THE NORTH'S BETRAYAL OF THE OTHER SOUTH

The fate of the Southern Unionists began to be clear with the massacre at Ft. Pillow, where Nathan Bedford Forrest's men massacred white soldiers of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry. Yet, Ft. Pillow is remembered mainly for the massacre of black soldiers. Both Congress and Lincoln forgot the Southern loyalists, and forgotten they are today. These men risked more for their nation than did the men of the North, for they risked execution on capture and consigned their families to the often not-so-tender mercies of their often unforgiving neighbors.

President Andrew Johnson was extremely generous in pardoning ex-Confederates, and in many areas these pardoned men established governments that were inimical to the Union veterans. Some were murdered; many left and went West. In part, they fell into obscurity because Lincoln had seen the African-American population as representing a larger manpower resource during the war. After the war, the Radical Republicans sought to consolidate their power through the freed slaves rather than the Southern Unionists. White loyalists felt alienated in the Republican Party, which tended to give more emphasis to the needs of the freed slaves than to the loyal whites.

There were some exceptions. Colonel Spencer, commander of the First Alabama, was elected governor of Alabama and then Senator, and was the only Southern Republican re-elected to the Senate. Nevertheless, he ended up his years in Nevada, leaving Alabama as the newly re-empowered enslavers began creating the Jim Crow South while the North abandoned Reconstruction in the face of opposition by the white South.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party used the federal government to defend equality before the law and to expand opportunity for ordinary Americans. After the war, they included the newly emancipated southern Black population in their vision of an economy based on legal equality and free labor. When white southerners tried to force their Black neighbors back into submission, Congress passed the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act, establishing the right of Black men to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions.

White southerners who hated the idea that Black men could use the vote to protect themselves terrorized their Black neighbors to keep them from voting. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers and calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop southern Republicans—both Black and white—from voting in favor of the new state constitutions. They killed nearly a thousand Unionists before the 1868 elections, terrorizing their neighbors and undercutting democracy in the South.

Even more effective than Ku Klux Klan ropes and clubs and bullets in the long run, though, were the new tactics to which white Democrats turned when they realized that the violence of the Ku Klux Klan simply hardened Republican resolve. They insisted that government policies promoting black equality were simply a redistribution of wealth as poor men—especially poor Black men—voted for lawmakers who would agree to fund roads and schools and hospitals with tax money. In the postwar South, the people most likely to own taxable property were white men.

Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”

In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.

Their intimidation worked. The antebellum Democrats regained power over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men as they had been before the Civil War, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.

After the restoration of the anti-New Deal Republicans under Ronald Reagan, federal econmomic investment in infrastructure and promotion of economic growth through taxation policy favoring development ceased. While this hurt the country as a whole, it hit the South the hardest. When this was followed by “globalization” that resulted in the hollowing out of American industry - it was the final straw for those “left behind” by the “new economy.”

Ironically, the victory of the “Unreconstructed South” resulted over the years in the near-complete suppression of the real history of the civil war as those who knew differently from the Lost Cause Myth died out. In the end, the descendants of the Southern Unionists largely became the most-resistant to the civil rights movement of the sixties that heralded the possible end of white supremacy. Philadelphia, Mississippi, was once a center of resistance to the Confederacy. In 1964, local members of the reborn Ku Klux Klan - the organization created to deny their ancestors the opportunity to make The Other South a reality - murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney. Ronald Reagan went there in 1980 to announce his candidacy for president on a platform of “states rights.”

Today, the real history is struggling to be rediscovered. Descendants of the members of the First Alabama have created a civil war re-enactor’s group, the First Alabama Cavalry US Volunteers, and they appear at Civil War re-enactments in the South, in uniform, a visual proof of the Other South. The group has created a website where family documents from the period have been digitized and put up for researchers (which is how your author began his own study of Southern Unionists in the Civil War 20 years ago).

Thus endeth the lesson.

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