[In his new book, Silent Cavalry, former New York Times editor
Howell Raines tells of loyalties long suppressed in his native Alabama
] [[link removed]]


THE WHITE SOUTHERNERS WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION  
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Martin Pengelly
December 27, 2023
Guardian
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_ In his new book, Silent Cavalry, former New York Times editor
Howell Raines tells of loyalties long suppressed in his native Alabama
_

Union cavalry in action during the civil war, photograph: Library of
Congress

 

“Norman Mailer said every writer has one book that’s a gift from
God.” So says Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York
Times, now author of a revelatory book on the civil war, Silent
Cavalry
[[link removed]]:
How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And
Then Got Written Out of History.

[Twin black-and-white images of a white man with neck-length hair and
a beard, wearing a dark three-piece suit, both in profile, with the
images facing each other.]
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Longstreet: the Confederate general who switched sides on race
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Read more
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“And agnostic as I am, I have to say this was such a gift, one way
or another.”

Raines tells the story of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, loyalists who
served under Gen William Tecumseh Sherman in campaigns that did much
to end the war that ended slavery, only to be scorned by their own
state and by historians as the “Lost Cause
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myth, of a noble but traduced south, took hold.

For Raines, it is also a family story. As he wrote in the Washington
Post
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his name is a “version of the biblical middle name of James Hiel
Abbott, who … help[ed] his son slip through rebel lines to enlist in
the 1st Alabama … That son is buried in the national military
cemetery at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Until a few years ago, I was among
the thousands of southerners who never knew they had kin buried under
Union army headstones.”

The 1st Alabama was organised
[[link removed]] in
1862 and fought to the end of the war, its duties including forming
Sherman’s escort
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his famous March to the Sea, its battles including Resaca, Atlanta and
Kennesaw Mountain.

To the Guardian, Raines, 80, describes how the 1st Alabama and the
“Free State of Winston
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the anti-secession county from which many recruits came, have featured
through his life.

“My paternal grandmother gave me my first hint, when I was about
five or six, that our family didn’t support the Confederacy. It was
a very oblique reference but it stuck in my mind. And then, in 1961, I
ran across a reference … in a wonderful book called Stars Fell on
Alabama [[link removed]] [by Carl
Carmer, 1934], and it confirmed … that there were Unionists in my
mother’s ancestral county, Winston county, up in the Appalachian
foothills.

“So those were the seeds, and I just kept over the years saving
string, to use a newspaper term. And I could never rid myself of
curiosity about what the real story was. And then when I started
reading enough Alabama
[[link removed]] history to see how
these mountain unionists had been libeled in the Alabama history
books, that, I suppose, fit my natural curiosity as a contrarian.

“… For years, I thought I would write it as a novel. I had done
one novel set in that same county [Whiskey Man, 1977
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it took me a long time to realise that the true story was better than
anything I could make up.”

Raines has written history before: his first book, written in the
1970s when he was a reporter and editor in Georgia and Florida,
was My Soul Is Rested
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an oral history of the civil rights years. His new book is also
inflected with autobiography and follows two memoirs, Fly Fishing
Through the Midlife Crisis
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and The One That Got Away
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the latter published not long after his departure from the Times
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in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair
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He had, he says, “a very unusual upbringing”, for Alabama in the
1940s and 50s.

“In no house of my extended family was there a single picture of
Robert E Lee or any of the Confederate heroes. It didn’t strike me
until I was much older that I lived in a different southern world than
most other white kids my age in Alabama. Our families not venerating
these Confederate icons was the very subtle downstream effect of
having had a significant number of unionists and indeed some
collateral kin and direct kin who were part of the Union army.

“It’s a curious thing about Alabama. After segregation became such
an inflamed issue in the south with the 1954 school desegregation
decision [Brown v Board of Education
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by the US supreme court], families with unionist heritage quit telling
those family stories on the front porch. The only way to find out
about it was to dig them out. And it always struck me as the ultimate
irony that many of the Klan members in north Alabama in the 1960s, and
many of the supporters of George Wallace [the segregationist
governor], were actually descendants of Union soldiers without knowing
it.”

Reading Stars Fell on Alabama “was a seminal moment. [Carmer’s]
observation that Alabama could best be understood as if it was a
separate nation within the continental United States: suddenly the
quotidian realities that a child accepts as normal or even a young
college student accepted as normal, I began to see as odd behavior.

“For example, Alabamians were always complaining in the 1950s and
60s about being looked down upon. And suddenly … I said, ‘Well,
there’s a reason for this. If you pick [the infamous
[[link removed]] Birmingham
commissioner of public safety] Bull Connor
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Wallace
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be your representatives before the nation on the premier legal and
moral issue of the decade” – civil rights – “then they’re
going to think you’re strange.”

If Alabamians complained of being looked down upon, many Alabamians
looked down on the unionists of Winston county – people too poor to
own enslaved workers.

“Even though the story of unionism was suppressed, it survived
enough in the political bloodstream of the state that the legislature
continued to punish them for 100 plus years after the war. So much so
that my cousins in the country went to school in wooden schoolhouses
while the schools in the rest of the state were modern, even in the
rural counties. And up until I was 10 years old, we had to travel to
my grandparents’ farm, only 50 miles from Birmingham, via dirt
roads. So this was a matter of punishing through the state budget,
this apostasy that sort of otherwise washed out of the civic
memory.”

As Raines writes in his introduction to Silent Cavalry, “History is
not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often
underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic
and cultural authorities.”

He “had to really dig deeply into historiography to understand how
this odd thing came to be: that the losers of the civil war got to
write the dominant history … [and how] that revisionist view …
became nationalised.” That’s what happened in the Lost Cause
crusade of the 1870s to 1890s that in turn produced William Archibald
Dunning
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(1857-1922), a historian at Columbia University in New York who did
much to embed the Lost Cause in American culture.”

Raines discusses that process and its later manifestations, not least
in relation to The Civil War, Ken Burns’ great 1990 documentary
series
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subject to revisionist
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Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C Ward, a historian who co-wrote
the script, are quoted on why the 1st Alabama is absent from their
work. But Raines also discusses historians who have begun to tell the
stories of the unionist south.

“Histories of the Confederacy were written by Dunning-trained
scholars who delivered a warped version of Confederate history: very,
very racist [and] very classist, in terms of their contempt for
southern poor whites. And those became the fundamental references
which national historians … were writing off. A tainted version of
southern history.

“That obtained until the publication in 1992 of a book
called Lincoln’s Loyalists
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Richard Nelson Current went back and actually discovered that there
were 100,000 citizens of the Confederate states
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volunteered in the Union army – almost 5% that came from the south.

“The reviews at the time hailed Current’s book as opening up an
entire new field of scholarship. But in fact it was not until about
2000 that a new generation of PhD students, hungry for unexplored
topics, began to really dig into this new area of study. And it’s a
thriving field now, with a lot of really interesting books.

Asked how his book has been received back home, Raines laughs.

“I don’t know about Alabama. I’m having a signing party in
Birmingham in January but that’ll be like-minded southern
progressives, for the most part. The defensiveness I referred to …
will cause many readers down there to say, ‘Oh, this is just another
chance to make Alabama look bad.’

“Alabamians take no responsibility for being on the wrong side of
history since 1830, and they think anyone who points that out is is
being unfair. So that won’t change.”

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_Silent Cavalry is published in the US
[[link removed]] by
Crown_

Martin Pengelly [[link removed]]
is breaking news editor for Guardian US. Twitter @MartinPengelly.
Click here
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Martin's public key

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