If you care to, look up the Alabama 1st Calvary U.S.V. - they were drawn from this area. And it was an integrated unit from the beginning, with several southern blacks in the ranks.
Winston County, which is next to us, actually seceded from the state of Alabama, using the logic that if a state could secede from the Union, they could secede from the state.
In Alabama, if you look at the numbers of slaves by county and area - as in largely they were in Southern Alabama, though also some large portions in some of the northern area in the Tennessee Valley that had land that worked for large farm holdings, ergo plantations with slaves... but in the north, that was an exception. Anyways, those clever bastards had set it up that a slave owner got to vote on behalf of their slaves, the slaves being 3/5 of a person/vote. If not for that, Alabama would not have seceded, as it was the votes of slave-owners using their votes given to them for the slaves they owned that made the vote swing.
100,000 plus white southerners fought for the union, in addition to larger #'s of blacks who did.
This is something that especially poor southern whites in the mountain areas need to remember... to be unignoranted about if they have forgotten it, to embrace... they were and are of the Union. The Plantation owners of old, the rich white men, Southern and Northern and Western, got nothing to offer them.
MLK Jr articulated it and was beginning to work on it more seriously when he was assassinated... the connection between blacks and poor whites. Nixon didn't win with the Southern strategy without passive help from non-Southern whites who rather than listening and reaching out and working for votes simply ignored the South. They, too, like you, lumped us all together. And I don't include you in that to diss you in any way. It's history as we mostly have been taught it. It is a conception of people as we have taught it, without context.
The Union won the war, but then they left the South, both blacks and sympathetic whites to Forrest and his KKK.
thank you again for letting me rant. :) |
