More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations fueled the rise of the black Confederate myth largely in the 1970s. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. Regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. After the war, Confederate veterans and others remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.