Southern Unionists
Southern Unionists were individuals from secessionist Southern states who actively opposed the Confederate cause during the American Civil War (1861–1865). This group, which garnered increased scholarly attention in recent decades, consisted primarily of white residents who aligned themselves with the Unionists of the North. Despite voicing opposition to secession before the war, many Southern Unionists were forced into secrecy once the Confederate States of America was established in 1861. During the Civil War, they played significant roles by providing refuge for Confederate deserters, sabotaging Confederate military efforts, and disseminating anti-Confederate propaganda.
Estimates suggest that a substantial number of Southern Unionists remained clandestine due to the risks of being branded as traitors. The movement included prominent figures like Andrew Johnson, who later became president, and Admiral David Farragut, known for capturing New Orleans. Southern Unionists often divided into those who fervently supported the Union, including abolitionists, and those who sought to preserve the Union while advocating for state rights. Their efforts included organizing underground networks to assist deserters and engaging in guerrilla tactics against Confederate forces. Despite facing severe repercussions, such as violence and property destruction, Southern Unionists remained a potent and complex minority within the Confederacy. Their actions and beliefs highlight the ideological divides that existed within the Southern states during this tumultuous period in American history.
Southern Unionists
Prior to and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), some white residents of secessionist Southern states actively opposed the Confederate cause. These dissenters are collectively known as Southern Unionists, because they aligned themselves with the Unionists of the North. Overlooked by historians for decades, Southern Unionists began to draw increased attention from scholars and researchers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
While Southern Unionists had freely voiced their opposition to Southern secession prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, the movement largely retreated to the underground after the 1861 declaration of the breakaway Confederate States of America. Throughout the war, Southern Unionists provided safe harbor to Confederate deserters and refugees, carried out acts of sabotage targeting the Confederate war effort, and published anti-Confederate propaganda. While much Southern Unionist activity was conducted in secret, the movement also included multiple high-profile public figures including seventeenth US president, Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), who assumed the presidency following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).
Background
Observers and commentators often describe the American Civil War as a conflict over the ethics of slavery as a social and economic institution. The Unionists of the North broadly opposed slavery and were committed to ending its practice in the United States, while the Confederates of the South sought to preserve and uphold it. Experts also note more detailed and nuanced causes of the Civil War: Southern states viewed themselves as resisting the increasing encroachment of North-aligned federal power into their legal and economic systems, while Northern and Southern factions faced deep ideological divides over the politics of Western expansion. The South wanted to import the practice of slavery into the rapidly growing Western territories of the United States, while the North sought to keep Western labor markets open exclusively to white workers.
Though April 12, 1861, is the accepted historical standard for the start date of the Civil War, the Confederate States of America officially announced itself on February 8, 1861. Alexander Hamilton Stephens (1812–1883), the vice president of the Confederacy, famously summarized the breakaway republic’s core principle as being rooted in “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Some white residents of the Confederacy’s founding states, and the states that later joined it, disagreed with this assessment. Other Southern residents opposed the intrusive and authoritarian practices of the Confederate government, which routinely appropriated civilian goods without fair compensation for use in the war effort.
While political debate about the underlying ideological principles of Southern slave states had been an open matter during the years leading up to the Civil War, civilian dissenters from the Confederate cause largely retreated from public view after the declaration of the Confederacy and the outbreak of hostilities. A 2000 Kent State University review of the 1999 book Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War noted that internal opponents of the Confederacy found themselves in an untenable position when the simmering conflict between the North and South finally erupted into open warfare. Pro-Union views were considered treasonous by both the Confederate government and a majority of its white citizens.
Overview
The number of Confederate residents who were openly or secretly sympathetic to Southern Unionist causes is unknown. Historians believe that a large majority of Southern Unionists were careful to keep their political allegiances a secret during the active period of the Civil War. No effort was made at the time to gauge the total number of Southern Unionists within the Confederacy, and as such, contemporary researchers can only make estimates. Experts generally characterize Southern Unionists as a small but potent minority within the Confederacy. Historians have documented approximately one hundred thousand deserters from the Confederate Army who switched sides to join the Union military forces over the course of the Civil War. Approximately 70 percent of those deserters came from Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, providing researchers with clues as to the locations where Southern Unionist sentiment was strongest. By contrast, South Carolina and Georgia contributed the smallest numbers of deserters to Union forces, indicating their relatively strong loyalty to the Confederacy.
According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Southern Unionists generally fell into one of two broad categories. The first category consisted of fervent supporters of Unionism, the federalist cause, and the abolition of slavery. The second category included more tempered Unionists, who believed the United States should be preserved but reformed to prevent the federal government from overreaching its authority into state-level governance. In Arkansas, Unionists represented a significant segment of the population: Arkansas had only been a state since 1836 and federal troops had served as a stabilizing presence during its early history, while federal funding had delivered significant infrastructural improvements and economic benefits. A Unionist organization with an estimated 1,700 members known as the Arkansas Peace Society was dismantled by Confederate authorities in 1861, with hundreds of participants forced into service with the Confederate Army.
In 1862, The New York Times published an anonymous editorial titled “A Plea for Southern Unionists, By One of Them.” The column noted significant divides between wealthy Southern political leaders and the white, working-class majority of Southern states. Its author described the Confederacy as an expression of the desire of Southern elites to replace democracy with plutocracy and characterized this core objective as deeply opposed to the values of most white Southerners. Other expert observers have noted that many white Southerners remained indifferent to the ongoing conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, and instead simply sought to avoid falling victim to the invasive nature of the Confederate government with regards to its management of the civilian economy.
The fervently committed branch of the Southern Unionist movement was characterized by its strong loyalty to the United States and its federal government, staunch opposition to the Confederacy, and a willingness to risk economic loss, injury, or death in defense of its beliefs. These operatives were involved with activities including the so-called Unionist Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses for Confederate deserters and refugees, which is believed to have operated in multiple regions of the Confederacy throughout the Civil War. Anecdotal stories preserved on the historical record indicate that participants in the Unionist Underground Railroad faced severe censure if their activities were discovered, including the destruction of their property and violent attacks from their pro-Confederate neighbors.
Another Southern Unionist organization, the Heroes of America (HOA), was based in Confederate-controlled regions of the Appalachian Mountains. The HOA, like the Arkansas Peace Society, engaged in active efforts to subvert the Confederate war cause, staging guerrilla attacks in groups known as layout gangs or tory gangs. These operatives destroyed transportation infrastructure on which the Confederate Army relied, disrupted Confederate supply lines, and cooperated with Union military units in staging blockades. In some areas of the South, such as Mississippi’s Jones County, the layout gangs were large and strong enough to effectively overtake local governance and operate independently of the Confederacy.
Several noteworthy figures represent a departure from the secretive and underground nature of Southern Unionist activity during the Civil War. These include Anna Ella Carroll (1815–1894), Robert J. Breckinridge (1800–1871), William G. Brownlow (1805–1877), and President Andrew Johnson. Carroll, Breckinridge, and Brownlow are all noted for openly publishing anti-Confederate propaganda during the Civil War era. Carroll was an anti-slavery pamphleteer who served as an adviser to the Lincoln administration. Breckinridge was a high-profile Presbyterian minister and slaveholder who nevertheless sought to preserve the unified integrity of the United States and used his platform as a newspaper editor to lobby for abolition. Brownlow was the publisher of a Tennessee-based pro-Union newspaper, the JonesboroughWhig, who went on to become Tennessee’s governor in the post-Civil War era. Johnson was the only senatorial representative from the South who remained loyal to the federal government during the secession crisis phase of the Civil War. He was cast as heroic by the Northern media but in the South was widely considered a betrayer. Johnson was chosen to serve as vice president under Lincoln precisely because he represented hope for the preservation of the unified United States and assumed the presidency when Lincoln was assassinated as the Civil War was in its final stages.
Bibliography
Bittinger, Emmert F. “Dissenters from the ‘Southern Cause’: Unionists in the Shenandoah Valley.” Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, www.shenandoahatwar.org/unionists-article-1. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
“Buildup to the Civil War.” City University of New York, 2022, guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/c.php?g=288398&p=4496530. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
Christ, Mark K. “Unionists.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 2022, encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/unionists-6398/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
Eichhorn, Niels. “Author Interview—Clayton J. Butler (True Blue) Part Two.” Michigan State University, 26 Oct. 2022, networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/11455976/author-interview-clayton-j-butler-true-blue-part-2. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
Freidel, Frank, and Hugh Sidey. “Andrew Johnson: The 17th President of the United States.” White House Historical Association, 2006, www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/andrew-johnson/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
Inscoe, John C. “Southern Unionists Pamphlets and the Civil War (Review).” Civil War History, vol. 46, no. 4, Dec. 2000, pp. 344–346.
Inscoe, John C. “Unionists.” New Georgia Encyclopedia, 8 June 2017, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/unionists/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
“A Plea for Southern Unionists, by One of Them.” The New York Times, 18 Aug. 1862, www.nytimes.com/1862/08/18/archives/a-plea-for-southern-unionists-by-one-of-them.html. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.
Robinson, Michael D. A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South. U of North Carolina P, 2021.
Williams, David. “Southern Unionism.” Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, 2022, www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/southern-unionism.html. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.