Black Confederates is a term often used to describe both enslaved and free African Americans who filled a number of different positions in support of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Most often this assistance was coerced rather than offered voluntarily. Male slaves were either hired out by their owners or impressed to work in various departments of the Confederate army. Free black men were also routinely impressed or otherwise forced to perform manual labor for the army.
The government’s use of black labor, whether free or slave, followed patterns established during the antebellum period, when county governments routinely engaged the service of black men to help maintain local roads and other public property. While large numbers of black men thus accompanied every Confederate army on the march or in camp, those men would not have been considered soldiers. Only a few black men were ever accepted into Confederate service as soldiers, and none did any significant fighting.
Through most of the war, the Confederate government’s official policies toward black men maintained that those men were laborers, not soldiers; changes to that policy in March 1865 came too late to make any difference to Confederate prospects for victory. Those changes were also accompanied by widespread debate indicating that a significant minority of white Southerners opposed any change to the institution of slavery, even if that change might help bring about a Confederate victory.