True Blue : White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction / Clayton J. Butler.

9780807177549

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2022]

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2022

©[2022]

1 online resource (239 pages).

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"Clayton Butler's True Blue answers many vital questions about white Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War, including who they were, why and how they took a Unionist stand, how were they perceived, and what happened to them during and after the war. To address those questions and others, Butler focuses on three Union regiments recruited from white residents of the Deep South: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. By profiling the men in these units, he better understands their motivations, expectations, and experiences during the war and after it. Utilizing service records, newspapers, speeches, letters, diaries, and Southern Claims Commission files, among other sources, Butler argues that white Unionists occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and Confederacy because they possessed broad symbolic importance as a group. Northerners and southerners alike thought and wrote a considerable amount about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their respective hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters. For both, the importance of white Unionists during the war hinged on their role in each nations' future. To northerners, they represented the tangible nucleus of national loyalty within the rebelling states on which they expected to build Reconstruction. To Confederates, they were traitors to the cause and the white race. The would-be nation demanded loyalty from all persons living within its borders, which these men defiantly repudiated. At times, Confederates met this dissent with vicious reprisal. Most importantly, Unionists' wartime allegiance and service to the United States proved a key touchstone during the political chaos and realignment of Reconstruction, a period in which many of these veterans played a crucial and underappreciated role. According to Butler, white southerners who opposed the Confederacy and supported the Union without qualification during the war have a great deal to teach today's readers. For example, their consistent prioritization of the Union holds the key to Reconstruction's unfolding, since no biracial political or social coalition ever materialized in the Deep South to the degree necessary to ensure its success there. That happened because white Unionists proved willing to ally with African Americans during the war to save the Union but were unwilling to commit afterward to protecting or advancing Black civil rights. Only by understanding the continuity of southern Unionists' values and goals between the war and its aftermath-their fundamental antipathy toward secession, with slavery as its genesis, without solicitude for the enslaved-can we fully understand the decisive forces of the era completely. Butler's work is the first to make the case that the historical significance of the white Unionists of the Deep South lies chiefly in the ways that both the Union and Confederacy imagined and treated them, from the secession crisis through the war and especially into the postwar period. While Unionists did not alter the war's outcome, they did determine the shape of the subsequent peace. Indeed, their most significant impact came after the war, during Reconstruction, when they migrated back into the Democratic Party fold, all but dooming the tenuous Republican coalition in the Deep South"-- Provided by publisher

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July 19, 2023

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