White Southerners Who Fought for the Union Army

[David Lockmiller]

After 1830, the best farm acreage was bought up by the wealthy owners of Atlantic seaboard plantations, who brought slavery and their own aristocratic pretensions into new states such as Alabama. Poorer farmers had to settle for small farms in the Appalachian foothills. They could not afford enslaved people, and their Unionism had deep historical roots. The original highland homesteaders revered the “Old Flag” that their forefathers fought for in the Revolution and the War of 1812. Most of the some 100,000 future Union volunteers from the South were Jacksonian Democrats who hewed to Old Hickory’s 1830 dictum that the Union “must be preserved.”

The county (the Free State of Winston) was one of 22 in central and northern Alabama that elected anti-Secession delegates to the enslaver-dominated convention that took Alabama out of the Union on Jan. 11, 1861, by the unexpectedly close vote of 61 to 39.

In 1862, Gen. Carlos Buell got Abraham Lincoln’s permission to organize the “Alabama volunteers” into their own regiment – the First Alabama Union Cavalry. White volunteers from the Confederate states made up almost 5 percent of Lincoln’s army.