confederacy.
Frederick Douglas, abolitionist and former slave, reported, "There are at
present moment many colored men in the Confederate Army doing their duty not
only as cooks, but also as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders
and bullets in their pockets."
Who was Amos Rucker?
Amos Rucker, born in Elbert County, Georgia, was a servant of Alexander
"Sandy" Rucker and both joined the 33rd Georgia Regiment of the Confederate
Army. Amos got his first taste of battle when a fellow soldier was killed
by a Union bullet. Rucker quickly took the dead soldier's rifle and fired
back at the enemy.
After the War Between the States, Amos Rucker came back to Atlanta where he
met and married Martha and the couple was blessed with many children and
grandchildren.
In Atlanta, Amos joined the W.H.T. Walker Camp of the United Confederate
Veterans. It was made up of Southern Veterans whose purpose was to remember
those who served in the war and help those in need. The meetings were held
at 102 Forsyth Street in Atlanta where Amos was responsible for calling the
roll of members.
Amos and Martha felt that the members of Walker Camp were like their own
family. It is written that Amos would say, "My folks gave me everything I
want." These UCV men helped Amos and his wife buy a house on the west side
of Atlanta and John M. Slaton also helped prepare a will for Rucker.
Slaton, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Gordon Camp, would, as
governor of Georgia, commute the death sentence of Leo Frank.
Amos Rucker's last words to members of his UCV Camp were, "Give my love to
the boys."
His funeral services were conducted by preacher and former Confederate
General Clement A. Evans. Rucker was buried with his Confederate gray
uniform and wrapped in his beloved Confederate Battle Flag. Today, some
members of the Martin Luther King family are buried near Amos and Martha at
Southview Cemetery.
The Reverend T.P. Cleveland led the prayer and when Captain William T.
Harrison read the poem, "When Rucker Called The Roll" there was not a dry
eye among the crowd of many Black and White mourners.
The grave of Amos and Martha Rucker was without a marker for many years
until 2006, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans remarked it.
Did you know that the first military monument, near our nation's Capitol, to
honor an African-American soldier is the Confederate Monument at Arlington
National Cemetery?
"When you eliminate the Black Confederate soldier, you've eliminated the
history of the South."---The late Dr. Leonard Haynes, Professor, Southern
University
Lest We Forget!!!
======================================================
================================================
Letter to the Editor in Midland, TX by
Col. Kelley
I called Principal
Winget's office yesterday and sent the following Email to him of which he
acknowledged receipt to help him prepare for this meeting:
...I am aware of the hearing that has been instigated regarding
certain of the symbols, names and traditions associated with your school. I
wish to offer my aid in preparing you to discuss this matter based on
historical fact to counter Ms. Templeton's emotions.
As a Civil War historian and Texas Confederate reenactor I am well
aware that Ms. Templeton's "offense" is the result of lack of knowledge of
history and the resultant failure to understand the topic about which she is
so highly motivated. Like many people on both sides of the issue she is
operating from a position of emotion, belief and assumption rather than a
solid grounding in historical fact.
Ms. Templeton specifically suffers from a lack of education or
understanding of the nature of the Confederate States of America and the
Confederate Army, especially the Confederate Army of Texas. She demands
that her misconceptions become the rule by which others must conduct their
lives.
The Union Army was strictly segregated and remained so until 1950.
During the Civil War all non-whites were compelled to serve in "United
States Colored Troop" regiments - this included Blacks, mulattos, Hispanics,
Indians and anyone who was simply not "white enough." Often recruiting of
Black Southerners for these regiments involved hunting them down, capturing
them and even torturing them to get them to "volunteer" as documented in the
Federal Official Records.
The Union Army had used Irish immigrants as "cannon fodder" to absorb
the highest casualties in battle so Northern sentiments would not turn
against the war being waged for economic domination of the agrarian South
which provided 70% of the Federal budget. When the supply of "Micks" ran
low they turned to the USCT to die in droves:
"...As usual with the enemy, they posted their negro regiments on
their left and in front, where they were slain by hundreds, and upon
retiring left their dead and wounded negroes uncared for, carrying off only
the whites, which accounts for the fact that upon the first part of the
battle-field nearly all the dead found were negroes." - Federal Official
Records, Vol. XXXV, Chapter XLVII, pg. 341 - Report of Lieutenant M. B.
Grant, C. S. Engineers, Savannah, April 27, 1864 - Battle of Ocean
Pond (Olustee)
U.S. Grant issued "General Orders No. 11" in December, 1862, which
expelled "all Jews, as a class" from his area of operations. It so
disaffected his men that Jewish Union officers resigned en masse.
The Confederate Army included in its unsegregated combat ranks: 13,000
Indians, including Cherokee Chief and Confederate Brigadier General Stand
Watie; 6200 Hispanics, 19% of them officers, nine of them Colonels and Texas
Col. Santos Benavides who was so successful his area of Texas was known as
"The Texas Benavides Confederacy;" 3500 Jews, including among the first and
last Confederate officers to fall in battle and the Confederate Secretary of
State, a Jewish lawyer from New Orleans; Filipinos from Lousiana whose
ancestors were brought there by Spanish colonists before there was any
African slave trade; tens of thousands of immigrants from all over the
world; two Amerasian sons of Chang and Eng, the original "Siamese Twins,"
who served with Virginia cavalry and were both wounded in battle; and an as
yet undetermined but significant number of Black Confederate combat
soldiers, some of them regularly enlisted, who saw combat from the first
battles of the war to the last as documented in the Federal Official
Records, European newspapers, Northern and Southern newspapers and the
letters and diaries of Union and Confederate soldiers.
"Almost fifty years before the (Civil) War, the South was already
enlisting and utilizing Black manpower, including Black commissioned
officers, for the defense of their respective states. Therefore, the fact
that Free and slave Black Southerners served and fought for their states in
the Confederacy cannot be considered an unusual instance, rather
continuation of an established practice with verifiable historical
precedence." - "The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin
Powell" by Lt. Col [Ret.] Michael Lee Lanning
In March, 1861, President Buchanan and President-Elelct Lincoln
supported and lobbied for the passage of the "Corwin Amendment," a proposed
13th Amendment to the Constitution.
"Article Thirteen: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution
which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere,
within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of
persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State." - Submitted to
the Senate by Corwin and supported by President-Elect Lincoln as the
proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution as voted on by that body on
February 28th, 1861. The Senate voted 39 to 5 to approve this section
passed by the House 133-65 on March 2, 1861. Two State legislatures ratified
it: Ohio on May 13, 1861; and followed by Maryland on January 10, 1862.
Illinois bungled its ratification by holding a convention.
In December, 1862, only two months before Lincoln issued the
"Emancipation Proclamation" (which freed not a single slave) in his State of
the Union Address Lincoln offered the Confederacy a plan of gradual
compensated emancipation with slavery not ending completely until 1900.
In comparison, your school's namesake had made his position clear some
years before:
"There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not
acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.
It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil
to the white than to the colored race." - Col. Robert E. Lee, United States
Army, December 27, 1856
Offered the opportunity to come back into the Union successful in
preserving slavery before a single shot was fired the Confederacy maintained
its independence. Offered another chance to have 37 years to wean itself
from slavery the Confederacy again maintained its independence.
The South did not secede nor did it fight to maintain slavery. The
real issues were taxation, Federal revenues and national economics:
"The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of
the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole...we
have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty persent,
and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to
compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This
operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor,
of millions annually." - Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860
"They (the South) know that it is their import trade that draws from
the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the
shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection
and encouragement of Northern interest.... These are the reasons why these
people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They (the North) are
enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they
have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to
enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are as mad as hornets because
the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it." ~ New Orleans
Daily Crescent, January 21, 1861
"...the Union must obtain full victory as essential to preserve the
economy of the country. Concessions to the South would lead to a new nation
founded on slavery expansion which would destroy the U.S. Economy." -
Pamphlet No 14. "The Preservation of the Union A National Economic
Necessity," The Loyal Publication Society, printed in New York, May 1863, by
Wm. C. Bryant & Co. Printers.
"What were the causes of the Southern independence movement in 1860?
. . Northern commercial and manufacturing interests had forced through
Congress taxes that oppressed Southern planters and made Northern
manufacturers rich . . . the South paid about three-quarters of all federal
taxes, most of which were spent in the North." - Charles Adams, "For Good
and Evil. The impact of taxes on the course of civilization," 1993, Madison
Books, Lanham, USA, pp. 325-327
Does Ms. Templeton think THESE Confederate soldiers would be
"offended" by the Confederate links of your school?
Andrew and Silas Chandler (Free Black), both regularly enlisted in the
44th Mississippi Infantry Silas saved Andrew's life at the Battle of
Chickamauga
Unknown Black Confederate soldier from original deteriorated tintype
Mulatto Confederate Soldier Daniel Jenkins and his wife. Jenkins was
with the Confederate 9th Kentucky Infantry and was killed at Shiloh on
4/6/62.
South Carolina Confederate Indian soldier
Private Marlboro, a free black Confederate
Volunteer
Mixed-race Confederate
More specifically, would these Texas Confederate cavalry troopers be
"offended" by your school's remaining Southern traditions or by Ms.
Templeton's failure to know about them?
Ms. Templeton needs to significantly further her education before she
discusses "being offended."
Perhaps Irish-born Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne
predicted it best in his January, 1864, letter which proposed the mass
emancipation and enlistment of Black Southerners into the Confederate Army:
"Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation
before it is too late...It means the history of this heroic struggle will be
written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern
schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the
war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard
our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for
derision...The conqueror's policy is to divide the conquered into factions
and stir up animosity among them..."
Through painstaking research and thorough, uncommented documentation
we celebrate the courage, sacrifice, and heritage of ALL Southerners who had
to make agonizing personal choices under impossible circumstances.
"The first law of the historian is that he shall never dare utter an
untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true.
Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of
malice." - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
We simply ask that all act upon the facts of history. We invite your
questions.
Your Obedient Servant,
Colonel Michael Kelley, CSA
Commanding, 37th Texas Cavalry (Terrell's)
http://www.37thtexas.org
"We are a band of brothers!"
". . . . political correctness has replaced witch trials and communist
hearings as the preferred way to torment our fellow countrymen." "Ghost
Riders," Sharyn McCrumb, 2004, Signet, pp. 9
"I came here as a friend...let us stand together. Although we differ
in color, we should not differ in sentiment." - Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford
Forrest, CSA, Memphis Daily Avalanche, July 6, 1875
|
I AM THE CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAG.
