Originally published on October 31, 2022 (Episode 291)
Introduction
In late November 1864, Lieutenant David R. Snelling returned to Baldwin County, Georgia, where he had once worked in his uncle’s fields alongside enslaved laborers. Now he was a Union officer in Company I of the First Alabama Cavalry—on temporary duty as commander of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s headquarters escort—Snelling came home not as kin but as conqueror. His troopers seized provisions and, at his direction, burned the family cotton gin.
Snelling and the men of the First Alabama represented a small but striking minority: white Southerners who remained loyal to the Union after secession. In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), Clayton Butler argues that these Unionists, though few in number, loomed large in the political and military imagination of both North and South. Their story illuminates central questions of loyalty, nationhood, and power during America’s greatest crisis.
About the Guest
Clayton Butler is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction is his first book.
For Further Investigation
Clayton Butler, True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2023)
Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, Greeneville, Tennessee
First Alabama Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers, a reenactor and research site
“Union Scouts in Louisiana,” Harper’s Weekly, May 1864 — via House Divided Project, Dickinson College
Related conversations
Episode 67: Douglas Egerton on Reconstruction
💬 Listen & Discuss
What did it mean to remain loyal to the Union in the heart of the Confederacy? Do these stories complicate how we think about Southern identity during the Civil War? Share your thoughts in the comments and pass the episode along to someone interested in the American Civil War.
