The leaders of the Unionist revolt in Winston County were Bill Looney and Chris Sheats. Raines gives Sheats an entire column of listings in his index, even though he did not personally serve in the army. A born debater with “fierce anti-secession views,” (pp. 179-80) Sheats was elected to the Alabama secession convention in order to campaign against leaving the Union. He was one of 39 delegates to vote no and one of 24 who refused to sign the ordinance of secession after passage. “After his return to Winston County Sheats tirelessly crisscrossed the backwoods to set up secret cells of Free Staters.” (p. 66)
When the Confederate Congress passed the first Conscription Act in US history on April 16, 1862, recruiters flooded the counties looking for able-bodied, young, white men. Raines writes that an underground railroad emerged to escort Union sympathizers susceptible to the Confederate draft to caves in the Appalachian hills. They hid out, often joining the Union army when it came through. (p. 147)
By October of 1862 there were enough to form the First Alabama Cavalry of the US Army. Its duties were numerous, carried out mostly in northern Alabama and Mississippi and lower Tennessee. In November of 1864 General William T. Sherman chose it to join his other troops on his famous March to the Sea.
Raines maintains a running commentary on professional historians, especially but not exclusively those who perpetuated the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” view of the war. He’s much kinder to those who pursued history as an avocation. Indeed, Chapter 21 is “In Praise of Amateur Historians.” He begins it with a nod to Gloria McWhirter Todd, whose great grandfather enlisted in the First Alabama from Marion County. While working for a Tennessee government agency, she spent 45 years combing the records for information about the regiment. Raines writes that she died (in 2017) before he could meet her, but he did read her books.
I was more fortunate. We corresponded off and on between 2004 and 2013. She sent me what she found in the official records about Andrew D. He enlisted on September 25, 1863 for one year, along with his two older brothers. He was only 17, so lied about his age so he could stay with his brothers. Both brothers got very sick; one died only four months later; the other recovered. Andrew was with the First Alabama during the summer of 1864 when General Sherman conquered Atlanta, but not when he marched to Savannah at the end of the year. His enlistment having ended, Andrew was discharged on September 29, 1864. However Andrew re-enlisted on February 18, 1865, staying with the regiment until it was dissolved on October 20, 1865.
Seeded throughout the book is a scathing critique of the “Lost Cause” view of the war. This view shifted its cause from slavery to states rights, promoting the Confederacy’s major figures, such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, to the status of heroes. It claims that the South lost only due to the overwhelming material might of the North. While this view had many mothers, Raines particularly goes after the Dunning School at Columbia University in New York City, which “dominated academia for the first half of the twentieth century.” (xvi) Its namesake trained a couple generations of scholars to see the Confederacy as the moral winner of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction as a diabolical development.
While the Dunning school had a strong racist component, Raines highlights its suppression of information about white Unionist sentiment in the Southern states. He details how the Alabama Department of Archives and History helped wipe the First Alabama Calvary and its cohorts out of history.
Ironically, the best way to quantify Union sentiment is to look at the vote, especially after the Black vote was suppressed. Unionists voted Republican long after conservative Democrats took back the state government. Winston County reliably voted Republican but the other counties didn’t ignore the party of Lincoln. Indeed, in 1910 Andrew D. Mitchell ran for Congress as a Republican in Alabama’s 6th Congressional District, getting 18 percent of the vote.
There’s much in Raines’ book about the entire state of Alabama. He is fascinated by his home state, even though he left it in 1971 and didn’t go back to live there. He writes early on that he agrees with a 1934 author that Alabama was so distinct that it needed to be studied like a foreign country. (pp. 3, 484) Those of us who worked in the southern civil rights movement would give that distinction to Mississippi (for reasons I wrote about elsewhere) – or to the five Deep South states (plus the Florida panhandle) as a group.
This is a great book for anyone interested in the state of Alabama. That includes me.
Copyright © 2024 Jo Freeman
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