True Blue

White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Clayton J. Butler

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780807177532
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents of the Deep South—individuals who passed the highest bar of Unionism by enlisting in the United States Army to fight with the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry.Northerners and southerners alike thought a considerable amount about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters. For both, the significance of these Unionists hinged on the role they would play in the postwar future. To northerners, they represented the tangible nucleus of national loyalty within the rebelling states on which to build Reconstruction policies. To Confederates, they represented traitors to the political ideals of their would-be nation and, as the war went on, to the white race, making them at times a target for vicious reprisal. Unionists' wartime allegiance proved a touchstone during the political chaos and realignment of Reconstruction, a period when many of these veterans played a key role both as elected officials and as a pivotal voting bloc. In the end, white Unionists proved willing to ally with African Americans during the war to save the Union but unwilling to protect or advance Black civil rights afterward, revealing the character of Unionism during the era as a whole.

CHAPTER 1

Origins and Perceptions of Deep South Unionists, 1860–1862

In 1861, unconditional white Unionists in the Deep South comprised a decidedly small segment of society, yet represented a remarkably diverse set of backgrounds, motivations, and expectations of the conflict ahead. Who were they, and why did they take the stand that they did? Subsistence farmers and planters, urban laborers and country lawyers, scions of old southern families and newly arrived European immigrants, each for their own reasons refused to go along with the newly formed Confederacy. They possessed myriad, often uniquely personal motivations for doing so. Absent among them, it must be said, was any special sympathy for enslaved people. In the conflict that erupted in the wake of secession, some Deep South Unionists would fight for an end to slaveholders’ political dominance, others to safeguard their slave property. Some took sides with the Union against the Confederacy because they had no economic stake in slavery; others, as they saw it, did so to protect the stake that they had. Practically none, in taking the stand that they did, sought justice for African Americans, a position they shared with the majority of white Americans—North and South. “It requires no especial love for the negro race,” explained the Nashville Daily Union, “to hate a traitor and labor for his just punishment.” Fundamentally, all believed in the primacy of the Union and hoped for the reinstitution of federal authority, though in 1861 none knew what that reinstated federal authority would look like. By supporting the Union and rejecting the Confederacy without qualification, all of them risked more than they stood to gain.1

Most white residents of Alabama, Louisiana, and west Tennessee favored immediate secession from the time of Lincoln’s election in November 1860. The less sanguine, for a time, maintained a conditional Unionism based on a wait-and-see attitude, and sought cooperation and coordination with other slave states. By the spring of 1861, however, virtually all of these conditional Unionists shifted their allegiance to the new Confederacy as the conditions of their Unionism were broken. As Daniel W. Crofts explains, the meaning of Unionism itself changed for most white southerners. Rightly or wrongly, they believed that to remain in the Union and live under the new Republican administration would threaten their way of life more than it had protected it up to that point. At each stage of the secession winter and into spring, more and more men and women who had resisted at first eventually surrendered to the seemingly irrepressible momentum of events. With attitudes ranging from belligerent enthusiasm to a kind of fatalistic acceptance, the overwhelming majority of the white population of the Deep South welcomed the inauguration of the Confederate state in the spring of 1861. Northerners, and Republicans in particular, overestimated the degree of unqualified loyalty to the Union that survived among the white population at the commencement of the war. Unconditional Unionists were few and far between. Only a very small minority refused to condone the dissolution of the Union under any circumstances, and maintained their allegiance to the United States even as the Confederacy took real form all around them.2

Springs of Unconditional Unionism

Many scholars have tried to divide unconditionally loyal white southerners—who rejected the legitimacy of the Confederacy, spurned neutrality, and hoped for an imminent return to the national fold at the outset of the war—into discrete groups. According to historians Stephen V. Ash and Daniel E. Sutherland, for example, southern Unionists were more likely to have had a formative connection to the North (birth, marriage, education), been prewar Whigs, or come from poor subsistence farming districts antagonistic to both slaveholders and their slaves. Such categorizations do not suffice to provide a convincing picture. Membership in one or two of these groups did not by itself serve as a dependable indicator of an individual’s loyalty. Just as often, those who belonged to those same groups and who had the same backgrounds, economic interests, or political affiliations sided with the Confederacy. In the Deep South, Unionists appear more likely to have been prewar Democrats than Whigs. Certain conditions might have inclined individuals and communities toward their Unionism, but no single variable reliably predicted it. As Carl N. Degler explained in his perceptive discussion of southern dissent, “any analysis of motives always does some violence to the complexity of the springs of human decisions and actions.” Determining the source of uncompromising Unionism in the Deep South most often comes down to a nearly case-by-case basis.3

Northern Alabama stands out as a region of the Deep South unusually rife with Unionism; as such it provides an apt starting point for an examination of the phenomenon. A greater concentration of native white southerners resisted the imposition of Confederate authority there than in any other Deep South state. Historian Margaret Storey has shown that even within northern Alabama Unionism, there existed a considerable degree of economic, political, and cultural diversity, such as between residents of the Tennessee Valley counties and the hill country. While a number of factors contributed to their unusual resistance to the Confederacy, perhaps most important among them—particularly in the upcountry—was a sense of isolation and detachment from the planter class and from Black Belt plantation culture. Alabama historian Walter Lynwood Fleming explains that, “There was a certain social antipathy felt by them toward the lowland and valley people . . . and a blind antagonism to the ‘nigger lord’ as they called the slaveholder, wherever he was found.” Many viewed secession and the establishment of the Confederacy simply as a plot hatched by slaveholders for the exclusive benefit of the slaveholding class and refused to support it. Sectional distrust reached such intensity, Fleming hyperbolized, that “it is safe to state for North Alabama that had the Black Belt declared for the Union, that section would have voted for secession.” For decades, historians rather uncritically accepted the class explanation for Unionism in upcountry regions of Alabama, resulting in what Storey calls a “one-dimensional politics of opposition.” Recent scholarship has proven that explanation incomplete, yet it contains an important grain of truth. The bitterness was real, and palpable. James Bell, for example, a resident of Winston County, Alabama, wrote to his son Henry, then living in a secessionist county of Mississippi, that “all they [the slaveholders] want is to git you pupt up and go to fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o [all] they care.” Subsistence-level farmers from the upcountry White Belt deeply resented Black Belt planters’ efforts to drag them into a conflict in which they felt they had much to lose and little to gain. Northern Alabama in 1861 had more in common demographically and economically with eastern Tennessee than it did with southern Alabama, and many in the region similarly resolved to wait for deliverance from Union forces rather than support a slaveholders’ rebellion.4

At the secession convention in January, Winston County, Alabama, elected Charles Christopher (C. C.) Sheats as its representative. Sheats garnered four times as many votes as his opponent, a planter committed to immediate separation. The twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, the youngest delegate in Montgomery, consistently maintained an unconditional stance in favor of the Union and against secession. Though other representatives from northern counties also expressed opposition to disunion, once it became a fait accompli all but a tiny handful acceded and professed their loyalty to their state and the new nation. Democrat Jeremiah Clemens, who would become a prominent Unionist, for example, opposed secession as a delegate from Madison County but submitted to the will of the convention once it became clear that the ordinance would pass, and, in his own words, “walked deliberately into rebellion.” Ultimately, secession in Alabama passed by a 61–39 vote, but a far greater number of delegates eventually signed the ordinance than had voted for its passage. “Diehard Unionist” Sheats refused to do so, and returned to Winston County. On July 4, he spoke at a pro-Union meeting held at Looney’s Tavern attended by 2,500 people, at which Winston County symbolically seceded from Alabama. No transcript exists of Sheats’s remarks, but the gathering did officially commend Sheats for his “loyalty and fidelity to the people whom [he] represented in voting against secession, first, last, and all of the time.” Sheats’s constituents in the “Free State of Winston” even elected him to the Alabama House in 1862, and he attempted to take his seat, but his fellow legislators prevented him from doing so due to his obvious disloyalty. After his expulsion, he pledged to join with Union forces and “expose fiendish villainy before the world,” but ultimately spent most of the war in a Confederate prison in North Carolina. Winston County went unrepresented in the lower house for the remainder of the war.5

C. C. Sheats was an unusually strident figure who represented an unusually outspoken constituency. Alabamians who still held Unionist sentiments at the outset of the war tended to suppress them publicly or risk imprisonment, destruction of their property, and possibly outright violence toward themselves and their families. They remained well behind the front of the battle lines being drawn, deep in the heart of the Confederacy. Outnumbered and surrounded, unconditional Unionists generally faded from view for the time being, and waited in hope for a chance to openly reaffirm their loyalty to the United States. John Roberts Phillips, a twenty-six-year-old farmer from Fayette County, suffered terrible abuse from Confederate neighbors, but “cherished the hope that Uncle Sam would surely put them all to death at an early day, and I stood it the best I could.” In hindsight, they frequently characterized it as the “shut mouth time.” Unionists refused to contribute to the formation of a slaveholder’s republic but as of 1861 could do nothing to stop its ascent.6

Fleming estimated that at the start of the war “there were probably no more than 2000 men who were wholly disaffected” in the entire state of Alabama. Though undoubtedly low—Alabama’s white population in 1860 exceeded 500,000, and 2,500 people reportedly attended the Unionist meeting at Looney’s Tavern alone—that figure does give some indication of the status of unconditional Unionists proportionate to the general population. The preponderance of white southerners in 1861, especially in the Deep South states, subordinated whatever class grievances they may have held to the preservation of the racial hierarchy ostensibly under threat from the “Black Republican” administration. The social and economic situation of north Alabamians, however, led to a number of exceptions to this trend. Upcountry residents, explains Margaret Storey, were often only “liminally part of Alabama’s staple crop and slave economy,” and had far less frequent contact with African Americans or people who were not smallholding farmers like themselves. Hill country neighborhoods such as those in Winston County remained quite insular. As a result, the prospect even of the abolition of slavery—as utterly unpalatable as the concept must have seemed to them—did not amount to a justification for the dissolution of the Union as it did in other parts of the Deep South. The whole region, judged one southern Unionist, “appeared admirably adapted to the growth of loyalty.” Northern Alabama’s geographic isolation and unusual economic and social circumstances fostered a hidden wellspring of Unionism in the heart of the Confederacy.7

In 1862 Robert S. Tharin, lifelong resident of the Deep South and onetime law partner of William Lowndes Yancey, attempted to explain the situation of, and position himself as the spokesman for, the beleaguered Unionists of Alabama. Forced to flee to the North once his “undeviating and unadulterated” Unionism became widely known, Tharin advocated on their behalf for the rest of the war from the relative safety of Indiana. In a deposition given late that year, Tharin, known as “the Alabama refugee,” made clear that resentment toward the slaveholding class lay at the heart of many north Alabamians’ sustained Unionism. “The cotton planters, as a class,” he explained, “have reduced the non-slaveholding population to a level with the despised negro.” Though he disavowed any affiliation with abolitionists, whom he blamed in nearly equal measure for the country’s descent into war, he utterly denied the legitimacy of secession and decried the undemocratic and illiberal actions of the secessionists. The slaveholding aristocracy, he wrote, “have immolated upon the self same altars whereon they endeavor to sacrifice the whole country, the freedom of the press and the liberty of speech.” Hypocritical and morally bankrupt, they had brutally silenced the non-slaveholding Unionist element that remained in the upcountry regions of the state. Now, “they bring upon the country a revolution, which they are to ride . . . into power and greatness. Under the cry of ‘Southern Rights,’ they openly trample upon Southern Rights.” Fellow Alabamian Frederick Anderson, a doctor and former Whig, concurred that secession had been, “carried forward by unscrupulous men to promote their own ambitious schemes for self aggrandisement and not for the good of the people.” In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith in 1862, Tharin implored the administration not to name a planter provisional governor, as it would insult and alienate the segment of the population that had demonstrated the greatest commitment to the Union. It ought to go, he said, to one who had continuously defended the Union without qualification, and who did not come from the ranks of those who had brought on the ruinous war in the first place. He suggested himself for the position.8

The evidence indicates that class resentment, though not the sole determinant of Unionism in parts of Alabama, frequently figured into the mental calculus of Unionists there. It also played a significant role in the development of resistance to the Confederacy in Louisiana, especially in the great urban center of New Orleans. The majority of unconditional Unionists—and future Union soldiers—from Louisiana resided in New Orleans, by far the largest city in the Confederacy. In fact, a remarkable 43 percent of Louisiana’s total white population lived in New Orleans and the adjacent municipalities of Algiers, Carrollton, and Jefferson. In 1860, nearly 40 percent of New Orleans’s 170,000 residents were foreign-born. Irish and German immigrants, predominantly working-class laborers, resented the political exclusion they suffered and showed little enthusiasm for secession. While some historians, such as John Winters, argue that the foreign-born population lacked strong loyalties either way and picked sides out of simple opportunism and the need to provide for their families, others like Mich...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Origins and Perceptions of Deep South Unionists, 1860–1862
• CHAPTER 2 The First Louisiana Cavalry (U.S.), 1862–1865
• CHAPTER 3 The First Alabama Cavalry (U.S.), 1862–1865
• CHAPTER 4 Bradford’s Battalion and the Massacre at Fort Pillow, 1864
• CHAPTER 5 Losing the Peace: White Unionists in Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1867
• CHAPTER 6 The Parameters of White Unionist Radicalism: Congressional Reconstruction, 1867–1877
• Conclusion: “Gone from View, Mingled in Peace”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations