May Day Books Blog: Alabama Unionist 'Hillbillies'

“Silent Cavalry – How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History” by Howell Raines, 2023 - (Part 1 of 2)

This book is one of a large number of 'revisionist' histories that overturn the “Lost Cause” mythology that was prevalent in Alabama and the U.S. until the '60s and '70s. Evidence of the mostly white Unionist First Alabama Cavalry was hidden by local Alabama state historians and William A. Dunning, the leading Lost Cause historian in the 1920s. He taught and wrote at that bastion of 'Yankee' egg-headedness - Columbia University in New York City. Dunning's American Historical Society's version blocked W.E.B. Du Bois' accurate take on civil war history for many years. Columbia finally apologized for their 'white supremacist historiography' (their words) in 2019. They might have been talking, in part, about Dunning.

The Jim Crow Alabama State Department of Archives & History expunged Unionist Civil War, along with Reconstructionist 'scalawag' and populist Alabama history too. Even in 2018 Raines couldn't find anything useful there. Ken Burns and Shelby Foote never mentioned the 1^st Alabama Cavalry U.S.A. in their conservative, 'nostalgic' 1990 documentary series on the Civil War. Foote, a "semi-closeted Lost Causer," as Raines calls him, had time to call former slave dealer, future leader of the KKK and butcher Nathan Bedford Forrest a 'genius' equal to Lincoln.

Raines is here to set the record straight as he eviscerates the self-pity of the “Alabama inferiority complex.” He names the names of the various twisted characters, thugs and intellectual frauds in Alabama who protect the state from outside influences. As he puts it: “...intellectual dishonesty of a particularly flagrant sort is a thematic feature across the decades of public life in Alabama...” Much of the book is his deep search through documents, books and interviews trying to piece the story together - in the process combating Dunning, Wallacite and Trumpist neo-Confederates. He zig-zags between the home front and the war, which is at times irritating. Raines spends time on the many characters involved, along with the illicit cotton trade between northern and southern military units. The book is littered with colorful insults from both sides. The Confederates denigrated the Alabama mountain folk as disloyal low caste anti-war 'hillbillies.' You see, 'white trash' is not just a classist northern insult.

Raines instead seeks his own anti-racist, anti-slavery roots, sometimes to excess. Some of his extended 'hillbilly' family lived in northern Alabama. One ancestor worked with the First Alabama U.S.A. and walked all the way back from South Carolina after a Johnston's army surrendered in Raleigh. One more distant relative died in Andersonville while others were killed in battle fighting for the Union. Raines tells stories of his youth, his father, mother, grandfathers and grandmothers in the northern hill country and steel town of Birmingham. His family and area were influenced by “Jeffersonian Democracy” and the Church of God, which operated integrated churches and revivals in Birmingham and northern Alabama even during Jim Crow. They had been in north Alabama during the Civil War too, which shows how religious ideology influences communities, not just economics. The non-segregationist Primitive Baptists played the same role for “The Free State of Jones” in southeast Mississippi.

In the 1890s this northern Alabama area between Florence on the Tennessee and Birmingham supported Populist Party politicians who appealed to all skin colors and were for 'sharing the wealth' and ending convict leasing. Their candidate was defeated statewide by a famous example of vote fraud – stuffed ballot boxes in mostly black southern counties where some African-Americans could still vote. In 1902 all black voting was basically made illegal in Alabama. Raines as a child experienced the area's rural poverty. The TVA finally got electric power to Winston County in 1937. But it continued with mule-driven plows and the lacks of electric light, telephone service, sewage systems and paved roads even into the 1960s.

First AL Cav.USA led by Genl. Spencer

The 1^st Alabama Cavalry U.S.A

79 of 100 delegates to the Alabama secession vote were slave-owners, as a popular vote for secession would have lost. The vote 'for' was just 61 to 39. After these delegates voted to secede in 1861, many men in northern Alabama were 'lying out' to avoid conscription, or heading north to find Union soldiers. Some found the beginnings of the 1st Alabama Cavalry like Raines' ancestors.

Across north Alabama an organizer named Chris Sheats roused Unionist and anti-war feeling, with big meetings held at Jim Looney's tavern in Winston County. The first rally drew 2,500 people, one of the largest in the South. 2,066-2,678 men were recruited into the 1st Alabama and other units from these mountainous and wooded counties unsuited to slave plantation agriculture. His family's Winston County wanted to secede from Alabama when Alabama left the Union, so some called it 'The Free State of Winston.' The unit recruited from 18 Appalachian counties, a thing Raines says was hidden by local Lost Cause historians. The cavalry gathered at Huntsville and Corinth after these cities were taken by the Union in April and May 1862. There are still graveyards in several counties where the dead are listed, not as 'C.S.A.' but as 'U.S.A.' This movement spread so at one point Unionists in northern Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee suggested a 'Nickajack' Republic, named after a lake in the Tennessee River valley just west of Chattanooga. The First Alabama fought alongside units from Missouri, Kansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, not just from farther North.

In 1862 the local secessionist authorities in Montgomery, basing themselves on Richmond's Partisan Ranger and Conscription laws, instituted a reign of terror against north Alabamians to either impress draft resistors, arrest refusers or kill them. A first local sweep of the Home Guard was repulsed by armed Unionists. The second, larger military sweep drove locals north into the arms of the Union Army or draft dodgers farther into the hills and caves. Known Unionists were pointed out by a prominent local informer and assassinated, arrested or forced into the C.S.A. Horses, cattle, pigs and chickens were seized from known Unionists and their families left destitute and starving.

Murders even happened long after the war as part of political feuds engendered by the UnCivil War when neighbor killed or informed on neighbor. This campaign of murder and intimidation of Unionist draft dodgers, deserters and resistors occurred throughout the South, as documented by the Southern Claims Commission, an arm of Reconstruction. Mountain people later responded to the Confederate violence in kind. Raines suggests that Northern units under General Grenville Dodge developed the tactic of attacking civilian infrastructure useful to the Confederacy – factories, bridges, rail, secessionist plantations and crops. He thinks this strategy was later adopted by Sherman in Georgia and secessionist South Carolina to make the Confederacy 'howl.'

End of Part 1 of the review.

P.S. - If you think Civil War history is irrelevant to today's political situation, 'bless your heart.' States Rights Constitutional nonsense is still one of the key motivators of anti-labor reaction and racism in the U.S. It was also the legal claim made by the Confederacy. “States' Rights” are embedded in parts of the archaic U.S. Constitution, the Senate, the electoral system and the court system. It has created a ridiculous patchwork of states, counties, cities and towns, laws and powers benefiting reactionary and depopulated areas.

P.P.S. - A book recommended is 'Hammer & Hoe” about Communist organizing among black and white workers in the steel industry and farms around Birmingham during the 1930s – a newer subject Raines doesn't bring up in his discussion of censorship in Alabama.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these words: “The South vs. South” (Parts 1&2); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg); "Struggle & Progress" (Jacobin); "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," “Monument,” "Drivin' Dixie Down," “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or the words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."