There were black Confederates. The only question was were there a handful or a lot.
Some points.
There were many thousands of free blacks living in the Confederacy under very varied economic circumstances. Some were even slave-holders, though research shows mostly they owned members of their own family who they had bought from another owner. It wasn't easy top get to the courthouse, so many of these cases may have just been no one got around to formally freeing your wife after buying her.
Confederate regiments were raised by county with much autonomy. Whatever the central rules were, each regiment pretty much governed itself with its own elected leaders. While one colonel or general would take a free black in the ranks as an affront, another would shrug. This is where you also get into the definition of what a black is. Whose going to be the one to accuse a mixed race blacksmith who came with a regiment that he looks black?
Armies of the Civil War marched with huge mile long trains of wagons filled with cannons, ammunition, food, and whatever other camp supplies were needed. The Confederate army teamsters were almost entirely black. The teamsters were armed and there is no doubt there were occasions where they used their arms to fend off raiding cavalry or bummers. Does that count as soldiers of the Confederacy?
Some documented cases. There's a Yankee letter which talks about a Confederate sniper who was a pain during the Seven Days campaign. Eventually the federals realized he was in a tree. They got a group of soldiers who shot volley after volley at the tree until they killed him. When they recovered the body they were surprised to see he was black.
During the battle of Gettysburg there's a letter from a federal troop who was captured in the union rout of day one. He was walked to the back with other prisoners by a black Confederate. He said he had a conversation that went something like "what are you fighting for the south for," to which he answered something like "shut up Yankee."
In his book "To Appomattox, Nine April Days, 1865," author Burke Davis describes the only documented case of black Confederate troops fighting as an organized group. In the last months of the war, the Confederacy started training black groups of soldiers. When Lee evacuated Richmond those black soldiers joined the retreat.On Tuesday, April 4, 1865, Davis talks of a Virginia private RM Dowell who wrote that he saw "a singular sight to me." He wrote that a federal cavalry regiment showed up on a hill 100 yards from stopped Confederate wagons. Black Confederates formed a line of battle and when the federal cavalry charged, the blacks in gray "fired rapidly and drove them off." The cavalry reformed and made a more determined charge which ended in the capture of the group.
So it's a complicated story. Things are almost always complicated in history when you look closely at them.
There is also a well documented case of a woman fighting in the ranks of Lee's Army and I'm sure there were many gays and transgenders too.
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