May Day Books Blog: The Ride to the Sea

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

Confederate and neo-Confederate sources repeatedly claimed the U.S.A. First Alabama Cavalry was undistinguished. Raines shows otherwise. He tries to liken their role to the 20^th Maine on Little Round Top in the battle of Gettysburg but they're different situations. The Alabama Federal unit was quickly created by Union General Buell, and some soldiers were loaned to the budding spy system of General Dodge. They helped as spies in the siege of Vicksburg, the seizure of Chattanooga and the siege of Atlanta, as well as providing cavalry screens for the armies. Their local knowledge and accents helped immensely, as well as their courage. Dodge had spies inside southern cities and roaming the roads looking for Confed units and northern Alabama men were key. 1,000s of black freedmen went north and were used and recruited by the Union too – 13 were even on the roster of the 1^st Alabama.

Nearly every Union general had good things to say about the regiment and for a few who didn't, they were said out of temporary ignorance or CYA. The regiment was eventually split into 3 parts. They became outriders for garrisons in major cities combating sabotage; patrolling all along the Tennessee River valley in places like Florence against units of Secesh cavalry under Morgan, Wheeler and Forrest; and with Sherman's march through Atlanta to Savannah, then to Virginia. Constant brushfire guerrilla battles between Union and Confed units went on for most of the war in northern Alabama too, so you might say that area never really seceded. Like eastern Tennessee and the rest of mountainous Appalachia, Confederate control was nominal to non-existent. This extended to the swamps of western Florida and southeast Georgia and the farms of eastern Texas, which became no-go areas for Confederate parties trying to round-up recruits and hogs to butcher.

The loyal Alabamians participated in the key battles of Stones River, Brice's Crossroads, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta and on Sherman's march. Upon leaving Chattanooga Sherman made a group of 1^st Alabama his personal bodyguard for the headquarters group! Above Resaca near Dalton, Georgia they were running point. They had a chance to help destroy the Confederate army when they and others penetrated Snake Creek Gap on the Confederate western flank, but were erroneously ordered to stop by McPherson. According to Raines, at the battle of Allatoona Pass above Atlanta they, along with a Kansas cavalry unit, rescued a Union garrison force besieged by Hood. This battle is where the phrase 'hold the fort' comes from, though there is disputation about this.

While Raines mentions the burning of Atlanta in his title, he has no evidence cavalry soldiers were burning rail roundhouses and the like in the city. That's just 'click-bait.' However one of his themes is how aggressive these southern Unionists were against the slave forces. They could have burned Atlanta and would have enjoyed it!

Marchin' & Ridin' to the Sea

For their skills, the First Alabama were chosen by Sherman to ride point in the right, southern column of Sherman's 'march to the sea' – Blair's XXVII Corps. They swept away Confederates, secured bridges, towns and ferries, did recon, appropriated or destroyed military hardware and enjoyed decimating some plantation properties. They were part of a rowdy group that occupied the former Georgia state capitol in Milledgeville. Prim and proper Blair tried to tell them to back off in a letter to Sherman, but Sherman did nothing. After all, gleeful foraging was part of the drill. Confederate raiders back home were abusing the people of north Alabama, their kin, at the same time and they knew this. Southern-fried historian Shelby Foote noted that not one instance of rape was reported on the whole march, so there's that.

Sherman on the road to Savannah

Their behavior reminds me of a character from the modern South, Madalyn Murray O'Hair. The way to raise the most prominent atheist in the U.S. is to stick them in some Bible-thumping state like Texas. So in this war. An anti-slavery Georgia Unionist, George Snelling, born near Milledgeville and Sherman's liaison with the First Alabama, directed Sherman to the plantation of a general in the Confederate Army, Howell Cobb. Cobb was a pompous politician in the U.S. House, a main speaker for secession in Montgomery and an advocate of Andersonville. His plantation was completely looted by Union soldiers and slaves. If you find no justice in this, you're not paying attention. Maybe Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Greg Abbott will someday suffer this fate if they secede.

The First Alabama's role in Kilpatrick's U.S.A. cavalry was to block Joe Wheeler's rebel cavalry along the route to Savannah. They succeeded in keeping him at bay in constant skirmishing. They forded the major Oconee River at Ball's Ferry in southeastern Georgia and attacked Confed forces, then were forced back across the river. But the Union took the crossing that day, constructing bridges and the army moved on. After the easy reduction of Fort McAllister south of the city, they led the victory parade down Savannah's main street due to their service, contradicting the Lost Cause myth that they had no role in the fighting. Heading north, they routed Wheeler at Barnwell, South Carolina, sending his cavalrymen into a desperate scatter. At Monroe's Crossing, South Carolina their small command repulsed a night attack by Johnston massive forces, turning it into a victory with the help of a well-placed cannon. Reaching Raleigh and the surrender of Johnston's army, Sherman ordered them home because of the constant fighting still going on in north Alabama.

1900 Reunion of 1st AL Cavalry USA

The Lost Causation

Raines goes into the Lost Cause bastion of Tuscaloosa, AL, home to the University of Alabama, its 'crimson tide' and its 'Bama Rush,' a college now full of rich frat and sorority brats from Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth. The local post-war Tuscaloosa paper was run by a sociopathic aristocrat, Ryland Randolph, who did more to promote Klan Klaverns than Forrest. Later the University was a hotbed of Lost Cause historiography, which Raines defines as not asking obvious questions and ignoring information that opposed their thesis - and sometimes outright lying or destruction of documents. He analyzes various Lost Cause journalists, politicians and academics across the South - men like Richmond's Edward Pollard and General Jubal Early and places like Vanderbilt in Nashville and Polk's University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

Pollard, a vicious aristocratic imbecile, wrote the book “The Lost Cause” in 1866 and set the tone for 100 years of historical fiction. For Raines it consists of 3 theses: 1. The “culturally superior, racially homogeneous white” South lost because of northern industrial might and the crude 'mongrels' of the North. 2. The need to win the continuing war by maintaining white dominance through “recalcitrance, legal trickery and political deals.” 3. The South didn't lose so much as was misled by the incompetent Jeff Davis. Attach the Robert E. Lee cult and you've got yourself a real shit-story.

Early, an incompetent Confederate general on the first day of Gettysburg, a hesitator of the first order in his raid on D.C. and the loser of the 1865 Shenandoah Valley campaign, continued pushing the myth. His blame was on Longstreet, the most competent of Lee's generals. According to Raines Early was actually the central, drunken figure in solidifying this racist, nationalist Southern story. Raines has found evidence that Dunning worked with the disorganized Alabama archives to make it “a Rebel Shrine.” Raines makes hilarious fun of a broad array of rich and powerful locals here, so its an enjoyable romp – but still perhaps a too-deep dip into Alabama politics for most. Raines describes the refutation of William Dunning's Lost Cause mythology by recent historians Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner, and the rediscovery of W.E.B. Du Bois.

In 1909 at the Waldorf Astoria the 'American' Historical Association met and both Dunning and Du Bois were there. Du Bois wrote a paper about the benefits of Reconstruction; the Dunning side presented their racist, Jim Crow angle about the terror it inflicted on rich white people, a period of “Negro misrule.” Du Bois spoke of the vast increases in education, advances in public transportation, fairer taxation and economic development, not to mention the spread of democracy in ethnically diverse southern legislatures. Dunning chose to ignore Du Bois, as did the idiot NY press, while printing the vilifications of “an unreconstructed crank” from Alabama named Chisholm. Birmingham's steel money and the Walker Percys paid for the Lost Cause for another 60 years and this included a long family friendship with Shelby Foote. As a 30-year old Foote wanted to blow up the first Union memorial he saw, in Arizona. And there we have it – later delivered right to your TV screen by Ken Burns. While still disdaining blacks, Foote finally rejected segregation around 1963. But these are reasons why Foote didn't tell Burns about the First Alabama, a fact Raines uncovers after years of research.

The Afterlives of the First

Coming back to a vicious, racist state government full of Confederate sympathizers for many years, the men of the First Alabama USA were re-tormented after the fall of Reconstruction in the 1870s. They were not just read out of history or forgotten. Raines spends no time on this part of the story however. He's more interested in his family story, the bastardization of history by shabby academics, the violent clowns of Alabama, a detailed semi-history of Birmingham, the reactionary literary aristocracy of the Nashville Agrarians and the Fellowship of Southern Writers and lastly the Lost Causeite Dixie Brahmins who looked down on Negroes and white 'red necks' alike. All in all a book that takes many colorful and chatty detours in its story of a legendary Union regiment from the South.

The basic impact of this book is the manifest number of characters in the South - through history - who promote idiotic, violent, untruthful and corrupt ideas on a regular basis, up to and including present Trump supporters. The South will rise again all right - under proletarian, progressive and socialist groups who remember the First Alabama's resistance to racism and planter capital.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these words: “Silent Cavalry – Part 1,” “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."