By the authority vested in me by Google and their subsidiary Blogger I hereby proclaim April to be United States Colored Troops month in the Commonwealth of Virginia!
Fox’s Regimental Losses in the American Civil War states that 5,723 African Americans from Virginia joined USCT Regiments.
By focusing solely on the state's Confederates, Governor McDonnell, you ignore Virginians like Powhatan Beaty – a slave born in Richmond who would return to the place of his birth as a Union soldier, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading his unit in a charge at New Market Heights.
For more responses to the guv’s goof, see here, here, and here.
Oh, and don’t celebrate too hard :-)
I was hoping you would mention a Virginia African-American or two and their sacrifices... I suspect if we actually looked at the total population of Virginia combined, separated those who were "gung-ho" for the Confederacy from all others... the "all others" might make up the majority.
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