Alabama Review

Clayton Butler’s first book successfully argues that white southern Unionists played an outsized role in the course and conduct of the Civil War in their home states and that their influence extended well into the Reconstruction era. Belying their small numbers, compared to supporters of the Confederacy, Unionists attracted significant attention [End Page 338] from northern political leaders, especially President Abraham Lincoln, who sought to succor the oppressed patriots of the South, as well as from southern insurrectionists who hated the “Tories” who remained in their midst. Butler argues that military service in support of the United States during the war earned political capital in the post-war period, allowing many Unionists to play substantial roles during the “reconstruction” of their native states. But involvement in political affairs alongside the recently emancipated helped spur the massive resistance from disenfranchised ex-Confederates, who resorted to extralegal violence, intimidation, and election fraud, often aided and abetted by the nascent Ku Klux Klan, to “redeem” their states, maintain white supremacy, and punish those who had fought to save the Union. Though focused primarily on Alabama and Louisiana, Butler’s argument extends across the South, helping to explain the failure of post-war Reconstruction that ultimately led to a second attempt a century later during the Civil Rights movement.

Despite the strong thematic elements, Butler largely organizes the work chronologically, beginning with a brief overview of southern Unionists, then tracing the military service of three southern-raised military units: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (Bradford’s Battalion). These fairly straightforward unit histories build upon previous accounts of the regiments’ service to highlight the sacrifices Unionists made during the war years and to demonstrate how their successes earned the political capital many leaders and members invested in post-war political careers. The final two chapters, the real strength of the book, illustrates these members’ efforts to support Reconstruction in their home states, their wavering stances on Black enfranchisement essential to support Republican majorities, and their eventual defeat at the hands of “Redeemers” who used the cudgel of racial politics to batter them back into the Democratic Party. Though covered only briefly in the conclusion, Butler highlights how these same proponents of the “Myth of the Lost Cause” then rewrote the history of the period to denigrate and exclude the efforts and impact of white southern Unionists, which his book does much to correct. [End Page 339]

At first blush, Butler’s choice of which units to highlight seems to contradict the definition of “Deep South.” Much of the First Louisiana Cavalry came from the urban center of New Orleans, the South’s largest city, which the author admits was “atypical of the Deep South as a whole” (41). As previous works have demonstrated, the unit contained a large proportion of northern and foreign-born soldiers, though several prominent Unionist slaveholding planters, including Henry Taliaferro, also lent their considerable talents to the unit’s eventual successes. Similarly, while Alabama is almost always included in the definition of the “Deep South,” most of that regiment’s soldiers hailed from the Hill Country of northern Alabama, a region where rugged terrain precluded the widespread adoption of chattel slavery typically associated with the Deep South. The author admits that “Northern Alabama in 1861 had more in common demographically and economically with eastern Tennessee than it did with southern Alabama” (13). Oddly, the Thirteenth Tennessee, though nominally from an “Upper South” state, most closely represented “Deep South” Unionism, as the soldiers came from western Tennessee along the Mississippi River, a region with widespread slave-based plantation agriculture.

But the subsequent activities of the commanders and troops of the units make Butler’s choices clearer. The commander of the First Alabama Cavalry, George Spencer, though not a southern Unionist himself, rode the votes of his former...