In late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncle’s fields alongside those his uncle enslaved. Now Snelling returned home as a Lieutenant in the Army of the United States, commanding Company I of the First Alabama Cavalry–though detached on temporary duty as commander of the headquarters escort for General William Tecumseh Sherman. The homecoming was not a happy one, at least for Snelling’s uncle. The troopers who accompanied Snelling took what provisions they could find, and then at Snelling’s direction burned down the family’s cotton gin.

Snelling and the First Alabama were some of the very small percentage of Unionists who persisted in the Deep South following secession. Yet Clayton Butler argues that their importance in the minds of both the Union and the Confederacy “helps to shed light on some of the most crucial issues of the entire era.”  He examines these Unionists, and those illuminated issues, in his new book True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

For Further Investigation

The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, in Greeneville, Tennessee

An informative website constructed by historical reenactors who interpret the First Alabama Cavalry (USV)

The image is of a Union scout in Louisiana, during the Red River campaign of 1864. For more,  ""Union Scouts in Louisiana," artist's impression, Harper's Weekly, May 1864, detail," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College

For an introduction to Reconstruction, see the conversation in Episode 67 with Douglas Egerton. For a view of the Civil War that dovetails nicely with this conversation, see Episode 132, a conversation with historian Elizabeth Varon.