Rebels against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists by Barton A. Myers (review)

Historians have long discarded the Lost Cause myth of the white South unified behind the Confederacy, recognizing the myriad ways the Confederacy was beset by internal division and dissent. Barton Myers’s Rebels against the Confederacy adds a significant dimension to this scholarship by examining committed white and black unionists in North Carolina. He argues that southern unionists actively and militantly resisted Confederate authority. He pays particular attention to the role of unionists in the various forms of irregular warfare that were rampant in North Carolina.

The great strength and weakness of this work is its reliance on the Southern Claims Commission petitions. Established in 1871, the commission was empowered to compensate southern unionists who had property appropriated by the United States Army during the Civil War. This long-neglected body of sources has only recently attracted the serious attention of historians, including Daniel Sutherland, Susanna Lee, and Dylan Penningroth. Myers’s study is based on the 362 approved Southern Claims Commission petitions from North Carolina, a state known for its widespread unionism. His close reading of these petitions reveals stories of the persecution unionists faced from their neighbors and from the Confederate government. Myers documents how unionists suffered from systematic intimidation, threatened and actual violence, arbitrary arrests, and conscription. They responded initially by opposing secession and then by vocally criticizing the Confederate government; refusing to pay taxes or submit to conscription; joining the Heroes of America, a clandestine anti-Confederate organization who had a significant presence in the North Carolina Piedmont; and joining the Union army. Committed unionists formed the heart of the guerilla war that challenged Confederate authority in a third of North Carolina’s counties. Myers’s treatment of guerilla warfare is sophisticated and nuanced, drawing on the most recent scholarship. Myers is also careful to articulate the heterogeneous composition of North Carolina’s uncompromising unionists, which included pacifist Quakers, slaveholding whites, and African Americans—recognizing the many ways unionists understood their identity and objectives.

Two major questions confront historians who want to use the Southern Claims Commission records to understand southern unionism. First, how representative of the broader southern unionist experience were the approved petitions? The narrow mandate of the Southern Claims Commission meant that many southern unionists were not eligible for compensation, and many southern unionists did not or could not apply. This reader found it difficult to sustain the notion that the number of petitions in Myers’ study presented a reliable cross section of the unionist experience in North Carolina. Second, how honest were petitioners in their claims? Forced to demonstrate their unfailing loyalty to the Union, petitioners had an incentive to embellish and obfuscate their experience. Myers attends to these questions in a well-crafted and thoughtful appendix, but it would have been useful to have this analysis earlier in the volume and integrated more fully into the narrative.

One of the most important contributions of this study is the recognition that the difficulties unionists faced in North Carolina did not end in 1865. Joining the Union League, wartime unionists sought to rebuild the state, although they rarely spoke with one voice about what that reconstructed state ought to look like. Although briefly holding political power in the state, wartime unionists became targets of Klan violence. Some were unfairly denied pensions for their service in the Union army. An insightful epilogue chronicles how Lost Cause advocates such as Zebulon Vance, Walter Clark, and D. H. Hill systemically erased unionists from the story of wartime North Carolina.

This valuable book helps provide greater clarity to the complex topic of southern unionism. Carefully researched and intelligently written, its findings should assist in shaping future research into the experiences of unionists across the Confederacy.