Buried Truth

They fought Confederate troops in some of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of the Civil War, carried out dangerous missions of espionage, and won the admiration of their Union officers.

But for more than a century, many historians with sympathies for the Confederacy have covered up, ignored, and twisted the story of this regiment—a unit consisting mostly of soldiers not from Massachusetts or New York, but from the Confederate state of Alabama.

Birmingham native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Howell Raines says he spent decades searching through archival records and pouring over Civil War documents and texts, trying to uncover details about the First Alabama Cavalry U.S.A. and the men from Alabama’s hill country who fought on the side of the Union.

The search for details about the First Alabama Cavalry proved frustrating for decades because many historians, archivists, and even southern newspaper editors either ignored or omitted details about the regiment from historical records. Others hid the historical records all together.

“History is not what happened. It’s what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic, and cultural authorities,” Raines writes.

In his new book, Silent Cavalry, Raines, a former executive editor at The New York Times, tells the story of the white men from Alabama’s hill country who voluntarily fought for the Union army and how scholars, along with librarians, archivists, writers, and others favoring the Confederacy conspired to erase the evidence of the First Alabama Cavalry U.S.A., from the history books. 

“This was the hardest book that I’ve ever written of the five books I’ve written because it has so many layers. Every time I would start down one path, it would open up another path,” he says.

Jacksonian Democrats with No Skin in the Game

The path to understanding the First Alabama Cavalry starts in Alabama’s hill country, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Hill country includes Winston and Walker counties, Raines explains in Silent Cavalry, and his own maternal and fraternal ancestors lived there.

The Scotch Irish immigrants who settled in the hill country between Jasper, Alabama, and Huntsville to the Tennessee line tended to be less wealthy than the slave-holding plantation class in Alabama’s southern region, Raines says.

“These were small farmers. Farms were at most 160 acres, but usually about 40 acres, and they didn’t produce enough wealth for the famers to have the capital to participate in the slave economy of mass-scale cotton growing,” he says.

“So economically, they didn’t have a stake in the plantation South. More important politically to me is that they were followers of Andrew Jackson,” Raines says.

President Andrew Jackson was the political hero of North Alabama, says Raines. Jackson famously argued for the preservation of the Union, saying that it was too important, too sacred, to be torn apart over any issue, including slavery.

North Alabamians supported staying in the Union, calling themselves Jacksonian Democrats. Meanwhile, the national debate over slavery and threats of secession from slave-holding states in the South continued fracturing the country through the 1850s.

But the commonly held belief that all whites – and all whites in Alabama in particular – supported secession has been a myth pushed forward for decades by historians sympathetic to the Confederacy, Raines says.

In fact, records from the Secession Convention of 1860 show that on the first test vote on whether Alabama should side with the Republicans and stay in the Union or support the Democrats and leave, even though the plantation owners controlled the convention, the pro-secession, pro-Confederate supporters prevailed by only nine votes, he says.

During and following the Civil War, many hill country residents leaned Republican, including Raines’s paternal grandparents, Hiram and Martha Jane Raines, and his maternal grandparents, Robert and Martha Walker.

Even Raines’s parents, Wattie and Bertha Raines, voted for Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948 in opposition to most white Alabamians who favored an extreme right-wing faction of the Democratic Party called the Dixiecrats and its candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

In his book, the author credits his parents for never uttering racist language, treating Blacks fairly, and never displaying images of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate flags in their home the way other whites did at the time.

Pushing the “Lost Cause” Narrative

Historians sympathetic to the Confederacy have promoted what is called the “Lost Cause,” narrative, a myth that lends support to white supremacy by unfairly criticizing Union forces and portraying the Confederate forces as more honorable soldiers who fought against overwhelming odds to preserve and protect their Southern way of life, their cotton plantations, and their grateful slaves against the malevolent and marauding Union forces.

The “Lost Cause” narrative in higher education can be traced back to New Jersey native and Columbia University history professor William Archibald Dunning.

Dunning, who led the American Historical Association in 1903, sympathized with the South, criticized post-Civil War Reconstruction, and is credited for influencing the first generation of professionally trained historians in “Lost Cause” scholarship, Raines writes.

“He shaped the Civil War canon and continues to influence the American imagination with romantic fictions about paternalistic planters and servile slaves,” he says.

The Lost Cause myth also furthers the idea that all southern whites supported a split from the Union. But in Silent Cavalry, Raines tells the story of the white, hill country men who rebelled against the Confederacy under the inspiration of Winston County native Charles Christopher Sheats.

“I think he (Chris Sheats) is the most neglected major figure in Alabama history,” Raines says.

Chris Sheats and the Rally at Looney’s Tavern

Born in 1839, Charles Christopher Sheats was a young school teacher who became a local celebrity in Winston County for his political speechmaking and establishing himself as a passionate defender of the Union.

On December 24, 1860, Alabama held a statewide election in which each county elected two delegates to represent them at the secession convention scheduled for January 7, 1861, in Montgomery. Sheats won a delegate seat by beating the richest plantation owner in Winston County, a man who owned up to 30 of the 100 slaves in the county at that time.

At the convention, Sheats was one of 24 delegates out of 100 who refused to sign the Ordinance of Secession.

Afterward, Sheats returned to Winston County to organize Unionist support and to encourage residents to oppose the Confederacy; he kicked off one of the biggest anti-war rallies in antebellum history at Looney’s Tavern, a well-known site in Winston County, just north of Haleyville.

Moreover, Sheats helped hill country men dodge the compulsory draft by hiding in caves and forests.

Some of those who escaped managed to reach Union lines.

Alabama Soldiers on the Union Front Lines

Major Gen. Don Carlos Buell of the Union army devised a plan to recruit Unionist sympathizers from Winston and adjacent counties to form the First Alabama Cavalry. Through his Order No. 106 on August 8, 1862, he organized the recruits into companies and enrolled them into the United States service.

“They were integrated into the Union Army with amazing speed,” Raines says.

After enlisting in Huntsville and Decatur, most of the recruits then crossed the Mississippi border to a camp near Corinth, Mississippi. That is where unit commanders Grenville Dodge and Col. George Spencer began leading and training them for battle.

“So, they very quickly came into a prominent role, and this is part of their miraculous history, which again, is not noted in Alabama history books,” Raines says.

“They had on-the-job training in combat, fighting the best cavalry in the Confederate states, and they got whipped some, but they learned very quickly how to be a good cavalry unit.”

After proving their bravery, Col. Spencer came up with the idea of training the First Alabama cavalrymen for spying missions where they infiltrated Confederate lines to bring back critical information.

The Cavalry’s exploits brought them some notoriety and attracted the attention of Gen. Ulysses Grant and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Raines says.

Gen. Sherman eventually recruited the First Alabama Cavalry to escort his troops, and the regiment was present when Sherman’s troops burned Atlanta in 1864.

A Shrine to the Confederacy

After the war and following Reconstruction, southern Democrats championing the Confederacy and white supremacy set about expunging the names of white and Black Republican office holders from official records. Moreover, newspaper reports began ignoring or ridiculing Republicans and even misrepresenting some of them as “outsiders” rather than as native Alabamians, Raines writes.

Then in 1901, the scholar and national historian general of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Thomas McAdory Owen founded what is today the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In fact, Alabama was the first state in the country to establish an official treasury for state records.

But Owen – and later his wife, Marie Bankhead Owen, who became the department director in 1920 after his death – decreed that the Alabama archive would be a shrine to Confederate memory and thereby chose not to preserve the records of the 3,000 white Alabamians who fought for the Union or the more than 10,000 former slaves from Alabama who fought with the Union army, Raines says.

In addition to the suppression of historical records by scholars who followed in the Dunning “Lost Cause” tradition, historians such as Walter Fleming and William Hoole published negative depictions of whites in north Alabama, or “Tories,” portraying them as hillbillies and moonshiners. Fleming once wrote, “The Alabama tory was, as a rule, the lowest class of the population.”

Layers of Lies

“People who hold political power or cultural autonomy through, say, religion, they decide what gets written down,” says Raines. “So that’s why we have this totally distorted version of Alabama history which not only ignores Black history, but also ignores the history of the two-thirds of Alabama white people who didn’t own slaves, at least half of whom opposed the Civil War altogether.”

“The two big lies about Alabama history and the Lost Cause version of national history are that it was not about slavery but was about states’ rights. But if you go back and look at the original oratory in the Alabama Legislature, it was always all about, ‘We want to own slaves and we’re not going to be stopped,’” he says.

The second lie is the notion that white southerners monolithically supported secession from the Union, he says.

“Modern polling didn’t exist then, but by looking at voting records, we can pretty well establish that at any given moment half of the white voters in Alabama in 1860 – that is to say white men – did not want to leave the Union. They wanted to preserve the Union. They didn’t want to fight to preserve slavery.”

The impact of this kind of revisionist history has had a profound impact on modern scholarship. Books by scholars such as Shelby Foote and even documentaries such as The Civil War  by filmmaker Ken Burns make no mention of the First Alabama Cavalry.

Revealing the Full Picture

Raines says that in recent years, a new crop of young historians has emerged, breaking from the “Lost Cause” myth and publishing papers and books that offer a more accurate take on the Civil War.

In fact, he recalls a recent incident when he and his grandson Jasper visited the Alabama Department of Archives and History to hunt for any materials on the First Alabama Cavalry.

One of the curators handed over three wrapped bundles of records in white muslin cloth, and Raines immediately recognized the name of Col. George E. Spencer, the commander of the First Alabama Cavalry.

“These turned out to be the original handwritten muster rolls of the first three companies of the First Alabama Cavalry as they assembled in Corinth, Mississippi,” he says.

“As best we can reconstruct it, we think this might be what happened: When Thomas McAdory Owen was working with the Library of Congress in Washington, the director said something like, ‘Here’s some Alabama records. Take them home with you. I think they’ve been buried in the Alabama archives for over 100 years.’”

But the question is, says Raines, did Owen misfile the documents to ensure they would remain hidden forever, or were they misfiled by accident?

Today, these materials about the First Alabama Cavalry are digitized and available on the Alabama Department of Archives and History website.

“Now they’re available to everyone,” Raines says. “They’ll not only be important for Civil War scholars, but they’ll also be tremendously important for Alabama genealogies because by now, the 3,000 original white Union soldiers from Alabama have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of descendants.

“There are many Alabamians who’ve been deprived of their family history, who will now have access to it,” says Raines. “This isn’t re-enlivening divisions in Alabama. It’s showing that we have a much more cohesive, unified history than we ever knew.

“That includes the descendants of former slaves and includes the descendants of mountain farmers and those who revere their Confederate ancestors. So, I think for the first time, we’re getting a full picture of Civil War Alabama.”