Jo Freeman On Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History by Howell Raines
By Jo Freeman
Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta -- and Then Got Written Out of History
by Howell Raines
New York: Crown, 2023, xxv + 540 pages. Cloth $36.00
Silent Cavalry caught my eye because my great-grandfather joined the Union army from Alabama and was left out of family history. My mother, who was born and raised in Marion County AL, never so much as mentioned his name. Nor did her mother, who spent her life in that county and was always telling me who in it was related to whom. Raines’ says that his great-grandfather traveled with the First Alabama Calvary as a horse tender, but not as a soldier.
This book is about Raines’ effort to put together a jigsaw puzzle about Union sentiment in Alabama, beginning with his family. Raised in Birmingham, Raines’ ancestral roots are in Winston County in NW Alabama, famous for the legend of the Free State of Winston. According to the legend, a mass meeting was held at Looney’s Tavern in Winston County to decide how to respond to Alabama’s vote to secede from the Union. (pp.121-2) Those present passed a resolution that no state can legally get out of the Union, but if it could, then a county could cease to be a part of the state. Winston County didn’t set up its own independent government; it just asked to be left alone because its citizens didn’t want “to shoot at their neighbors ... or the flag of Washington, Jefferson and Jackson.” (pp. 180-81)
I heard about the “Free State of Winston” while growing up, without knowing that it was part of my own family history. The story was not told with approval. By the 1950s the history of Southern resistance to secession had all but disappeared from common knowledge. The statement “.... must be from Winston Co.” was applied to those who didn’t know their place or didn’t follow the rules. I was on the receiving end of that accusation many times.
Not until 1995 did an older cousin tell me about our great-grandfather, Andrew D. Mitchell, who had fought in the First Alabama Calvary, USA along with his two older brothers. Born in Georgia, his mother took her children to Winston County in January of 1861, the same month that Alabama seceded from the Union.
Raines doesn’t explain what made northern Alabama different, but the obvious explanation is economics. Plantations were rare in the hill country and slaves were few. Individual family farms and small towns dotted the landscape. Hardscrabble farmers had little sentiment about slavery and no interest in supporting it. Most Southern states had hill and mountain sections which saw the coming conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” That’s probably why every Confederate state except South Carolina was able to raise a military unit of white men to fight for the Union.
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