Over at RebelStore.com, where a beer koozie adorned with a Confederate flag is described as "ain't no cheap made 'un," they have for sale a photo that supposedly depicts the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, an all-black unit of soldiers who fought for the secessionists in the Civil War. It's a jarring and depressing sight; at best an ugly reminder that mental chains can be worse than physical ones, at worst evidence of what pro-Confederate "historians" have claimed for years: slavery wasn't that bad, and some blacks preferred it to freedom. Whatever the picture means, it seems to make sense that it's for purchase next to bumper stickers that read "I'd rather be a-shootin' Yankees" and "Hey y'all! Remember racing is a Southern sport!"

Like I said: depressing. But now, a new research study titled Retouching History, by Charlottesville, Virgina scholars Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite Jr, appears to have proven with a high degree of certainty that the picture is a fraud.

Turns out that the real photo depicts Union soldiers in Philadelphia in 1864.

… in its July 1973 issue, the widely read Civil War Times Illustrated published a copy of the original photograph which had been submitted to the magazine by James Spina, an antiques dealer who had purchased it years before. The photo published in Civil War Times Illustrated was a slightly cropped version of the original … but was substantially the same photo as the original. The photograph … was re-published in 1982 in the well-respected and accessible The Embattled Confederacy …
…
Sometime after its publication in either the Civil War Times Illustrated or The Embattled Confederacy, the photograph was scanned and digitally manipulated … to produce the photograph … with the caption “1st Louisiana Native Guard, 1861” that is being sold by www.rebelstore.com.

The source of the original manipulation is not known, although their intentions remain abundantly clear.