by James G. Hollandsworth Jr.
... Black southerners contributed to the Confederate war effort in four ways. First, as slaves, they provided the labor that fueled the Southern cotton economy and maintained the production of foodstuffs and other commodities. Second, slaves were rented to or drafted by the Confederate government to work on specific projects related to the South’s military infrastructure, such as bridges and railroads. Third, black southerners were part of the work force in the Confederacy’s war-related foundries, munitions factories, and mines. In addition, they transported food and war material to the front by wagon, and provided services to wounded and sick soldiers in Confederate hospitals. Last, a large number of black southerners went to war with the Confederate army as noncombatants, serving as personal servants, company cooks, and grooms.
Veterans of the Union army who were disabled as a result of their service during the Civil War were eligible for a federal pension as early 1868. However, disabled Confederate veterans had to wait until their Confederate allies regained political control of the Southern states after Reconstruction to apply for pensions sponsored by the individual states. Although Confederate pensions were limited initially to disabled veterans, it was not long before eligibility was expanded to include veterans who were poor and in need. North Carolina and Florida led the way in 1885, and by 1898 all of the states that had seceded from the Union offered pensions to indigent Confederate veterans. Missouri and Kentucky followed suit in 1911 and 1912, respectively. These states, with the exception of Missouri, also extended coverage to indigent widows of veterans, as long as they did not remarry.
African Americans who had served with the Confederate army were not included – except in Mississippi, which had included African Americans in the state’s pension program from its beginning in 1888. It was not until 1921 that another state extended the eligibility for pensions to African Americans who had served as servants with the Confederate army. Unfortunately, black southerners who applied for Confederate pensions in the 1920s were, for the most part, very old men. Consequently, the number of black pensioners was small compared to the large number of Confederate veterans in the states that had allowed for pensions decades earlier. For example, Mississippi, which was the only state to include African Americans from its program’s beginning in 1888, had 1,739 black pensioners; North Carolina, which first offered pensions in 1927 had 121; South Carolina, which first offered pensions in 1923, had 328; Tennessee, which first offered pensions in 1921, had 195; and Virginia, which first offered pensions in 1924, had 424 black pensioners ...
http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/articles/289/black-confederate-pensioners-after-the-civil-warConfederate pension records are commonly cited by neo-confederate revisionists as evidence of black military service on behalf of the secessionist states during the civil war. But the pension records do not support that view. What they mostly illuminate, instead, is the political climate of the 1920s, in which poor elderly African-Americans found it politically advantageous to claim their service to their enlisted masters as service to the confederacy
In fact, the confederacy for ideological reasons rejected any possibility of black soldiers, until defeat was immediately at hand: beginning in March 1865 (but not before), a very small number of blacks (perhaps 40 or 50) were actually trained and armed as confederate soldiers. In Mississippi, where the black pensions began earliest, about 55% of the confederate era population was black, a distribution far different from that in the pension records. About 40% of the confederacy's population was black; the confederate army enlisted perhaps 0.5-2.0 million soldiers, so if there were any black enthusiasm for the confederacy and any corresponding confederate interest in enlisting blacks, one might have expected 0.2-0.8 million black confederate soldiers -- instead we have this tiny handful of black pension records 
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