The subtitle of Silent Cavalry is How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written out of History. Those startling and nearly unknown stories form the spine of Howell Raines’ tremendous new book, but they were not the fuel that propelled him through decades of painstaking research.
What drove this Alabama native to write these 477 pages (before the notes) was a need for absolution – a feeling that was especially powerful in a Birmingham native, then 20, who was humiliated when his hometown became world famous. That happened in 1963, when the public safety commissioner, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than a thousand non-violent protesters determined to end the century of white supremacy that followed the American civil war.
Raines is a former executive editor of the New York Times and the author of a much-admired oral history of the civil rights movement whose title gives another clue to his motivation here: My Soul Is Rested.
As a journalist, he was famous for the cut-throat ambition that pushed him to the top of the Times news department – a perch he lost after less than two years when he was unable to contain a scandal produced by a suspiciously energetic reporter who turned out to be a serial fabulist. But Raines’ road to redemption wasn’t very connected to his life as a journalist. From the evidence in his new book, what mattered most was a fierce quest to find as many relatives as possible who fought against the Confederacy 80 years before he was born. That was the most powerful way he could separate himself from the infamous Alabamians of his youth, Bull Connor and George Wallace, the segregationist governor who ran for the White House.
Early discoveries that buoyed Raines included the fact that his ancestors left Methodism for the Church of God, because of its more enlightened attitude towards “colored people”, as his sister put it, and the discovery of a great grandfather, Hiram Raines, who became a draft dodger after the passage of the Confederate Conscription Act.
It was his uncle Brack who first suggested that Raines might be descended from soldiers who fought to preserve the Union rather than to defend slavery. Raines writes: “I can’t overstate the attraction for someone born, as I was, in the war zone of the desegregation crusade of the possibility that my ancestors … might have followed [Abraham] Lincoln rather than [Jefferson] Davis and [Robert E] Lee.” He describes himself as “the moral archaeologist of my family on matters of race”.
A big part of this multi-layered narrative is devoted to the campaign of prominent historians to suppress the story of non-slave-owning Alabamians who supported the Union. That was just one consequence of historians’ larger effort to rebrand the war, to abolish slavery as its cause and instead tell “a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats on their plantations and the dashing knights of the rebel army”.
This was an “epic feat of disinformation” that reached “its apex in Gone with the Wind”, the film Raines correctly identifies as “the greatest single influence on the national imagination” regarding the civil war.
Raines cites a plausible estimate of 10,000 unionists in north Alabama in 1862, including deserters from the Confederate army who held a convention at which they waved US flags and voted to remain “neutral”. At least 2,678 white Alabama men enlisted in the Union army, including 2,066 who made up the 1st Alabama cavalry – Raines’ principal focus.
“Every root of my family tree rested in the soil of these 18 jurisdictions of north-central Alabama,” Raines exalts.
There are many other pleasures in this book, including an account of WEB Du Bois offering the only challenge to mainstream historians at a 1909 meeting of the American Historical Society. His paper on Reconstruction and Its Benefits would make him a permanent outsider to a profession dominated by professors who believed Black officeholders had presided over a “tragic decade” of political corruption. Du Bois pointed out that Reconstruction actually produced the first public schools in the south, fairer taxation and advances in public transportation and economic development.
“Seldom in the history of the world has an almost totally illiterate population been given the means of self-education in so short a time,” Du Bois said. Nobody listened.
Raines ends with a description of how Ken Burns continued the distortion of history with his much celebrated documentary series on the civil war. Because he relied so heavily on the southern historian Shelby Foote, Burns consistently favored “nostalgia” over “historical illumination”, according to Eric Foner, a great historian of the civil war and Reconstruction at Columbia University in New York. From Notre Dame, James M Lundberg wrote that because of Burns’s work, his civil war lecture was “always packed – with students raised on your sentimental, romantic, deeply misleading portrait of the conflict”.
Worst of all, Burns’s film never mentions the existence of an Alabama regiment in the Union army – because neither he nor his two principal collaborators knew enough to quiz Foote about it. Apparently, they had never seen a 1969 collection, Conversations with Southern Writers, which Raines discovered included this revelation – from Foote:
“I found a whole belt of dissident southerners right along the lower reaches of the Appalachians. It comes down through the end of Tennessee down into northern Alabama and peters out in northern Mississippi. There were a lot of Union-loyal Alabamians, for instance, along that range of hills, and they rode with [Abel] Streight on his raid down there.”
Raines says Foote’s reference to AD Streight, a Union colonel, proves that he knew about the Alabama cavalry in the Union army. But Burns’s viewers never learned about it.
Silent Cavalry is published in the US by Crown
