Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS273 is understandable, the reader is often left wanting to know more, especially about how these women and their families fared by the end of the war. Culpepper does not include any significant discussion of the thousands of women who found jobs in government service and private industry during the war. Although she discusses the challenges women faced running farms and businesses without men, concluding that while many complained they also blossomed in their role as independent individuals, there is little analysis of how the majority of women coped without men. Forced by circumstance to abandon rigidly held notions about women's appropriate sphere, thousands of women took on responsibilities and faced adversity they never imagined they would have to accept. Quoting from hundreds of manuscript collections by Southern and Northern women, Marilyn Mayer Culpepper has shown us the wealth ofresources available to historians. Interpretation of their meaning still awaits. Wendy Hamand Venet Eastern Illinois University Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiersfrom the Confederacy. By Richard Nelson Current. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 253. $21.95.) In a seminal article in i960, historian Carl Degler reminded us that "There Was Another South." This South was composed of yeoman farmers who owned few if any slaves, tended to be Whigs in politics, and opposed secession . Many ofthem lived in the mountain areas ofTennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. While they may have disliked the Confederacy, the impression has been given that they were trapped by geography into a rather passive and quiet opposition. The one group of Southerners who had borne arms for the Union were black soldiers, who only had the opportunity to serve after Lincoln's final Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Until very recently even these 180,000 black soldiers were little more than a footnote in most Civil War textbooks. In Lincoln's Loyalists, Richard Current demonstrates forcefully that, with the exception of South Carolina, every Confederate state provided at least a battalion of white soldiers for the Union army, while thousands more enlisted in Northern regiments. In all, over one hundred thousand white Southerners fought for the Union; if the black soldiers are added to that total, then Louisiana furnished more Federal troops than Rhode Island, Virginia more than Minnesota, and Tennessee more than New Hampshire. An interesting subtheme of Current's study is the courage of these loyalists and the physical hardships they endured. Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin ordered alleged bridge-burners to be hanged. This was done in Greenville, Tennessee, Andrew Johnson's hometown, with the corpses left by 274CIVIL WAR history a railroad bridge so train passengers could strike them as they passed by. George Pickett, whose charge failed at Gettysburg, executed twenty-two members ofthe Union 2d North Carolina Infantry on desertion charges, leading to an investigation of Pickett for war crimes (which was prevented only by the intercession of his West Point classmate, General Grant). And at Fort Pillow, the well-known massacre of blacks by Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops was accompanied by the murder of 127 loyal white Tennesseans, who were shot down in cold blood. If Lincoln's record in the area of civil liberties can be criticized, the Davis government's actions, which are usually ignored, were apparently worse. During the era of Reconstruction, the sacrifices of Southern loyalists along with the contributions of black troops were quickly forgotten. Either they became Republicans, who were discredited by their cooperation with the socalled carpetbag-scalawag governments, or else they resisted Reconstruction and identified with the ex-Confederates. They no longer wished to be remembered as one-time comrades of men whom they now looked on as blackloving Yankees. It is little wonder that they became the forgotten soldiers. One final statistic is compelling. If somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred thousand Confederates fought in the Civil War, then the loyalists deprived the South of 10 percent of its manpower. In reality, this was a 20 percent deficit, since every Southerner who served the Union was a double loss. If the state's rights tendencies of the Confederacy were a significant factor in its ultimate demise, so was the presence of these armed and...