Common Sense On Honoring Southern Unionists

Common Sense On Honoring Southern Unionists 

 Do They Deserve To Be Honored?

By C. W. Roden

This blog post is dedicated to those men from the South who choose to remain loyal to the Union, or who - like their fellow Pro-Confederate Southerners - simply wanted to be left alone. It is to their memory and those of their descendants and the descendants of their fellow Southerners loyal to Dixie and our shared Southern Heritage.

Earlier this month there was a somewhat interesting exchange of thoughts online about Southern heritage and how some view remembering certain individuals from the parts of the American Southland who served in the War Between The States (1861- 1865).

This debate was not about those who wore the hallowed gray and butternut of the Confederate soldier - at least not directly - rather it was about the little-told story of Southern-born men and boys who wore the Union blue uniform of the United States and fought against their "rebellious" neighbors -- and in many cases their own family.

The debate began with THIS article dated March 28th. 

The article titled: Romance of the Confederacy written by one Josh Gelernter, starts out with the odious tagline: It's time the South dropped it in favor of a batter part of its heritage. 

Mr. Gelernter starts out by discussing a court case concerning license plates in Texas and then pointing out his own Confederate ancestry and pedigree as justification for his case against the Dixie Cross banner. Not the first Southern-born supporter of the Righteous Cause Myth to do such a thing by and means, and sadly he won't likely be the last, but I digress.

Moving on to the second paragraph of the article, Mr. Gelerner is quoted:

"That war killed about three-quarters of a million Americans, and the Stars and Bars are the symbol of the men responsible — regardless of its having also been a symbol of men who were just trying to defend their homes."

Let's begin with the obvious mistake here. He uses the term "Stars and Bars" to identify the Confederate flag -- a fact which belies his claims of understanding and education since it has been noted that informed people know that the Stars and Bars is not the Dixie Cross banner. I pointed that fact out myself several times on this blog. As for the first part, where he mentioned the war killed three-quarters of a million Americans....Um, I think he overlooked the fact that of those numbered about forty percent of those Americans were in fact the same men who carried the Confederate battle flag into battle.

I take it you folks are beginning to see the obvious here?

After that -- while attempting to sound reasonable rather than condescending, which he fails at miserably - Mr. Gelerner proceeds to talk about how over 110,000 Southern men fought for the Union. Or as he puts it, how one in ten Southerners fought against slavery rather than for it.

Then Mr. Gelerner makes the suggestion directly to Southerners who honor their Confederate ancestry (again as he claims to continue doing so). He points out that he understands the inclination of Confederate soldier's great-great-grandchildren to glorify their great-great-grandfathers -- and yes folks, he thinks folks actually accept that statement at face value. 

The magnanimous bastard even goes on to concede an obvious point: that Confederate soldiers were not Nazis. Uh....duh! That face is pretty much obvious to anyone else with even a rudimentary understanding of history who isn't a complete Leftist ideologue, or an utter brain-numbed moron.

Mr. Gelerner -- after offering up some brief details on the service of Southern Unionists -- conclude his piece with:

"But every few years, when a battle breaks out over the Confederate flag, I can’t help thinking that it’s time that the South, en bloc, abandoned the Confederacy and embraced the heritage of southern Unionists. Your average adult southerner today has between 128 and 256 ancestors who were alive during the Civil War. Statistically, it’s very likely that some of those ancestors were...." 

Well folks, at this point he starts reciting campfire songs about justifications for the destruction and plunder of a wide stretch of Southern Georgia and the article ends on that low note.

Let me pause here to go empty my bowels.

Okay, I'm back. 

Now then, a few days after Mr. Gelerner's article about picking and choosing one aspect of Southern heritage in favor of some aspects over another came THIS article in response, dated March 31st.

This article, written by Thomas DiLorenzo, begins with a simple question: "Should the Polish people memorialize fellow Poles who collaborated with the Soviets?"  

The answer to which is plainly obvious -- at least to Mr. DiLorenzo.

The rest is a rather well-written rebuttal that pretty much destroys Mr. Gelerner's suggestions and points out their obvious failings. He also throws in some modern views of the War and some of his own personal political bends into the story. Regardless, it was well written.

Still, rather than let Mr. DiLorenzo completely off the hook, I would like to go back to his opening statement, an obvious comparison between Polish collaborators who sided with the invading Soviet who stayed long after liberating Poland from Nazi occupation and installed their own puppet government, and Southern Unionists. He argues against honoring Southern Unionists.

In this case, Mr. DiLorenzo is in error much like Mr. Gelerner was in his assertions that the heritage of Southern Unionists should replace Confederate heritage, but for entirely different reasons.

Allow me to explain why.

So Who Were These Pro-Southern Unionists?

Before the War Between The States broke out, before the Southern States actually seceded, the issues that divided America likewise divided the people of America, and not always along the Mason-Dixon Line.

Slavery certainly caused much of the problem, both morally and in terms of political power between the North and the South. That has been well documented in terms of several territorial acts after the War of 1812, US Supreme Court cases like: DredScott vs Sandford (1857), "Bleeding Kansas" and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859.

Also certainly the differences between the North and South were likewise caused over the issue of how both saw federal power and State sovereignty. Some believing that only local government can understand local issues. Some believing that the union itself was made up of sovereign and independent States and a federal government that was limited by the US Bill of Rights, no different than the original Articles of Confederation after the American Revolutionary War. Others believing that in order for the United States to maintain its place as a free and powerful nation it must have a strong government like other world powers.

Ultimately those two main causes fueled a fire that finally exploded on April 12, 1861 when the newly formed Confederate States exerted what it perceived its sovereign authority to drive away a foreign occupation of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The US government, which continued to see Fort Sumter as Federal property, retaliated by calling for 75,000 volunteers to put down a "rebellion" in the South.

Naturally views on how individual Americans saw duty, loyalty and honor were just as divided, and geography was not always a determining factor.

Even today, many people still believe the idea that people in the Northern and the Southern States both followed the loyalties of the side each State choose to support. This is far from the truth.

In the North, particularly in Southern Illinois and various places along the Ohio River Valley, many northern-born Americans actively supported the Confederate States, even joined Confederate military units in Kentucky and Tennessee. The States of Kentucky, Missouri, Western Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were all heavily divided, and sent soldiers to both Union and Confederate armies.

In several Southern States loyalties were very divided in the Appalachian regions of Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, and some parts of Northern Alabama. Some of these people - particularly people German and some Scots-Irish descent - remained loyal to the US government, much like American Loyalists a generation earlier remained to the British Empire during the American Revolutionary War. 

One of the Union's most brilliant generals, Major General George Henry Thomas, was a Virginian who stayed with the Union because he supported the idea of a strong federal government - a decision that would ultimately lead to his family disowning him during and after the War ended. 

Certainly a large number of black Southerners joined the ranks of the Union army. An estimated 178,000 black Americans overall were a part of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). This fact is well documented today. 

Among white Southerners, the numbers of men who served in the Union military come close to around 100,000. These are the estimates of that number from each Confederate State: 

Alabama: 3,000

Arkansas: 10,000

Florida: 3,500

Georgia: 400

Louisiana: 7,000

Mississippi: 545

North Carolina: 25,000

Tennessee: 42,000 

Texas: 2,200

Virginia & West Virginia: 22,000 

What Motivated Pro-Union Southerners?

The question of loyalty to either cause depended on the mindsets of the time.

America was a vastly different place in the 1860s. People then were much like people today, but we must be careful not to attribute the same specific desires and attitudes of today.

In the American Southland, mostly small rural communities with negligible government interference and policing, they were often more responsible for their own security and safety. Based on their social structure, Southerners lived by a clear and simple moral code. Concepts like right, wrong, and kinship were certainly much stronger then than they are today in America.

Those who followed the Confederacy, for the most part, were fiercely independent minded individuals, who regarded loyalty and duty to home and close kin more strongly than duty to State, or government. To these men and boys they saw the North and the Union as literally a foreign entity very far away wanting to impose the will of the leaders on the people, while their personal code of honor would never accept that.

Those Southerners who followed the Union believed strongly in national identity, in a rule of law that was less a form of anarchy that their Confederate neighbors and family accepted. Or, in some cases, such as the Southern Unionists in the Appalachian regions, they were so fiercely independent that they saw the Confederate government as a closer and more intrusive threat to their individual liberties than the far-off Union government in Washington D.C. Many of these people simply declared their neutrality and remained so until the Confederate State governments imposed conscription.

Slavery was sometimes a factor, though a small number of pro-Union Southerners were themselves slaveowners, while a number of pro-Confederate Southerners from the same region were not. Many of these Southern Unionist's slaves continued to remain slaves until the end of the war because the Emancipation Proclamation did not specifically apply to their cases. Others were freed willingly by their owners only after the proclamation went into effect in 1863. Including many members of the United States Colored Troops, some of those same Unionist slaves served side-by-side with their Southern Unionist masters in the war, little different that the slaves and freemen who served in the Confederate army....a topic we will explore in detail at a later date.  

These Southerners who remained loyal to the Union often times suffered brutally at the hands of their Confederate neighbors for their allegiance. The best example of this being the infamous Shelton Laurel Massacre. This is not to say that these Southern Unionists were all angels of virtue either. Southern Unionists likewise committed their fair share of war crimes against their pro-Confederate brothers and sisters. Incidents such as the Wilson Massacre and the Huntsville Massacre are testament to the fact that during the War Between The States neither side walked away entirely as the pillars of honor and virtue. 

Indeed, many of y'all might recall from a previous blog post that several of my own family and Confederate ancestors were themselves murdered in cold blood by some of these Southern Unionist. 

Some of these Southern Unionists were in fact former Confederate soldiers who deserted for various reasons. Some of them simply to protect their own homes from what they began to see as a Confederate government that was more intrusive than the far away Union government, particularly in terms of conscription. Others because they were disgusted with the fact that the Confederate government exempted rich plantation owners and their families from service. It should be noted in their defense however that both sides had exemptions and "substitute policies" and that many Union soldiers likewise deserted the army because they were disgusted with such policies. The "rich man's war and poor man's fight" class warfare argument was universal throughout the conflict. 

Then there were those Confederate prisoners of war held in Northern prisons like Camp Douglass and Elmira Prison who swallowed the dog and took the Oath of Loyalty to the Union. These men were offered the choice of remaining in prison till the end of the war, or to join the Union army out west to fight the Native American populations and maintain the US outposts in the Dakotas and Wyoming. Many of these men did, becoming what are termed as "Galvanized Yankees" to escape the harsh and brutal conditions imposed on Confederate prisoners of war. Knowing what I know of those conditions, this blogger could not find fault with their decisions, not everyone can be a diehard rebel. 

A Common Sense Solution 

Following the end of the War Between The States and the Reconstruction Era, the memory of these Southern Unionists largely began to fade away, or were overlooked except in local folklore. In an ironic way, the memory of these Southern loyalists was little different than the memory of those Black Confederates who served in the War, until the last couple of decades. Although unlike some of these Black Confederates who actually remained honored and well respected by some of the former white Confederate Veterans in spite of the rise of Jim Crow racism in America, Southern Unionists found themselves completely edited out of the region's history, with few exceptions.

More than anyone else, I have a huge justification for wanting to hate the memory of those Southern Unionists given my family history.

Yet, I do not.

Largely because I do not believe in the "sins of the fathers" concept, nobody is their ancestor. I respect my own Confederate great-great-grandfather; but while I honor the person he was and those aspects of him that are a part of my genetic makeup, I am not him. I cannot personally claim any honor he earned for himself, or for any hypothetical crime he may have committed during his lifetime. As such I could never condemn, or hate the descendants of those Union soldiers and the Southern Unionists that fought against him either. 

I do not agree that these people should be edited out of Southern history anymore than I support calls for the removal of Confederate monuments and the condemning of Confederate symbols. If anything I see them as two sides of the same coin, and I am disgusted with the suggestion that either deserves their memory condemned. 

Southern Unionists are as much a part of out shared and diverse Southern heritage as Confederate soldiers, Scots-Irish Patriots of the American Revolutionary War, Nat Turner, grits, Coca-Cola, sweet iced tea, kudzu, ect. To ignore that is disingenuous.

One cannot omit any piece of Southern heritage -- either positive or negative -- and claim a love for it. This is the argument that those of us who honor the Confederate heritage part of that heritage promote. We condemn those who seek to destroy the memory of the Confederate soldier or erase his memory to promote an unsavory modern-day politically correct agenda. But in doing so, we cannot cherry pick Southern heritage as a whole and condemn the memories of others, even those who fought against our Confederate ancestors. 

I agree and support the idea that Southern Unionists should be honored, but only for the right reasons. At the same time I reject the idea that Confederate statues should be sacrificed in order to make room for monuments to others, simply to promote the national sin of political correctness. There is more than enough room on our city squares, courthouses, state capitols and other places for monuments, or plaques to Southern-born Union veterans without having to damn the memory of other honored Southern heroes and American veterans.