Silent Cavalry

Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama helped Sherman burn Atlanta–and then got written out of history.

Howell Raines (2023, Crown Publishing)

        This one’s for the folks back home in Alabama. Many of my friends there are, like Howell Raines, descended from the settlers of Winston, Walker, and surrounding counties. Birmingham’s industrial base attracted thousands of men whose Scots-Irish ancestors had scratched out a living in the last mountains of the Appalachian chain. The residents of Winston County, in particular, have long enjoyed a reputation as combative and stubbornly independent people. They went so far, during the Civil War, as to secede from Alabama, declaring themselves the Free State of Winston. While this was more a slogan than a reality, the county sent more people than any other, to cross Union lines and form up as the First Alabama Cavalry, USA.

         That so many Alabamians took up arms for the Union is one of those stories that falls between the cracks of the standard histories. Howell Raines went looking for the history, and for the reasons it has tended to be lost. He’s actually been thinking about this for most of his life, in the background of his long career as a journalist. (I’ve been familiar with his name since the late 1960’s, when he worked at the Birmingham News with my father.)

        The First Alabama came into being after General Ormsby M. Mitchel pressed down from Nashville to seize Huntsville and Decatur in the spring of 1862, shortly after the battle of Shiloh. Controlling the Tennessee River was an essential step to splitting the Confederate State into two parts. It also made Northern lines a relatively short walk from all over north Alabama, and an attractive destination compared with conscription into the rebel army at the point of a gun.

       Contemporary reports from Union officers praise the unit’s toughness; it saw valorous action at the battles of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge; Sherman used a couple of its companies in the vanguard of his march to Atlanta and beyond. Raines says, “Hill country partisan that I am, I take the First Alabama’s lack of legendary status as proof of the suppressive power of Lost Cause historiography.” The Lost Cause is a manufactured myth, in which “the war was not a heroic crusade to abolish slavery; instead it became a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats….”

       The myth’s manufacture is quite an interesting story in its own right. An editor of the Richmond Examiner brought out a book called The Lost Cause in June 1866, which ascribed ‘aristocracy and chivalry’ to the slave-holding way of life: “The civilization of the North was coarse and materialistic. That of the South was scant of shows, but highly refined and sentimental.” The late-nineteenth-century historian William Archibald Dunning, of Columbia University, sent Lost Cause acolytes into leading universities all across the South, ensuring that the academy would tell a harmonious story for most of the twentieth century.

      In that context, the mystery of the First Alabama’s disappearance from history is not so hard to parse. Neither the University of Alabama nor the Alabama Department of Archives and History had any interest in memorializing Alabama’s poorest and least Confederate county. Lost Cause historians regarded men from the hills with scorn; by definition, they couldn’t have done anything noble or meritorious. In their loyalty to the Union, they were, by definition, traitors. Howell Raines begs to differ.

      This is a dense, chewy book. If you don’t already know a Bankhead from a Debardeleben, it might be a bit rich, but I found it delicious.