Loyal to the Old Flag: The Story of Alabama Unionists
It is a story that is largely unknown. Certainly it is not taught in the schools. It is a story of courage, conviction, patriotism, persecution, retribution, and even atrocity. Above all, it is a great American history story worth telling and preserving .
When the gathering dark clouds of war were all encompassing in the South and in Northwest Alabama in particular in the spring of 1861, the voices of dissent were loud and clear. While some were eager to fight for a newly created secessionist government, many others considered an impeding war as a wicked, treasonous undertaking and wanted no part of it.
Indeed, a majority in the hills of Northwest Alabama, mostly poor yeomen dirt farmers, saw little value or reason in taking arms against the federal government. They recognized quite early that this was not their fight, but that it was the landed gentry. It was obvious to the hill folk that the plantation owners and their political spokesmen were fanning the war flames and talked the loudest about separation.
With their money and property and political power, it was the planters who felt most threatened by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.
That “Black Republican” Lincoln, the planters said, would mongrelize the races. He would destroy everything they built as a finer civilization. Southern women would not be safe from roving gangs of black thieves. They only thing to do, the planters contended, was to fight protect their very way of life, to secede and create a government that would protect their interests, protect their property rights, and protect that “peculiar institution.”
Of course, the peculiar institution was slavery.
But in the rugged landscape of northern Alabama, slaves were few and far between. The same was true in the mountains of East Tennessee and North Georgia and western North Carolina, and western Virginia, which would later become a state because of its overwhelming anti-confederate sentiment.
Few slaves were owned in the upland South, simply because the land would not support a plantation economy. Those who did work the land in the mountain South were a fiercely independent breed, poor but proud, and of no mind to lend support to plantation owners who looked down upon them as uneducated and inferior.
Winston County resident James B. Bell, a farmer who owned no slaves, was typical of an Alabama unionist. He blamed secession on large "Negroholders." In a letter to his pro-confederate son in Mississippi on April 21, 1861, he wrote. "All they [slave holders] want is to git you pupt up and go fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o [all] they care."
Southern unionists were not threatened by Lincoln’s election but saw him more as a blank slate. They were willing to give him a chance as president and did not see the federal government as any threat to their property rights.
The Loyalty to Old Hickory
If the inhabitants of the upland South were willing to give a new president the benefit of the doubt, they revered a former president. This was a man who lead their fathers and grandfathers against wild Indians and who tamed the land. He made their very existence here possible. President Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory” was seen as a man of the people. He was also a staunch unionist who warned the Southern aristocracy years before that any talk of busting up the union was madness and any actions to do so would be punished severely.
At a time when the country was about to go war, many Alabama unionists spoke about how President Jackson would have dealt with secession by hanging the ringleaders and crushing the rebellion before it got started.
Indeed, Jackson warned South Carolina on Dec. 10, 1832 that he was prepared to do just that.
“Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy State will inevitably fall the evils of the conflict you force upon the Government of your country. It can not accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims.”
And many Alabama unionists would remember the parting words of their fathers and grandfathers who served with Jackson, and who sensed years before that a war over secession could erupt. The old veterans would warn on their deathbeds to be loyal to the “Old Flag.” And their words were remembered and taken to heart.
So strong was union sentiment in North Alabama and East Tennessee that it was proposed that North Alabama join with unionist East Tennessee to form the loyal state of Nickajack.
The people of Winston County, Alabama, hill farmers of modest means, were typical of southern unionists. In 1860, Winston County was the poorest county in Alabama. The per capita value of property was $168 and the county ranked last in cotton production and slaveholding, with only 2 percent of the families owning slaves.
They were largely an isolated mountain people who had little influence on state government. They knew full well that the aristocracy viewed them as socially inferior and saw the impending conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
It would eventually come to that but only after the southern unionists proclaimed their neutrality. For the most part, the hill people wanted to be left alone, to sit the war out.
But the authorities in Montgomery would have none of it. Montgomery took a dim view to these unionists when they flocked to the riverside to profess their support to arriving gunboats on the Tennessee River in Florence and Decatur. Shortly thereafter, Gov. John Gill Shorter warned that if requisitions made upon the state for volunteers were not duly met by the hill people, then a draft would be ordered on the delinquent counties.
“…in case a draft should be ordered, the Western portion of Walker – And the whole of Winston County will be among the first included, as it is notorious that they have not furnished anything like their proportion of volunteers,” the governor wrote.
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