True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860-1880 Clayton J. Butler M.A., University of Virginia, 2016 B.A., Pomona College, 2010 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia March 2020 For My Mother and Sister And in Memory of My Father 2 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER ONE “WE ARE TRUE BLUE”: ORIGINS AND PERCEPTIONS 16 OF DEEP SOUTH UNIONISTS, 1860-1862 CHAPTER TWO “THE FIRST AND STRONGEST PROOF OF THE 50 RESTORATION OF GOVERNMENT”: THE FIRST LOUISIANA CAVALRY (U.S.), 1862-1865 CHAPTER THREE “THE ACID TEST OF TRUE UNIONISM”: THE FIRST 95 ALABAMA CAVALRY (U.S.), 1862-1865 CHAPTER FOUR “A TERRIBLE RETRIBUTION”: BRADFORD’S 132 BATTALION AND THE MASSACRE AT FORT PILLOW CHAPTER FIVE LOSING THE PEACE: WHITE UNIONISTS IN THE 167 DEEP SOUTH DURING RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1885 EPILOGUE “GONE FROM VIEW, MINGLED IN PEACE” 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 225 3 Introduction In the early 1990s, a friend of Tennessean Glenda McWhirter Todd asked her if she would care to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy. “Sure,” Todd responded, “my great, great grandfather, Andrew Ferrier McWhirter, from Marion County, Alabama, was in the Civil War.” Excited at the prospect, she set out to educate herself about her assumed Confederate heritage. To her “surprise” and “dismay,” she learned her ancestor had actually fought for the Union and was buried in the national cemetery in Nashville. Notwithstanding her dismay at learning of her non-Confederate ancestry, Todd began to conduct more research. Andrew McWhirter, service records revealed, had served in Company K of the First Alabama Cavalry (U.S.), along with two of his sons – George and Thomas. Todd had known none of this, but decided to keep digging and eventually compiled a number of voluminous resources on the First Alabama Cavalry into an amateur history of the unit titled Homage to Patriotism, which she published in 1999.1 In spite of her ambivalent reaction to learning the truth of her family history, Todd sought to bring her ancestor and those like him to light. She hoped to spread awareness of the presence of Unionists and Unionism in parts of the South where many people, she had good reason to believe, presumed them not to have existed. Recovery of the history and memory of regiments such as the First Alabama provides a new angle on the Union cause for scholars of the American Civil War. White southern Unionists illustrate better than most of their contemporaries the terms of attachment to the Union in 1 Glenda McWhirter Todd, First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A.—Homage to Patriotism (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books Inc., 1999), v; Compiled service records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Alabama, First Cavalry, M276, roll 6, RG94, NARA, “McWhirter, Andrew F” [https://www.fold3.com/image/272/109781366]. Hereafter cited as CSR, Alabama, First Cavalry. 4 nineteenth-century America and its traction as a concept worth fighting for, one that could find steadfast adherents even in the heart of the Confederacy.2 In the Deep South, unconditional white Unionists composed an undeniably small percentage of the total population. Yet an examination of their aims, expectations, and experiences – as well as the place they occupied in the minds of those in both the United States and the Confederacy – helps to shed light on some of the most crucial issues of the entire era. Relatively few in number compared to pro-Confederate neighbors or even their Upper South counterparts, Deep South Unionists as a group possessed a remarkable economic, political, and cultural diversity that makes their wartime alignment in support of the preservation of the Union all the more interesting, and their subsequent postwar divergence all the more instructive. During the Civil War era, Unionists took on a symbolic importance out of proportion to their limited numbers. But, as the case of Glenda Todd illustrates, the intervening years extinguished almost all awareness of their existence. These particular Unionists, long unacknowledged and still understudied, can teach contemporary scholars much about the Civil War and Reconstruction. This dissertation engages several central questions. Who were the white Unionists of the Deep South? Why did they take their Unionist stand? How did they do so? How were they perceived by people in the Confederacy and the United States? And what happened to them as a result both during and after the war? To address these questions, this dissertation focuses on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents of the Deep South, individuals who passed what historian Carl Degler called the 2 Todd passed away in 2017. 5 “severest test” of their Unionism by volunteering to enlist in the army.3 The First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry – also known as Bradford’s Battalion – served as the point of embarkation for my research.4 In a historical moment of layered and shifting national identities which scholars continue to analyze, a white southerner donning a blue Federal uniform represented the most unambiguous expression of national allegiance one could make.5 Profiling these soldiers, their backgrounds and communities, and following the various threads of evidence that they provided offered valuable insight into the motivations, expectations, and experiences of white Unionists throughout the Deep South.6 Though not representative of every manifestation of Deep South Unionism, these regiments – whose base of recruitment and areas of service extended beyond their geographic appellations – tell the fullest possible story. And a number of fascinating stories emerge in the telling—such as that of Henry Bullard Taliaferro, Sherman’s only loyal pupil at the Louisiana state military academy, who joined the First Louisiana Cavalry; his father, James Govan Taliaferro, who went from slaveholder in 1860 to president of the radical Louisiana state constitutional convention in 1867; Algernon Sidney Badger, who ended the war as colonel of the First Louisiana Cavalry and became 3 Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters In The Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 174. 4 The Union military raised several white infantry regiments as well – in Louisiana and Arkansas for example – but favored deploying southern Unionists as cavalry because of their aptitude for scouting and knowledge of the country that northern soldiers could not match. 5 Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers From the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 139-147; John A. Hedrick to Benjamin S. Hedrick, July 27, 1862; August 24, 1862. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick Papers #325, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 6 See David M. Potter, "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa." The American Historical Review, vol. 67, no. 4, 1962, 924 – 950; Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13; Judkin Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 4. 6 chief of the New Orleans Metropolitan Police during Reconstruction and fought side by side with James Longstreet against the White League at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1875; George Rudolph Snelling, a native Georgian who served as one of Sherman’s guides on the March to the Sea and who went out of his way to destroy his hated secessionist uncle’s cotton gin; his unit, the entire First Alabama Cavalry, in which Snelling rose to captain and whose colonel George Eliphaz Spencer became the state’s carpetbag senator in 1868 and served until 1879; and William Frederick Bradford, whose battalion of white west Tennesseans faced the murderous wrath of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederates at the battle of Fort Pillow and who, for the crime of fighting in league with African Americans, received summary execution at the hands of Forrest’s men. Beyond their individually compelling stories, Deep South Unionists possessed broader symbolic importance as a group. Partisans in the United States and the Confederacy thought and wrote about them a considerable amount over the course of the conflict, often projecting onto them in ways that revealed their respective hopes and apprehensions. To northerners, they represented the tangible nucleus of Union support within the rebelling states on which Reconstruction policies could be built. White southern Union soldiers made up the vanguard of wartime reconstruction, and symbolized the government’s efforts to harmonize the military and political elements of reunion. Both northern Democrats and Republicans rhetorically enlisted Unionists to their side during the war and framed their platforms and policies as designed for their benefit.7 To Confederates, these Deep South Unionists represented Tories, traitors to the 7 See Elizabeth R. Varon, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6. 7 political ideals of the Confederacy and, most important as the war went on, to the white race. Unionists’ wartime allegiance and service to the United States then became an important touchstone during the political chaos and realignment of Reconstruction, a period when many of these veterans played an important role. * * * * * * * * * * * * For much of the twentieth century, the pervasiveness of the Lost Cause historiographical narrative discouraged many people from looking for Unionists in the heart of the Confederacy. The Unionists’ marginal status in contemporary popular memory reflects their minimal place in academic writing on Civil War over the long term.8 Mainstream scholars of the mid twentieth century tended to explain away instances of both upcountry and urban Unionism within the Confederacy as anomalous pockets of ignorance and political apathy.