What I like about the structure of Levine's article is his decision not to take on Neo-Confederate claims of Black Confederates directly. And the reason is because it is unproductive to do so. Consider the standard approach to this debate. Individual stories are cited as evidence of a certain conclusion, but there is almost always no critical discussion of the origin of the source or whether the account really implies only one conclusion. [That is, they rely on anecdotes, often of questionable provenance.] For an example, check out the discussion on this topic over at Civil War Talk Forum. (This is a great example of why I usually steer clear of on-line discussion groups.) You will find the same lack of critical analysis in books that purport to demonstrate broad commitment to the Confederacy such as Black Southerners in Gray by H.C. Blackerby, The South Was Right! by James and Walther Kennedy and the edited collection Black Confederates. All of these books have been released by partisan presses which suggests that they did not go through any serious editing or review that is regularly carried out in more mainstream and university publishers. These debates lack any attempt at analysis, but this is exactly what is missing from the debate. Just consider the spectrum of supposed numbers of Black Confederates that were to have served: they range from 1,000 to 100,000. More depressing, however, is the sloppiness that lay just behind this debate. Finally, even if we can establish a certain number of blacks who "supported" the Confederacy one way or another we still need to know what this means. Of course it does not necessarily follow that they were considered as officially serving in a Confederate army since we know that the final authorization did not take place until March 1865. (my emphasis)