Why Was Robert Webster, a Slave, Wearing What Looks Like a Confederate Uniform?
By Marc Wortman
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
October 2014
... Images of African-American men in Confederate uniform are among the greatest rarities of 19th-century photography: Only eight were known to exist, according to Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the 2013 exhibition “Photography and the American Civil War” at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait of Robert Webster adds a ninth to that roster. Such images, says John Coski, vice president and director of historical research at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, are “tantalizing in what they do and do not tell us.” One thing they don’t tell us, he says, is that the men in the photographs fought in the Confederate Army, contrary to the belief of some researchers eager to show that African-Americans did so. Of the slaves photographed in Confederate uniform, the names and fortunes of only four are known. All four went to the front as servants to their owners, who were Confederate officers ...
... Webster’s importance to the Yanceys extended far beyond his wartime service, even though there is no evidence that he fought for the Confederacy and ample evidence that he risked his life to undermine it. One thing the portrait tells us is that Webster learned to manage conflicting loyalties while helping to liberate himself. From start to finish, his life reflected the complications that accrued from slavery and the precarious, contingent and dangerous position of slaves during the Civil War ...
Robert Webster was the only African-American to claim publicly that the senator was his father. Around 1879, he told a reporter for the Chicago Times that his mother “talked freely to him of his origin, and told him many anecdotes of the private life of Mr. Webster to whom she was passionately devoted.” The reporter saw a “striking” physical resemblance to Daniel Webster, though he had been dead since 1852. “His broad forehead and widely separated eyes are noticed as circumstantial proof as soon as you hear the story of his birth,” he wrote.
... Webster proved to be one of the North’s best friends in Atlanta, according to sworn testimony by other Unionists in town. “Mr. Robert Webster was one of the 35 or 36 loyal men of the city during the war,” said a white loyalist who was among those who knew Webster best in those years. “He was heart and soul a Union man,” another proclaimed ...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-was-robert-webster-slave-wearing-what-looks-confederate-uniform-180952781/?no-ist
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