Research and Writing Needed for Southern History, Part 3.
Mainstream history tells us that the Border Southern States were “Unionist” during the great conflict. It is not true in the sense that is meant. The main factor in the matter was coercion by the U.S. Army. After the North won The War, it was easy to accept the idea of “Unionism” on the border, distorted as it is.
A good historian could pull together all the vast scholarship already done and write a new, healthy revisionist chapter of U.S. history. There is a wealth of material in State histories and articles.
To start, every border governor repudiated Lincoln’s initial call for troops in 1861. Maryland was only held in line by army seizure of many members of the legislature. The recently arrived Germans in Missouri took over that State government of Heritage Americans by armed aggression.
All of the border areas gave many volunteers to the Confederate army. This meant soldiering in poor conditions and likely inability to return home–a genuine patriotic sacrifice taken on freely. True, there were many soldiers for the Union army from Kentucky and East Tennessee. They enjoyed good conditions and pay, hefty enlistment bonuses, and promise of substantial pensions.
There is need for new study of the State governments in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and the tribes of the Indian nations (Oklahoma). It’s also worth a close look at Confederate support in New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
How were elections held in the Border States? How often controlled by the U.S. army? Who were in these legislatures, what opinions did they express, and what did they do that expressed opposition to Northern actions. The extent of military suppression of civilian opinion was considerable and needs to be laid out fully.
It is true that there was some disaffection to the Confederacy in the Appalachian region, but this has been exaggerated. Votes and recruitment show great support for the South even where there were numbers of “Unionists.”
A good study would carefully survey all the Congressman from the Border States. Who were they? To what extent were they freely elected? How did many of them express opposition to the Northern war? Fortunately, a very good start has been made on this topic by Brion McClanahan’s University of South Carolina dissertation on Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware That shows the true nature of “Unionism” that held unwilling people under the Lincoln government.
It is a fact that whenever Confederate soldiers passed through a Border State civilians turned out to cheer them in large numbers. Perhaps most tellingly–Kentucky and Missouri, and even West Virginia, elected ex-Confederate to high political offices after The War including Governors and Senators.
Here is a splendid topic waiting for a good historian who has the ability and perseverance to bring together a new history of this major aspect of the War for Southern Independence.
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Eastern Tennessee is a good examply of how facts can be distorted. Support was more or less evenly split betweem Union and Confederate sentiment. Most people claim the area was pro-Union, but it was only more pro-Union when compared to the rest of the state or the rest of Dixie. Most of the Union support was in the mountains and hollers, ‘hillbilly’ country. (strangely enough, later this would be the area where moonshiners squared off against federal agents)
The area along the Tennesse River and the railroad from Chattanooga through Knoxville and up into Virginia was more heavily Confederate in sentiment.
So it was somewhat of the valley versus the mountains and plateau.
Gay Street in Knoxville hosted 2 competing recruitment booths for enlisting soldiers. One end had the Union recruiters and the other end had the Confederate recruiters, before the war began.
Digby Seymour’s Divided Loyalties is an excellent book on East Tennessee and the war.
A few years agoI had the pleasure of visiting Alvin York’s homesite in Pall Mall Tennessee. Great humble place and great Southern Patriot. But his father was a Unionist, I believe, killed by outlawChamp Ferguson. However, just a mile or two to the north of York’s farm in the Wolfe River valley was the site of a Confederate Army camp.
I heard years ago that Knoxville was split. See my comment below about Alvin York’s home.
I’ve yet to come across a good history of how hundreds of thousands of Germans and others fleeing the failed Revolution of 1948-49 fled to the United States and became a huge influence in the rise of political progressivism that, in conjunction with abolitionists (many of who were Unitarians), fueled the birth and rise of radical Unionism. What also needs to be explored is the role the so-called “Redeemers” played in the spread of progressivism into the South following Reconstruction. C. Vann Woodward touches on this in his excellent contribution to A History of the South series, “The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913” but he doesn’t fully explore the evidence that these people were not Confederates and most had not fought in the war, but they used the names and reputations of famous Confederate officers to give them legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Most interestingly and virtually unknown in histories of the time, is how these reformers fomented anti-black sentiment for their own purposes when that had pretty much died out following the disbanding of the original Klan who had been successful in their efforts to curtail the crimes and misdeeds of black Union soldiers acting on behalf of the Union League in its economic exploitation of the South. Lastly what needs to be explored is how the South lost the peace which is what really doomed the political cohesion of the region and how the Democrat party was captured by Whigs and Northern Democrats, began the transformation into what we see today with the election of Woodrow Wilson, which signaled the end of what was left of federalism and the end of the political power of Southern conservatism. That the American South would be largely responsible for the election of FDR clearly showed that they, like the nation itself, had lost their way.