Summary of Silent Cavalry by Howell Raines: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History

By Justin Reese

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Summary of Silent Cavalry by Howell Raines: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Howell Raines has revealed the hidden story of Union soldiers from Alabama who played a crucial role in the Civil War. The First Alabama Cavalry, consisting of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers, was instrumental in General William Tecumseh Sherman's victory over the Confederacy. Raines's book, Silent Cavalry, is part American history, part family saga, and part scholarly detective story. The book exposes a conspiracy to undermine the accomplishments of these southerners, a key component of the Lost Cause effort to restore glory to white southerners after the war. The book reveals the power of historians to destroy and redeem the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Dec 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223933229

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INTRODUCTION

In 1995, Emory University graduate student Margaret M. Storey interviewed the author's father about a Civil War tale he had heard from his grandfather who fled to the Union lines to avoid the Confederate draft. Storey wanted to earn her PhD by exhuming narratives pointedly ignored or distorted by generations of Alabama historians. She knitted hundreds of accounts like the author's into a seminal book, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The saga of Alabama Unionism had been hard to reconstruct for a good reason. The First Alabama Union Cavalry was overlooked by mainstream historians for a century and a half, appearing in none of the bestselling popular books on the Civil War. The regiment was not even mentioned in Ken Burns’s landmark PBS documentary The Civil War, broadcast to national acclaim in 1990.

This book explores the history of these Alabama Unionists, inspired by William Archibald Dunning, a famous historian produced by Columbia University in New York City. Dunning used the American Historical Association to repress the truthful interpretations of pioneering Black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and his star pupil, Walter Lynwood Fleming, and their friends in the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH).

The Myth of the Lost Cause is a remarkable feat of propaganda that upended the Civil War narrative and stood it on its head. The principal Alabamians involved in burying the legacy of the First Alabama Cavalry were Dunning’s friend and Alabama host Thomas Madison Owen (1866–1920) and his widow, Marie Bankhead Owen (1869–1958), who succeeded him as director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History in 1920.

PART 1

Varieties of Racial Education

What Happened to Me at Ma ’n’ Ada’s

In 1943, Birmingham, Alabama, was America's most segregated city. The author's childhood fascination with rural and ancient Appalachian folkways led to a fascination with Alabama's history, particularly the Free State of Winston. In 1951, a teacher named Esther Garrett introduced the author and their siblings to a glorified version of Alabama history, including the legend of the yellowhammer, the state bird. Miss Love, a stately matron, did not approve of the author's reading of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a didactic condemnation of prejudice based on skin color.

The author's mother was an Owen, and she provided the author with a glimpse into the famous woman in Montgomery, Miss Marie, the widow of Thomas McAdory Owen. Alabama was the first state to establish a state archive to preserve official papers, and Miss Marie used her political connections to secure a New Deal grant to construct an archives building. She was named director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, and she reigned there for over three decades as the guardian of her late husband's memory and administrator of the museum.

Miss Love led the author's fourth-grade class on a field trip to the archives, demonstrating her power and virtue. The author recalls the certitude of power and virtue she radiated as she explained the holiness of bullet holes in the large Rebel battle flag.

Childhood memories in Alabama are a mix of wavery and clear, with Miss Marie appearing like Queen Victoria. The flag on the wall behind her was a white dinner napkin carried by Captain Thomas Goode Jones, a Bourbon Democrat who helped get white supremacy written into Alabama's 1901 constitution. The author speculates that Miss Marie may have mentioned that Governor Jones was the father of one of her Montgomery courtiers, a judge and part-time journalist named Walter B. Jones. Judge Jones had his fifteen minutes of national fame in 1964, lecturing lawyers for his future newspaper on the uses of white man's justice in dealing with racial agitators.

Alabama is similar to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, where everything that rises must converge. The late Alabama folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham said Alabama is one big front porch, and life on that porch is more horizontal; everything circles, overlaps, and eventually seems to connect. The author's political education at the family hearth can be traced more clearly now than in the beginning, the presidential election year of 1948. In 1948, it was impossible for Alabamians to vote for President Harry S. Truman in Alabama because his party's position on the ballot had been assigned to Dixiecrats, the southern Democrats who rebelled against their party's civil rights plank. Thurmond won Alabama with almost 80 percent of the vote.

The author's political education was influenced by their grandmother, Martha Jane Best Raines, who was a quilter and a mountain matriarch. The author's grandmother was known as Ma in her hometown, and her four sons and their wives called her Grandma in recognition of her status. The author was the last born and was the only one named for her husband, Howell. My naming reflected the sociological drama of urbanization in Birmingham after the founding of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in 1852 and its takeover by U.S. Steel in 1901.

Thousands of white and Black families streamed in from the countryside to meet the manpower needs of the New South industrial city. The author's father squared the city/country circle when it came to my naming, offering the reversal of names of the man buried at Curry, Alabama. The tombstone has become my albatross, and when Grandma Raines died in 1967, a new one with both names was installed above the adjoining graves. The author has considered sinking the tombstone in the Delaware River or in the Gulf of Mexico, but feels a curse might descend on them for severing its connection to the Alabama hills or the last H. H. Raines to exist.

The author describes their childhood experiences with a mysterious bond or burden associated with their name and the man who had it before them. The name became associated with a halcyon time when their tribe lived up in the country. The author's grandmother, a woman who was spoiled by her adult sons and the long-suffering Ada, was spoiled to a level of pickiness. The author's grandmother was spoiled to a level of queenly pickiness, and families made obligatory Yuletide afternoon pilgrimages to her house with a tiny tabletop Christmas tree. The author's father brought Grandma the King Leo candy canes she had favored when they lived on the farm at the start of the century. The author's grandmother sat in lace-collared long-sleeved dresses during these visitations.

One day, the author's grandmother told the author about a neighbor who spied a neighbor coming toward them on the road. The author was shocked by her scatological usage of the term drot, a mild oath probably descended from God rot them. The author's takeaway was that Democrats were simply the other. This introduction to a profane and violent world of north Alabama partisanship dated back to the Civil War was a significant moment in their life.

The Centrality of Gradystein Williams Hutchinson

The author's childhood in Birmingham, Alabama was marked by a lack of historical markers and a biased view of the state's past. Their parents were busy citizens of the least nostalgic of major southern cities, and Birmingham did not even exist until 1872. They taught their children to honor Lincoln, sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and recite the Gettysburg Address, which was a split-the-difference concession to the overweening influence of northern money in the local economy.

The author's parents were not rebellious liberals but provided an example of Christian humanism that was not limited to whites. Gradystein Williams, a sixteen-year-old graduate of all-Black Parker High School, was hired as their weekday housekeeper, which proved a turning point in the author's life. She changed the way the author saw the world and shared stories about the Birmingham secrets from which white children were walled off, both tragic and trivial.

Grady's influence on the author was magnified by the fact that their siblings had both left for college by the time they were eight. Grady's influence on the author was magnified by the fact that their parents gave her the room to fill the open space in their life.

The author's parents allowed Grady to fill the open space in their life, which had something to do with the fact that they were hill people come to town, coming from north Alabama, with its fealty to the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Yankee landlords, not the Black Belt with its ghostly oligarchy of Rebel worshipers.

In the early 1950s, the Raineses were fortunate, and their father decided to step up from Oldsmobiles in 1951. His mother, Grady, and their grandparents, Robert Cyle Walker and Martha Loudella Fell Walker, were raised in a segregated community. Grady and her mother would go on a day trip in a Cadillac, where she would clean the house and prepare a family lunch. They would visit the infamous sunset towns in Alabama, where Black travelers were warned not to let the sun set on their heads. Grady, who was a black girl, would often view country whites with amused disdain.

On their trip, they encountered an incident where a relative refused to sit with a Black person at a table with six white people. Grady's grandfather told him that he would cook the meal for everyone and eat it with them. This incident revealed Grady's political principles, which the author later deciphered. The crucial information about his political principles was based on a conversation with her father in 1953, during which she met Miss Marie.

The Appalachian people, including the Appalachian mountaineers, were less vociferous in expressing their racism and the barriers between races were less adamantine than in south Alabama. This was exemplified by Imani Perry's book, South Toward History, which highlights the tenderness of understanding between Black and white people in the nation's poorest region. Most north Alabamians saw themselves as Jacksonian Democrats, with the exception of Judge Walker, who began his political involvement as a different kind of Democrat. Judge Walker's political journey began with his law library, and he became the first true populist he ever met. This story illustrates how information fragments are essential to personal search outside the boundaries of accepted history.

Cultural leaders and elected officials who want to revise facts to their own tastes do not hide their tricks in plain sight. Chance revelations like Judge Walker's are specks of reality that reveal their meaning when glued into place in a revisionist mosaic, sometimes far into an unforeseeable future. Each state and family has a subterranean narrative, but it is not nonexistent, just that it has been interred by the powers that be.

Saved by Uncle Sim

The author reflects on their childhood experiences with religious prejudice and the influence of the Church of God on their family. They recall their parents' religious preference for the sect, which they initially avoided due to its redneck name. However, the Church of God's influence in Birmingham during the 1950s and 1960s was subtle and unadvertised, making a significant difference in their lives.

The author explains that the sociopolitical topography of Dixie apartheid spread unevenly across the South, with some white southern churches failing when challenged by Dr. Martin Luther King. However, some individuals and institutions managed to break through the ignorance, such as Daniel S. Warner, who established a Church of God campground in 1890. This belief spread to their brother William Simeon Best, who preached radical preaching in 1918.

The author's sister, Mary Jo Raines Dean, believes that Sim Best's influence accounts for the mild racial attitudes of the people who raised them in the South's most segregated big city. The author's lack of curiosity about the change in denomination led them to seek an explanation, as if the humiliation of being identified with the Church of God was best ignored and covered up.

To find the full story, the author turned back to the eve of the Civil War, when their patriarchs James Raines and John Best acquired Alabama homesteads in Walker County. When the Confederate Conscription Act was passed in 1862, some of their kinsmen began lying out to dodge enrolling officers or reluctantly showed up to be drafted. John Best was the only red-hot Confederate in the bunch, or at least that's how he wanted to be remembered.

In 1906, the Jasper Mountain Eagle reported the death