"The Wikipedia article on the Battle of Olustee tends to perpetuate racial division and strife by gratuitously stating that Confederate soldiers ""murdered"" black Union prisoners.  Successive generations of Americans have been burdened with revisionist history about the Civil War. This reference to ""murder"" turns the article into a socio-political discussion which is part of a new trend of revisionist history that attempts to assign the moral high ground to certain political philosophies and to groups of people which it is now politically correct to recognize as ""oppressed"". The reference to ""murder"" (which is an emotional hot-button and a value judgment) should either be left out of the article or the events should be placed in a proper historical perspective.  ""Murder"" is a term of art, not an objective fact. Most, if not all, of the black troops involved in the Battle of Olustee were runaway slaves which the Union had encouraged to leave their masters and enlist in the Union army. These same troops had marauded East Florida, destroying Southern homes, farms and businesses, crops and livestock, and had burned Jacksonville, under Lincoln's ""scorched earth"" policy of making war on the Southern civilian populace. Under the Slave Laws, sanctioned by the U.S. Government, that had been in effect since Florida was acquired from Spain and became a U.S. Territory in 1821, it was a capital offense for a slave to take up arms against a white person. Blacks (originally sold into slavery by their African brethren), aligned with various native American tribes who routinely ""murdered"", enslaved, and usurped the lands of other native Americans, had been randomly massacring whites (men, women and children) in Florida and south Georgia since Florida became a Territory.  The massacres peaked during the slave revolt in 1835 and the Second Seminole War. Forty years of massacres of whites and destruction of their property, and more recent years of wholesale destruction of civilian property by the Union, which were participated in by blacks, were undoubtedly fresh in the minds of the Confederate soldiers at Olustee.  Under the new revisionist interpretation of history, if blacks killed whites, the Blacks were courageous freedom fighters.  But if whites killed blacks, the blacks were ""murdered"" by morally depraved whites.  If we are going to open a discussion about socially-sanctioned ""murder"", let’s not call it “history”.  Once we rid ourselves of the “history” mantle, we can engage in a morally-weighted philosophical discussion about the tens of millions of non-combatants (including prisoners of war) ""murdered"" by our now great friends, the Germans and Japanese, in the twentieth century.    "