The Forgotten Heroes of the Civil War

Those would be the white southerners who stayed loyal to the Union and in many cases gave their lives for it. They don't need any monuments but we should make room for them in our history books.

I gift article.

https://wapo.st/3NBV7vA

A new generation of Civil War scholars is filling in what one commentator calls the “skipped history” of White Southerners who fought for the Union Army. For me, the emerging revisionist account of the conflict is personal. I have discovered the story of a great-great-grandfather who was threatened with hanging as a “damned old Lincolnite” by his neighbors in the Alabama mountains.

My given name is an Anglicized version of the biblical middle name of James Hiel Abbott, who died in 1877 after helping his son slip through rebel lines to enlist in the 1st Alabama Cavalry, a distinguished regiment of bluecoat fighters whose story was deliberately excluded from the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. That son is buried in the national military cemetery at Chattanooga, Tenn. Until a few years ago, I was among the thousands of Southerners who never knew they had kin buried under Union Army headstones.

How did a regiment of 2,066 fighters and spies from the mountain South, chosen by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman as his personal escort on the March to the Sea, get erased? Oddly, the explanation reaches back to Columbia University, whose pro-Confederate Dunning School of Reconstruction history at the start of the 20th century spread a false narrative of Lost Cause heroism and suffering among aristocratic plantation owners.

As a 10-year-old I stood in the presence of Marie Bankhead Owen, who showed me and my all-White elementary-school classmates the bullet holes in Confederate battle flags carried by “our boys.” She and her husband, Thomas McAdory Owen, reigned from 1901 to 1955 as directors of the archives in a monolithic alabaster building across from the Alabama State Capitol. They made the decision not to collect the service records of an estimated 3,000 White Alabamians who enlisted in the Union Army after it occupied Huntsville, Ala., in 1862. The early loss of this crucial Tennessee River town was a stab to the heart from which the Confederacy never recovered. Neither did the writing of accurate history in Alabama.

Another victimhood article.

I’m shocked I tell ya

Those omissions point up another feature of history twisted to fit parochial politics and racial prejudice. For one thing, the 1st Alabama was one of the few integrated units in the Union Army: the regiment of 2,066 recruits included 16 freed enslaved people. The shortchanging of its accomplishments also cast a shadow over important events and colorful characters who deserved attention in mainstream histories. My most surprising discovery was that the 1st Alabama led the Union charge that could have prevented the burning of Atlanta. At Snake Creek Gap in North Georgia on May 9, 1864, they had a chance to rout Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnson’s entire army by charging into its rear. Their attack was called off when one of Sherman’s favorite generals arrived on the scene. In his “Memoirs,” Sherman admitted that his subordinate had cost the Union Army an opportunity that “does not occur twice in a lifetime.”

The 1st Alabama Cavalry’s shining moments came on the march from Chattanooga to Savannah. I never saw an Alabama history that noted the startling fact that the 1st Alabama Cavalry is listed in the “Order of Battle” for the Atlanta campaign. How they came to be picked as the point of the spear that would be driven through the heart of the Confederacy is a story told in the 2020 University of Virginia dissertation of Clayton J. Butler, which was published last year as “True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction.” Its author is one of a number of rising historians who have published in the past 25 years the research that enabled me to complete my six-decade quest for the full story of Alabama Unionism.

At the pivotal Battle of Fort McAllister on Dec. 13, 1864, Alabamians were on both sides of the battle lines, as the 1st Alabama faced Confederate neighbors from back home under rebel Gen. Joseph “Righting Joe” Wheeler. Later, the 1st Alabama figured in one of Sherman’s most famous demonstrations of the “hard war” tactics designed to break the will of Confederate soldiers and civilians. Rebel land mines blew off the leg of a 1st Alabama company commander, Lt. Francis Tupper. Sherman rushed to his side and, in a fit of anger, ordered Confederate prisoners of war onto the road, telling them to find the mines by digging them up or stepping on them.

By way of reward for 1st Alabama’s performance on the March to the Sea, Gen. Francis Blair Jr., gave them the place of honor at the right front of Sherman’s 17th Corps in the victory parade through captured Savannah on Dec. 27, 1864. The presence of Alabama soldiers at Savannah and the burning of Atlanta is the kind of belated news that can cause some Civil War buffs to gulp in surprise. Another of the new generation of Civil War students, attorney W. Steven Harrell of Perry, Ga., has found pension records showing that Sheats himself, having been freed from prison, rushed to the front to visit his old friends in the 1st Alabama as Atlanta lay in ashes.