Southern Unionists and the American Civil War

[Hawk1981]

During the secession crisis and subsequent Civil War the Southern upcountry yeomen discovered themselves as a political class. From the earliest days of settlement, there had never been a single white South. In 1860 a majority of white Southerners lived not in the plantation belt but in the upcountry, an area of small farmers and herdsmen who owned few slaves or none at all. In these yeoman areas, the elections for delegates to secession conventions in the winter of 1860-61 produced massive repudiations of disunion and from the outset of the war disloyalty was extensive in the Southern mountains.

From its beginnings the Confederacy suffered from a rising tide of intense domestic hostility, a violent inner civil war, brought on largely by those most responsible for the Confederacy’s creation. Planters excused themselves from the draft in various ways, then grew far too much cotton and tobacco, and not nearly enough food. Soldiers went hungry, as did their families back home. Women defied Confederate authorities by staging food riots from Richmond, Virginia, to Galveston, Texas. Soldiers deserted by the tens of thousands, and draft evasion became commonplace. By 1864, the draft law was practically impossible to enforce and two-thirds of the Confederate army was absent with or without leave. Many deserters and draft dodgers formed armed bands that controlled vast areas of the Southern countryside.

Long conscious of its remoteness from the rest of the state, supporters of the Confederacy formed a small minority in East Tennessee. This mountainous area had long been overshadowed economically and politically by the wealthier, slave-owning counties to the west, and voted by a two-to-one margin, to remain within the Union. Delegates from the region called for secession from the state. Senator Andrew Johnson remained at his post in Washington once the war had begun, and in August 1861 East Tennessee voters elected three Unionists to represent them in the federal Congress.

Meeting to repudiate Virginia’s ordinance of secession, delegates from the western counties formed the Restored Government of Virginia that sent recognized congressmen and senators to the US Congress in 1861. Two years later this Virginia government recognized the departure of the western counties and the resulting West Virginia entered the Union as a separate state.

Other southern mountain counties also rejected secession from the outset. One of the strongest pockets of pro-Union activity in the Deep South was Winston County, Alabama, where the majority of the subsistence farmers saw Alabama's secession as an illegal act. Winston County's residents held a famous meeting at a local tavern and floated the idea of breaking ties with Alabama. While they never formally seceded, many of the county’s young men hid in the hills and forests to avoid conscription by the Confederate army, and others fled north and fought for the Union. By the war’s end, Winston had supplied twice as many soldiers to the North as it had the South.

 

[Hawk1981]

Jones County, Mississippi, was the site of some particularly violent resistance to the Confederacy. The county became a haven for young men who had grown disillusioned with the Confederate cause and deserted the army. The runaways organized into a Unionist guerrilla outfit called the Knight Company and took to harassing nearby Confederate units. The group effectively disabled the county government, and at one point, its activities sparked rumors that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy and was flying the stars and stripes over its courthouse.

Many counties in the northern part of Arkansas remained ambivalent about separating from the Unites States. The region eventually supplied as many as six companies’ worth of troops for the US war effort. Like many backwoods regions, the mountainous area was the site of intense guerrilla activity. As the war progressed, it played host to bloody skirmishes and looting by both pro-Union and pro-Confederate bushwhackers.

The Texas Hill Country region of south central Texas was home to some of the Lone Star State’s most hard-line Unionists. Its residents included a large contingent of German immigrants, many of them liberal intellectuals who had fled their home country after a failed revolution in 1848. The German transplants typically considered slavery immoral, and many refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy or join its army.

 

[Hawk1981]

Confederate deserters who made it home found plenty of neighbors willing to help them avoid further entanglements with the Confederacy. A disgusted head of the Bureau of Conscription complained that desertion had “in popular estimation, lost the stigma that justly pertains to it, and therefore the criminals are everywhere shielded by their families and by the sympathies of many communities.” When deserters were arrested in Alabama’s Randolph County, an armed mob stormed the jail and set them free.

Some deserters joined with other anti-Confederates in a shadowy antiwar movement, widely known as the Peace Society. The Peace Society was the largest of the many secret or semi-secret organizations, such as the Peace and Constitutional Society in Arkansas and the Heroes of America in Appalachia, which sprang up across the South to oppose the war. Others deserter joined with draft dodgers and other anti-Confederates to form guerrilla bands, often called “tory” or “layout” gangs. They attacked government supply trains, burned bridges, raided local plantations, and harassed impressment agents and conscript officers.

Anti-Confederates, deserters, and resisters alike in the North Carolina mountains also formed defensive militias and set up warning networks. Wilkes County, North Carolina, was home to a band of five hundred deserters organized as a guerrilla force who openly challenged Confederates to come and take them. Wilkes County’s Trap Hill gang was especially aggressive in harassing local pro-Confederates. In Cherokee County, about one hundred layouts formed a resistance force that disarmed Confederate soldiers and terrorized Confederate loyalists.

The state of Georgia was one of the most divided in the South. Anti-Confederate gangs operated in every part of the state. Some areas were so hostile to the Confederacy that army patrols dared not enter them. The Pine Barrens region of southeast Georgia was a favorite hideout for those trying to avoid Confederate patrols.

 

[Hawk1981]

Southern blacks could often be counted on to aid anti-Confederate whites. Deserters escaping the Confederate army could rely on slaves to give them food and shelter on the journey back home. Some blacks joined tory gangs in their war against the Confederacy. Tens of thousands of blacks fled to federal lines and joined Union forces. Of about 200,000 blacks under federal arms, four out of five were native Southerners. Together with roughly 300,000 Southern whites who did the same, (about 200,000 of them from states of the border South). Southerners who served in the Union military totaled nearly half a million, or about a quarter of all federal armed forces.

Enslaved blacks in the interior for whom escape was more difficult nevertheless found various ways to resist. What work slaves did, they did grudgingly. Some refused to work at all. Others used the threat of escape to force wage payments from their owners. Fugitive slaves that escaped but could not make it to Union lines often gathered in small, isolated communities. Sometimes these settlements were multiracial. They were so numerous in the southern coastal plain that one source called it “the common retreat of deserters from our army, Tories, and runaway negroes.”

 

[jwoodie]

Lincoln galvanized southern support for the Confederacy by calling for an invasion of the seceding states. Virginia was pro-Union until that illegal act.

 

[my2¢]

I had heard about the military draft riots of NYC during the Civil War but nothing about the the problems of the South other than how states rights hampered their war effort even when it came to conscription. Interesting topic had me do some googling and in the last few minutes I learned of the Arkansas Peace Society and the First Arkansas Union Cavalry. I wonder how life was for these pro-Union folks after the war?

 

[bdtex]

I began a search yesterday on a branch of my mother's side of the family that I hadn't researched yet and found a direct ancestor who served in the 1st Florida Cavalry(US). He enlisted in March 1864 and mustered out in November 1865. On his enlistment papers he made his mark, "x" , in lieu of signing his name. He didn't know how to write. Census records showed him to be a farmer.