He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and found that the illustration there did not reveal the quality of the whole. So he tried out page 69 to see if it gave a good preview of book and reported the following:
From page 69:Follow Clayton Butler on Twitter.They condoned emancipation as a necessary war measure, just punishment, and future check on the slaveholding class—but retained a deep-seated antipathy toward African Americans the war did nothing to alter. For these atypical white Alabamians, the salvation of the Union—with or without slavery intact—subsumed all other concerns over the course of the war.Page 69 of my book (page 99 proved to be an illustration) would give browsers a direct look at the broader themes, if not the more minute details and vignettes, of the book as a whole. Page 69 finds us wrapping up the introduction to the third chapter, which centers on the First Alabama Cavalry, and beginning the discussion of the experience of Alabama’s white Unionists before the Union army’s first arrival in the state in 1862. The first sentence on the page refers one of the most important takeaways of the book— specifically, that Alabama’s white Unionists by and large did not oppose the Confederacy out of any any profound opposition to slavery and certainly not out of any sympathy for the enslaved. Indeed, with the Union’s integrity later assured by the early 1870s, they would help deliver the state back to the Democratic Party, banish the agents of so-called Radicalism, and “redeem” it from Republican rule. Alabama's white Unionists later abandoned black Alabamians politically, realigned with former rebels on the issue of race, and consigned their former Unionist comrades to another century of oppression and Jim Crow, an ignominious postscript to their Union service during the Civil War. Ultimately, though they made a brave and bold choice to oppose the Confederacy, solicitude for the plight of the enslaved almost never had anything to do with it. They were certainly Unionists -- True Blue -- but not for the reasons we might wish. The truth of history, as ever, is more complicated.
In all, 2,066 soldiers enlisted in the First Alabama Cavalry between 1862 and 1865, representing about two-thirds of the estimated total of Alabamians who took up arms for the Union. They forged a creditable military record over the three years of its existence and possessed a political significance to contemporaries on both sides that has been largely overlooked by current scholars. As Alabama historian William Stanley Hoole noted, 'the very existence of the First Alabama Cavalry entitles it to special consideration.' His own history of the regiment, however, is a somewhat boilerplate military history. Deeper investigation of the formation, career, and legacy of the regiment, as well as the stories of the men who comprised both its leadership and its rank and file, illuminates many of the complex facets of white Unionism in the state and in the Deep South as a region.
Alabama Unionists before Federal Occupation
During the period of more than a year between secession and the first arrival of Federal troops in northern Alabama, life for Unionists in the state had become increasingly fraught and precarious. Accounts of future soldiers and their family members recorded in diaries, letters, Southern Claims Commission files and other forms almost universally attest to the dire situation they faced as a result of their national allegiance. Confederate partisans attempted to enforce fealty to the new nation through intimidation and violence; especially after the institution of the Confederate draft in April 1862, even an outwardly neutral stance became untenable. As John Terry, a Cherokee County Unionist later testified, 'things got ... hot about the time the conscript law passed.' Men of military age could either report for Confederate service or face immediate forced conscription. The prospect induced many who still refused to fight against the Union to seek refuge in the woods. Women, nonmilitary-age men, and at times even enslaved persons helped to develop and sustain support networks for these 'lie-outs' which allowed Unionists in northern Alabama to carry on a dogged resistance to the draft."
--Marshal Zeringue
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