RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) – When the ashes of Mattie Clyburn Rice, the daughter of a slave, are buried Saturday in her father’s grave in the North Carolina piedmont, a color guard of Confederate re-enactors will be in attendance. So will members of the United Daughters of Confederacy.
That the daughter of a man enslaved in the 1800s should live to see the 21st century seems almost extraordinary enough – but equally remarkable is the record of her father, who went to war to cook for his master, saved the man’s life and ended up drawing a pension for his wartime service.
The lives of Rice and her father, who was in his early 80s when she was born, illustrate the tangled the threads of history in connection to slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath.
Members of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans who knew Rice say she regarded her father as a Confederate soldier, but historians and his pension papers say that’s not exactly the case; he was a slave who went to war to serve his master.
“There’s really no debate about the question of whether African-Americans fought for the Confederacy. We know they didn’t,” said author and historian Kevin Levin of Boston, who blogs about the rise of the belief in black Confederates.