These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War

By John S. Sledge

I couldn’t stop reading it! Bravo!” —Ken Burns, Emmy Award-winning producer and director of The Civil War

In These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War, John S. Sledge offers a riveting and readable account of Alabama’s Civil War saga. Focused on the conflict’s turning points within the state’s borders, Sledge recounts residents’ experiences from secession’s early days to its tumultuous collapse, when 75,000 blue-coated soldiers were on the move statewide. Sledge brings these tumultuous years to life in an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including official records, diaries, newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, sketches, and photographs. He also highlights such colorful personalities as John Pelham, the youthful Jacksonville artillerist who was shipped home in an iron casket with a glass faceplate; Gus Askew, a nine-year-old Barbour County slave who vividly recalled the day the Yankees marched in; Augusta Jane Evans, the Mobile novelist who was given a gold pen by a daring blockade runner; and Emma Sansom, a plucky Gadsden teenager who acted as a scout and guide to Nathan Bedford Forrest.

These Rugged Days is an enthralling tale of action, courage, pride, and tragedy. The Civil War has left indelible marks on Alabama’s land, culture, economy, and people, and Sledge offers a refreshing take on the state's role in the conflict. His narrative is a dramatic account that will be enjoyed by lay readers as well as students and scholars of Alabama and the Civil War. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391423

John S. Sledge

John S. Sledge is senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and Spanish from Auburn University and a master's in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. Sledge is the author of six previous books, including Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart; The Mobile River; and These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War.

Book preview

THESE RUGGED DAYS

THESE RUGGED DAYS

Alabama in the Civil War

JOHN S. SLEDGE

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Frontispiece: Civil War Alabama map; copyright by Nicholas Holmes III

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond and Futura

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Wilson’s Charge; painting by Don Stivers; courtesy Stivers Publishing

Cover design: Gary Gore

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1960-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9142-3

Publication of These Rugged Days is made possible in part through the generosity of the A. S. Mitchell Foundation and the Alabama Bicentennial Commission Foundation.

For the people of the great state of Alabama, and in memory of Thomas Tyler Potterfield, friend of many years

Hereafter you shall recount to your children, with conscious pride, the story of these rugged days, and you will always greet a comrade of the old brigade with open arms.

—Brig. Gen. R. L. Gibson’s farewell to his troops upon their surrender after the Mobile campaign, May 8, 1865

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Chasing Wilson’s Raiders with Aunt Octavia

Introduction: Alabama, 1860

1. Secession

2. War in the Valley

3. Mobile under Blockade

4. Streight’s Raid, 1863

5. Rousseau’s Raid, 1864

6. The Battle of Mobile Bay

7. Wilson’s Raid, 1865

8. The Mobile Campaign

9. Montgomery Falls

Epilogue: White Columns and the Gun That Won the Civil War

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.   Aunt Octavia

2.   Ebenezer Baptist Church, 2015

3.   Gaineswood

4.   Slaves Shipping Cotton by Torchlight

5.   Governor Andrew Moore

6.   Selma Independent Blues

7.   Jefferson Davis’s inauguration

8.   Varina Howell Davis

9.   Federal vessels cut out the schooner Aid

10. USS Tyler

11. Kate Cumming

12. Federal troops at Huntsville

13. Gen. Philip D. Roddey

14. CSS Florida

15. John Newland Maffitt

16. Gen. Dabney H. Maury

17. Impressment form

18. Col. Abel D. Streight

19. A Confederate cavalryman

20. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest

21. A gun explodes aboard the USS Jackson

22. Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau

23. Castle Morgan, Cahaba

24. Adm. David Glasgow Farragut

25. CSS Gaines

26. Adm. Franklin Buchanan

27. Fort Morgan after the siege

28. Gen. James Harrison Wilson

29. Ruins of Bibb Naval Furnace, Brierfield

30. A sketch of Selma, May 1865

31. Gen. E. R. S. Canby

32. Site of Blakeley

33. Union siege works at Spanish Fort

34. Federal steamboats moor at Alabama River landing

35. Gus Askew

36. White Columns

Plates

Following page 102

1.   Colton’s Alabama map, 1859

2.   Flag of the Magnolia Cadets, 1861

3.   Emma Sansom monument

4.   Map of upper Mobile Bay defenses

5.   USS Richmond

6.   Federals search for Rebels in a cave

7.   Battle of Mobile Bay

8.   Battle of Blakeley

Acknowledgments

I must begin by thanking Joseph Meaher for his enduring interest in Alabama history in general and my work in particular. Joe encouraged me to seek the support of Mobile’s A. S. Mitchell Foundation for this project, and the trustees happily agreed. Jay Lamar of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission was also an early advocate, and her enthusiasm throughout has meant a great deal. I am very proud that These Rugged Days is part of the state’s official bicentennial observances.

One of the joys of doing any Alabama history project is the generous assistance of so many dedicated and talented professionals at libraries, archives, museums, historic sites, and universities. To begin with, profoundest gratitude goes to Robert Bradley, recently retired from the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH); Mike Bunn of Blakeley State Park; and Mike Bailey of the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC) at Fort Morgan. These three gentlemen served as an indispensable Civil War brain trust, reviewing the manuscript and saving me from innumerable errors. Their expertise is astonishing, exceeded only by their good cheer. I consider it a privilege to have received so much of their time and attention. Numerous other individuals at various institutions provided help in small ways and large. Thanks go to Steven Murray, Scotty Kirkland, and Debbie Pendleton (recently retired) at ADAH; Jacqlyn Kirkland of the AHC; Charles Torrey and Nick Beeson of the History Museum of Mobile; Lauren Vanderbijl, Robert Allen, Melanie Thornton, and Bob Peck of the Historic Mobile Preservation Society; Cart Blackwell of the Mobile Historic Development Commission; Ned Harkins, Zennia Calhoun, and Pamela Major of the Mobile Municipal Archives; Jane Daugherty at the Mobile Public Library, Local History and Genealogy Division; Jo Ann Flirt of Blakeley State Park; Becky Nichols, Crystal Drye, and Stephen Posey at the Selma-Dallas County Public Library; Susanna Leberman of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library; Judy Bolton at the LSU Libraries Special Collections; and the Rev. Danny Rasberry at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Stanton, Alabama. The following friends and colleagues provided important assistance at various points along the way: David Alsobrook, Dan Brooks, Hardy Jackson, E. C. LeVert, Holly Jansen, Jacob Laurence, Sheila Flanagan, Mildred Orr, Roy Hoffman, Hudson McDonald, Stephen McNair, Tracy Stivers, Walter Edgar, Robert Gamble, Ken Niemeyer, Tom Root, Mike Mahan, Ken Noe, and Jim Day. At the University of Alabama Press, retired director Curtis Clark and acting director Dan Waterman expressed early and sincere interest in yet another Civil War book. Working with them and the press staff has been a distinct pleasure. Special thanks go to Nicholas H. Holmes III for the stunning map of Civil War Alabama. Nick is an old and dear friend, and this collaboration has been a delight.

Lastly, my family has been wonderful. My lovely wife, Lynn, edited the manuscript with her usual eagle eye for clarity and served as an invaluable sounding board. Our children, Matthew and Elena, both living upstate, have endured more than their share of historic site visits over the years with remarkable good humor. Their love and support buoys me. And then there’s my mother, Jeanne Arceneaux Sledge, who read this book as I wrote it and offered helpful insight and encouragement. It is easy sometimes for a writer to get lost in the forest, but family always helps me regain the path.

There are no doubt errors herein, but they should be laid solely at my door.

Prologue

Chasing Wilson’s Raiders with Aunt Octavia

Virtually every southern boy of my generation has vivid memories of the Civil War Centennial. Reenactments, pageants, billboards, advertisements, full-page newspaper articles, and even restaurant menus celebrating the momentous anniversary were everywhere. Caught up in the excitement, my buddies and I refought the war throughout the woods and subdivisions of our little piece of the South. With high hearts, we nailed a Confederate battle flag to a wooden slat and hollered our juvenile Rebel yells as we overran the hated Yankees’ positions. The enemy was imaginary, of course, since none of us wanted to be a Yankee, even in play.

Home was Montevallo in southern Shelby County, Alabama, a small college town of about 3,000 people then, thirty-three miles south of Birmingham. In fact, our community was just about as close to the geographical center of the state as it was possible to be, with a marble stone attesting to the fact off Highway 25, a little west of the city limit.¹ Downtown consisted of Main Street, a short commercial drag of one- and two-story Victorian-era buildings occupied by a bank, the post office, drug stores, a five-and-dime, clothiers, a book shop, a jeweler, and the Strand Theater. The charming Alabama College campus was only two blocks away. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm in 1896, the campus is still notable for its handsome red brick buildings and streets lined with graceful pecans and oaks. My family moved there in 1962 when Dad took a position as a biology professor at the school (rebranded the University of Montevallo seven years later).

Not content merely to study and act out the major Civil War battles like Antietam and Chickamauga that everybody had heard of, my buddies and I were eager to learn about the conflict in our own neck of the woods. And like any southern burg worth its salt, Montevallo could boast of a little fighting between the blue and the gray. For it was there, in the wet spring of 1865, that Union Maj. Gen. James Harrison Wilson’s thunderbolt cavalry raid into the heart of the Deep South first encountered serious resistance. Somewhere along what is Highway 119 today, a smattering of Rebel cavalry under the command of Gen. Philip D. Roddey engaged the Yankees and was driven through downtown. Montevallo’s capture was important to the Federals, even though it was little more than a dot on the map. It was there that the Alabama and Tennessee River Railroad connected from Talladega to the northwest and then bent south arrow-straight for Selma, Wilson’s main objective. Montevallo was also the seat of a rich industrial district, and numerous foundries, rolling mills, and collieries were in the vicinity, perhaps none more critical than the Bibb Naval Furnace five miles away at Brierfield. Even as Union regiments fanned out to destroy these industrial assets, Roddey set up a skirmish line two miles south of Montevallo to try to check the advance. Undeterred, the Fifth Iowa made a mounted charge complete with blaring bugles, fluttering guidons, snorting horses, jangling spurs, flopping canteens, and flashing sabers. The Rebel line broke and a running fight commenced all the way to Selma. I am satisfied that . . . [Wilson] drove us fifteen miles an hour a part of the time, one Southron later recalled. Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the famed Wizard of the Saddle, joined Roddey in the midst of this fracas, but even he and his legendary paladins couldn’t quell the blue tide.²

For school-aged boys, this was heady stuff indeed, and we enthusiastically plunged into the fields and woods in a frenzied hunt for artifacts. The most promising territory was along Mahan Creek in Brierfield, where we knew from our history-minded fathers and our own reading that brisk skirmishing had occurred. Mahan Creek is a lovely stream that threads north and west through Bibb County’s rolling farms and woodlands, eventually spilling into the Little Cahaba River. In her elegiac 1910 history, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama, Ethel Armes wrote that the banks of Mahan’s Creek droop with live oaks, cedar, and sycamore, yellow jessamine, and wild honeysuckle, yellow and red. Springs, at least forty in number, feed its course all along its way.³ Needless to say, this was a boy’s paradise, and since part of the land alongside the stream was owned by our family dentist, Dr. Mike Mahan, we had the run of it.

Chuck Hogue made the big find. If memory serves, he lived out that way himself, and one day while walking along a dirt road he spotted what looked like an iron pipe jutting out of the ground. As he told us later, he began digging around it, and as more of it was revealed, realized he had actually discovered a gun barrel. Excitedly pulling at it and digging farther down into the hard red clay, he eventually loosened the barrel enough to yank it free. My first glimpse of this find came when Chuck and his father brought it to Dad for identification. Dad was quite knowledgeable about the Civil War and had a fine collection of period guns and accoutrements he had acquired as a boy during the 1930s for laughable prices at surplus outfits. In truth Chuck’s barrel wasn’t much to look at, heavily rusted and the wooden stock long gone. Because there was a piece of quartz jammed in the breech, they thought it might be an old flintlock musket. But Dad knew immediately that it was a Spencer Carbine, a seven-shot repeater that had been standard issue for Wilson’s troopers. Exhausted butternut cavalrymen armed with Colt pistols and homegrown militias of old men and boys toting 10-pound single-shot muzzle loaders didn’t stand a chance against this ingenious weapon of war. Little wonder they’d dubbed it the danged Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot the rest of the week.⁴

I never will forget how it felt to actually hold a tangible piece of Civil War history. It spoke volumes that a valuable gun like that had been left behind. It was highly unlikely that a trooper would have simply lost it, as the consequences for such negligence were severe. No, my friends and I reflected in our discussions of this marvel, some Yankee had been shot out of the saddle by one of Roddey’s men. Amid the dust and confusion of a full-on cavalry charge, the carbine was knocked into a ditch or covered by debris. Whatever the case, there it stayed for a century, until rain exposed it to the light again and a country boy happened to pass by. Gazing at that rusted Spencer, Wilson’s Raid ceased to be an abstraction and became actual, even if still removed in time.

Happily, Chuck Hogue’s archaeological triumph wasn’t to be my only close brush with the historical reality of Wilson’s Raid. As I soon learned, memories of the event were still within reach, albeit secondhand, through the magical storytelling ability of my great aunt Octavia Wynn, or Ta Ta (pronounced tay-tay) to the family. Ta Ta and my uncle, Charles Wooding Wynn, affectionately known as Pinkie for his bright, slightly rosy countenance, lived in Selma alongside the Jefferson Davis Highway (US Route 80). They were an extraordinary couple, married in 1911 when Ta Ta was barely twenty-one. Pinkie, a native Georgian, had a robust love for the outdoors. He even made his own fishing lures. He had followed a diverse career path, working as a traveling salesman, automobile garage proprietor, and bottling plant owner. To preserve his sanity during the Great Depression when there was no work to be had anywhere, he loaded a small motor craft and puttered down the Alabama River, living off catfish, blackberries, and the kindness of tugboat crews and black swampers. At the site of Fort Mims in Baldwin County, he kicked up a few artifacts, including gun flints and militia buttons, which I now keep in a little wooden box on my office shelf.

Fascinating as Pinkie was, Ta Ta intrigued me more. Physically she was unimpressive, very short with her gray hair in a bun and eyeglasses perched on her nose. But intellectually she was a powerhouse. She nourished a love for William Faulkner’s novels, and her and Pinkie’s little Cape Cod cottage was filled with books. She was an engaging conversationalist, even with a youngster, and a superb storyteller. Although mostly retired when I came to know her well, she had worked as a journalist for decades. Hired by the Selma Times-Journal as a social editor in 1914, she eventually became city editor and penned a popular column titled Up and Down the Town. One of her renowned co-workers, Kathryn Tucker Windham, recalled that Ta Ta was a newsroom legend, noted for her long, involved sentences. This was hardly surprising for a Faulkner fan. Ta Ta’s proud record was 147 words, which almost certainly still stands and is impossible to imagine in today’s world of dumbed-down newspapers. Years later, in going through some of Ta Ta’s personal papers, I stumbled across a psychological evaluation conducted during the 1940s. It nailed her to a T. The test ranked her language capacity as high and noted deep artistic appreciation, tremendous detail capacity, diagnostic ability, and good memory as to events. Fittingly, the report concluded in part that she should have been good in history.⁵

Of course, Ta Ta was good in history. Throughout her career at the Times-Journal, she had written stories about local history and architecture and had interviewed Confederate veterans, widows, ex-slaves, and civilians who perfectly recalled the Civil War. Ta Ta’s years of trolling for stories and lore had supplied her with a virtually bottomless supply of material, all of it immediate, striking, and colorful. In relating these tales, Ta Ta was animated and eloquent. The personalities she conjured were vivid, the incidents rich, and the conclusions often tragic or poignant. Everything fell away except her voice, and it filled my imagination with wonder.⁶

I never will forget the most magisterial display of this native talent. When I was around ten, Dad drove the fifty miles down to Selma and brought Ta Ta back for a short visit. When it was time to take her home, we all piled into the family car for the trip. Dad pulled out of the driveway onto Pineview Road and then turned left on Highway 119, which took us down Main Street and across the bridge over Shoal Creek toward Wilton. And then, spontaneously, it began, Ta Ta on Wilson’s Raid. As my mother later recalled, it was a nonstop account from door to door.⁷ Looking back on it now, I am immensely grateful for the privilege of that short hour. It was a defining moment for me, helping to cement my determination to be a historian and a writer.

Just across the bridge on the right were two large magnolia trees. Ta Ta said that General Wilson had tied his gray horse, Sheridan, to one of these and consulted with his officers about where the roads led, what to destroy, and how best to keep pressing the outnumbered Rebels. Dad laughed and said those trees would have been mere saplings in 1865, not likely to hold a spirited gelding. But Ta Ta was undeterred, and I wasn’t interested in healthy skepticism. It was all about story, and Ta Ta was our narrator and guide.

Wilton didn’t exist during the raid, but it was there that the railroad tracks appeared, paralleling our route along the west side and then at Ashby, south of Brierfield, gracefully curving across the highway and running along the east shoulder all the way to Selma. The proximity of those gleaming rails on creosote ties and chert rock lent even more immediacy to the tale. As it turned out, Ta Ta had known the engineer for General Forrest’s ordnance train, who had desperately backed his cars just ahead of the bluecoats. She described his fevered efforts to keep up steam, frequent stops along with the troops, and pell-mell retreats as Yankee bullets clipped branches and banged into the iron locomotive.⁸

At the halfway mark we stopped at a claptrap gas station for Moon Pies and cool drinks, as Dad called them. This was Stanton, a tiny rural hamlet anchored by Ebenezer Baptist Church, a white frame building on an elevated knoll right beside the highway. A historic marker in front commemorated the pitched battle fought there on April 1, 1865. As we gazed at this little country church, Ta Ta described how Forrest had finally managed to concentrate enough men to make a determined stand. The Confederates were thinly ranked behind primitive breastworks and a few cannon as Wilson’s troopers thundered into view. But they were only 1,500 against 10,000, and Wilson smashed them and set them running for Selma again. Forrest himself was wounded by a young Indiana captain wielding a saber. He would have been a goner, Ta Ta averred, if the Yankee had used the point of his sword rather than the blade. Wiser in the ways of personal combat, the Wizard of the Saddle leveled a pistol and shot his assailant out of the saddle. The unfortunate Hoosier was buried behind the church, Ta Ta said, along with eleven of his comrades. I recall being very moved by this. Twelve young men, not too much older than me, killed far from kith and kin and laid to rest in an isolated and unfamiliar place.

South of Stanton the road dropped and rose across a series of wide hills before descending onto a fertile plain. During the war this would have been fine cavalry country, planted in corn and cotton and much less forested than now. Just ahead was Selma, the great industrial hub of the Confederacy and Wilson’s desideratum. Here Ta Ta was in fine form, for she knew every inch of the place, from the soaring Edmund Pettus Bridge and decayed Saint James Hotel downtown out to the strip malls and motels along the Jefferson Davis Highway. Before we took her home, she had to show us the mansion that still displayed bullet holes from the battle, and then there was the obligatory tour of Sturdivant Hall. Ta Ta worked as a docent there, and I thoroughly enjoyed the unfettered access this got me to every nook and cranny of the house.

Built in 1853 and occupied during the Battle of Selma by a local banker named John McGee Parkman and his family, Sturdivant Hall is one of Alabama’s best preserved Greek Revival mansions, a Corinthian-columned masterpiece of elegant proportions and exquisite interior plaster work. Ta Ta’s love for the home was infectious, and she possessed a bundle of stories about the house and what had happened there during Wilson’s Raid. Years later, her obituary would note that she was as much a part of Sturdivant Hall as the cupola on its roof.⁹ The cupola was always my favorite part of any ramble through the house, and there were many over the years. Ta Ta loved to climb up to it just as much as I did, and together we would ascend the tight spiral stair until we emerged, exhilarated and she slightly out of breath, into the little square space with its ample windows on all sides. Here, Ta Ta informed me, Parkman and his family assembled to anxiously watch the battle. After Selma fell, booted Yankee soldiers clomped into the house searching for Rebels and silver, and slashed a portrait with their bayonets. The painting of two little girls was later repaired, but the scars of that senseless vandalism remain evident.¹⁰

When we finally deposited Ta Ta back at her house, I think we were all a little dazzled. I know I was. Many years later, after I had completed my thesis in historic preservation, I traveled to the nursing home where Ta Ta then lived to share it with her. I had written about the little community of Summerfield, a Methodist enclave nine miles north of Selma that is rich in antebellum architecture. Ta Ta knew it well, of course. She greeted me warmly from her bed, and I pulled up a chair. After a hug, I showed her the thesis and pointed out the dedication, To Octavia S. Wynn, who instilled in me a fascination of history when I was very young. She liked that, but sadly suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and wasn’t able to grasp much more. Ta Ta passed on July 22, 1986, and was laid to rest in Selma’s New Live Oak Cemetery next to Pinkie, who had preceded her by a few years. Sui generis to the end, their stones are engraved with a few lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Ta Ta’s displays Canto XXVIII: With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, / And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow; / And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d— / I came like Water, and like Wind I go.¹¹

Comes now Alabama’s bicentennial, with all the attendant pageantry and scholarly reflection. Ta Ta would have loved it, no doubt, and I am profoundly sorry that the modern readers of the Selma Times-Journal will not benefit from her storytelling ability. But, moved by her spirit and love of good material, this book is offered for a popular audience. Of all the many important events in Alabama’s two-hundred-year history as a state, the Civil War still looms as the most profound. There are, of course, already many good books about specific aspects of Alabama’s war, from Wilson’s Raid to the Battle of Mobile Bay, not to mention Ben Severance’s Portraits of Conflict (2012), a fine photographic history, and Chris McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama (2016), which focuses on politics and Unionism within the state. Despite this, the story of the shooting war in the Heart of Dixie proper is still underrepresented in broader histories. Most, including McIlwain, include only a paragraph on the Battle of Mobile Bay, but never fail to emphasize that Alabama was largely untouched by fighting until nearly war’s end, and that what fighting did occur was minor and of little consequence.

While that is true from a grand strategic perspective, there is, as Ta Ta certainly understood, a great deal of story there nonetheless. Shots were fired in anger in thirty-one of Alabama’s fifty-two wartime counties by uniformed opponents. Troops from every Confederate state plus Missouri and Kentucky fought against Union regiments from twenty-three different Northern states, including black troops and loyal units from Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. The massive multivolume War of the Rebellion, a compilation of all the official army and navy correspondence and reports North and South, documents over three hundred military incidents within Alabama, variously defined as actions, attacks, battles, campaigns, engagements, evacuations, scouts, sieges, and skirmishes, from as early as January 4, 1861, days before the state seceded, to May 1, 1865, weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. Happily for the men involved, casualties were relatively low compared to the horrific bloodlettings at places like Shiloh and Gettysburg, but no one who fought in Alabama ever made light of the experience. Many of these men were hardened veterans who had seen the elephant, as the baptism of fire was quaintly called then, in Virginia or Tennessee, and knew whereof they spoke when they described Selma as a whirlwind of battle, the CSS Florida’s dash into Mobile Bay amid a rain of Federal shot and shell as daring and gallant, and the skillful defense and evacuation of Spanish Fort as one of the best achievements of the war. They, at least those men in blue and gray who had been there, as well as the civilians and slaves who had witnessed along with them, would never forget. Nor should we. In fact, what happened in Alabama not only affected the people who were there in important ways, itself worth relating, but also occasionally did indeed have important national consequences. One example was the sack of Athens, which led to a new federal policy endorsing the plundering of Confederate civilians, with infamous results later in Georgia. Another was the Union victory at Mobile Bay, which enhanced President Lincoln’s reelection chances and further demoralized the beleaguered South. Here then, from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf beaches and so many places in between—Auburn, Blue Mountain, Elyton, Eufaula, Greensboro, Lowndesboro, Montgomery, Montevallo, Selma, Stanton, Talladega, Ten Island Ford, Tuscaloosa, Tuskegee, and Whistler, the story of those rugged days.¹²

Introduction

Alabama, 1860

Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States on November 6, 1860. After decades of sectional wrangling over the issue of chattel slavery, most Southerners considered this the last straw. Only weeks later, on December 20, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. The momentous news clacked into the Montgomery telegraph office that afternoon, and by evening citizens had transformed the streets of Alabama’s capital city into a huge, impromptu carnival of celebration and support. The Montgomery Weekly Advertiser enthusiastically reported bonfires, flags, marching citizen-soldiers banging drums, volleys of musketry, the firing of cannons and ringing of bells, all mixed with the unrestrained shouts of men and boys and smiling female approval. Down in Mobile, a young woman named Kate Cumming witnessed a similar outpouring. The city was one blaze of light from the illuminations, she later wrote, scarcely a window in the whole city was not lit. The noise from the fireworks and firearms was deafening. Speeches were made, processions paraded the streets with banners flying and drums beating, and in fact everything was done to prove that Mobile at least approved of what South Carolina had done. Would Alabama follow suit?

Sentiment was divided among straight-outs, cooperationists, and Unionists, but anxious residents wouldn’t have long to wait for an answer. Governor Andrew B. Moore had called a state convention in Montgomery for January 7 to decide.¹

If Alabama indeed cast her lot with the Palmetto State, she would be a welcome ally in any armed confrontation with the powerful North. On the eve of the American Civil War, the Heart of Dixie was widely regarded as a wealthy and rapidly developing place of great beauty and promise. Then, as now, the state’s physical dimensions were impressive—336 miles from the Tennessee line to the Gulf of Mexico’s sparkling waters and 150–200 miles wide between Mississippi and Georgia, with a 60-mile coastal stretch between Mississippi and the Florida panhandle, the whole encompassing over 50,000 square miles, or in the terms of Alabama’s many farmers, 32,462,080 acres. Within these borders is a breathtaking geographical diversity. Immediately noticeable to anyone studying a topographical map are the parallel ridges and valleys that finger northeast to southwest and the state’s plurality of rivers and streams. The ridges mark the termination of the Appalachian Mountain chain. Flat-topped and generally below 2,000 feet, they have always been considered agriculturally viable. According to A New and Complete Gazetteer of the United States, published in 1854, Alabama’s mountains feature fine grazing lands, while the flats between them are very rich in soil.² Where not planted in corn or trod by cattle, the ridges were mantled in bountiful woods of oak, black gum, poplar,