Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History

by Howell Raines

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books.

We all know how the Civil War was won: by courageous Yankees who triumphed over the South. But as veteran journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from Northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground, but also an unsung regiment of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers—including at least one member of Raines’s own family.

Called the First Alabama Cavalry, USA, these “Mountain Unionists” were the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So why don’t we know anything about them?

Silent Cavalry is one part epic American history, one part family saga, and one part scholarly detective story. Drawing on the lore of his native Alabama, and investigative skills honed by six decades in journalism, Raines brings to light a conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of these renegade Southerners—part of the “Lost Cause” effort to restore glory to white Southerners after the war, no matter the facts.

Raines exposes this tangled web, implicating everyone from a former Confederate general, a gaggle of Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League, and a sanctimonious former keeper of the Alabama State Archives. By reversing the erasure of the First Alabama, Silent Cavalry is a testament to the immense power of historians to destroy, as well as to redeem.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Civil War, American History, War, American Civil War, Military Fiction

576 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2023

Reviews

[Clay Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book's title is not acurate, much of the book is about racism and debunking the Lost Cause. The men of the 1st Alabama Cavalry deserve better. After reading this book it makes me wonder if the author is over rated.

[Sandie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelby Foote suckered Ken Burns. Generations of historians and the American Historical Association were bamboozled by smooth talking, NJ -born, Confederate-loving Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning and his proteges who became leaders throughout academia. The pro-confederacy myths of the Lost Cause and the evils of Reconstruction became the story Americans were taught in high schools and colleges.. Popular culture reinforced the false narratives starting with the notorious Birth of a Nation and followed by the more benign and still beloved Gone with the Wind and PBS' celebrated documentary, the Civil War. Traitors became heroes, butchers became valiant commanders, stories of Black Americans and their allies were falsified and distorted, and some stories, like that of Alabama's Union Calvary, disappeared The newly freed slaves who seized the opportunities of citizenship and community building by seeking political office, erecting schools, churches, and homes, and establishing businesses were faced with a reign of terror orchestrated by the Klan and like-minded domestic terrorists. But these enterprising new citizens were portrayed as lazy, bestial, and inferior.  When the great, Harvard educated Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois pointed out the achievements of the Freed men and women before Dunning and his minions at an American Historical Association meeting,he was gas lighted.  It wasn't until the 1960s that academics began to discredit the Dunning School .

In Silent Calvary : How Union Soldiers from Alabama helped Sherman burn Atlanta-And then Got Written out of History, award-winning NYT reporter Howell Raines tells the stories of the white yeoman farmers from Winston County Alabama. It is the story of Raines' Republican family and forebearers who opposed secession, stood with Lincoln, and helped Sherman break the Confederacy. It is also the story of the men who created and perpetuated a false and damaging mythology, and the men and women who made the true history vanish.

Silent Calvary joins the excellent company of Kidada E. Williams' I Saw Death Coming. Both books offer powerful corrections to the historical record. The book is the culmination of decades long research into his own family's roots in Winston County and the First Alabama Calvary, USA. It is a thrilling book that vigorously upends the generally accepted history of the white Southerners and shames professional historians and the storied American Historical Association.

Generally, victors get to write the story but after the Civil War, racism, and powerful forces from both sides of the Mason Dixon line formulated the myth of the noble, tragic South's Lost Cause that denigrated Black folks and romanticized the life on the plantations and the battlefield heroics of the Delta's slaveholding masterclass. Not only did white supremacy allow Jim Crow
to legally replace slavery, but elite historians chose to rewrite history and suppress the truth about the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Professional historians, archivists, and librarians neglected and even destroyed material that questioned the honor of the Confederates and actively sought out materials that defamed African Americans and their allies. Not only were the upper-class slaveholders and their descendants steeped in white supremacy they viewed poor white southerners with equal or greater disdain than Black people, and held them and other Union soldiers uniquely responsible for wartime atrocities and the corruption of Reconstruction. Raines balances the history, both heroic and horrifying , and restores the First Alabama Union Calvary and the people, white and black, who were loyal to the Union to their proper place in history . He also documents the perfidy of elite white Southerners and their historians and writes convincingly that some of these people knew better.

While I had trouble slogging through the large cast of characters, Raines' search and analysis make for a great read. As a historian and librarian, I know history is complicated and selection of archival and library materials is necessary, but I also know it violates our professional ethics to lie, and omit and destroy materials because they are at odds with our beliefs.

As terrific as this book is, and it is terrific, the satisfaction Raines and I feel about the success of Silent Calvary, is tempered by the recognition of the ongoing damage done to our country by false white supremacy narratives and willingness to ignore actual history that are still being weaponized by powerful politicians.

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

When this book wound up on my TBR list, I took the front cover at face value that I was getting a history of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, USA, and how it became an embarrassment to "right-thinking" Alabamians post-Reconstruction.

What I got was the memoir of Howell Raines, and how being a descendant of pro-Union men impacted his personal outlook. Some of that would have been fine, but this is not a well-organized book, and reading it reminded me of some the more tedious researchers I dealt with when I was a reference specialist at the U.S. National Archives; generally well-meaning folks with a bad case of tunnel vision.

If you're more interested in the foundations of the "Southern" mentality, you'll probably get more out of this than I did.

[Scott DuJardin · Rating 2 out of 5]

As one 5-star review correctly states, "This volume is literary history, civil war history, family history, history of history". But as another 2-star review states, it is rambling and disjointed.

I was excited to read this book - more to learn how the regiment was written out of history than the history itself. But the way the book is written made it extremely difficult to follow and understand that narrative. So a subject I am thrilled to see in print but unfortunately not a pleasurable read for me.

[Paul Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at the First Alabama Calvary, USA. A deep dive into Southern Unionism, and the various machinations to keep the relatively widespread support of the Union covered up. Raines gets a little bogged down at times in minutiae, and occasionally his journalistic style feels repetitive. But, the story he unfolds needs to be widely read

[Susan Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adding to knowledge about the Civil War is critical to our national identity and understanding attitudes that persist to this present day. Mr. Raines is to be commended for undertaking this task but he blew an opportunity to produce a blockbuster best-seller by allowing his ego to get in the way. While I learned a lot from this raconteur and was fascinated at the material on Shelby Foote and Ken Burns, I found his writing style to be utterly incoherent and needlessly chatty. I totally agree with the reviewer who criticized the editor. Mr. Raines, you lose no opportunity to remind us that you are a Pulitzer Prize winner but you are no Robert Caro and your own editor is no Robert Gottlieb (r.i.p.).
I kept yearning for a straightforward narrative but instead got unwieldy tales about ancillary characters. I didn't appreciate your gratuitous pot-shot at Glenda McWhirter Todd, referring to her (and others) as an amateur historian with prose lacking polish. All that said, a reader with patience can plow through this well-documented book and learn much about the social structure in northern Alabama.

[Allison Damico · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not going to lie I was relieved when this book was over. It is something you do not learn about in school that’s for sure. I thought this topic itself was so interesting and important to give this story a voice. Howell Raines’ family was involved in this silent cavalry that this book is about. However, I do feel like this story went off on a lot of tangents making a bit hard to follow personally. So I would say this could have been cut down significantly and not almost 500 pages. It took me forever to get through because I really was trying my best to follow and struggled most of the time. However I do want to make clear that TONS of research went into this as you can see in Howell’s lengthy Notes section at the end of the book. I just think it could have been edited down a bit to be more concise and on track. If this is your cup of tea though and you enjoy Civil War research I would still recommend as it was something that is not common knowledge. #goodreadsgiveaway.

[Scott Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Audiobook) There is a lot more to this book than just the history of a group of Alabama based soldiers who fought for the Union, to include action against the Confederacy in 1864 as Sherman moved on Atlanta. Yet, the meat of the book is how this particular unit, the 1st Alabama, nearly disappeared from history. In the process of that story, the author covers Reconstruction, how Alabama residents view themselves vis-a-vis other states, the battle for history, the story of the Lost Cause, how turn-of-the-20th century historians sought to define the narrative about the South, to include how Reconstruction became seen as a disaster, even when the results bore out otherwise. Racism is also in play, especially with historical and political figures.

Also, the role of the archivist, which doesn’t get a lot of press, is huge in this tale. Orwell once said about those who control the past control the present and in turn, the future. In Alabama, political and personal back-stabbing did much to define how Bama views itself, and how this obscure unit nearly disappeared from history. Speaking of history, the tale also covers Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which was lauded when it first came out, but in recent years, generated significant controversy, to include Southern historian/writer Shelby Foote and his stances in the documentary and writing…and he grew up in Alabama and would have heard of the 1st.

Overall, the strength of this work is not the primary topic, the 1st Alabama, but rather, the larger tales involved with the story. There is good history, both national/international and local. Solid writing and good narratives help move this work along. Worth the time to read, regardless of format.

[Paul Womack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lived once in Huntsville, Alabama, I was eager to read this book, and was not disappointed! This volume is literary history, civil war history, family history, history of history. To pursue the various trails in the book is fascinating. So, now I have more to read in 2024! Great work in my opinion.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Silent Cavalry:  How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta --- and Then Got Written Out of History.  Howell Raines.  Crown, 2023.  576 pages.


Again, I feel misled. I thought I was getting book about a really fascinating and overlooked piece of Civil War history, the role of anti-secession southerners in the Civil War.  It's a great premise.  There were notable pockets of white resistance to the Confederacy throughout the South.  West Virginia actually broke from Virginia in order to remain with the Union, and there were sizable groups of people in North Georgia and North Alabama who opposed secession.  Some southern men actively resisted the Confederate conscription laws.  Some actively resisted by harassing Confederate officials and military units tasked with rounding up draft-dodgers and deserter.   Some provided assistance to escaped Union prisoners and soldiers trapped behind Confederate lines.  Some men actually chose to don Union uniforms and fight for the Yankee "invaders."  It's a subject that I would love to learn more about.


Alas, this is not the book for that.  It purports to be about the First Alabama Cavalry, USA, a unit of over 2,000 men from the northeastern corner of Alabama that General William T. Sherman hand picked as his personal bodyguard unit.  He tasked them with setting up and protecting his personal encampment on the March to the Sea, and they often rode point -lead - on the March itself. It is a story that should be told, and, until recently, it is a story that was intentionally covered up by so-called Alabama historians and archivists. THAT'S the story I wanted to read, both the story of the unit and of the cover-up.


Instead of that, I got  what appears to be a growing genre:  books written by retired or unemployed southern-born "journalists" that purport to be historical, but they're really memoirs that lay out how awful the South is and was and how their families were and are historic outliers, always proudly standing on "the right side of history."  And seemingly every other paragraph includes a damnation of  Donald Trump and "red-state Republicans."  (How many books would never have been written if Trump had never run for President? My guess is lots and lots.) I was listening to this book and had to quit after about a third of the way through, after learning nothing about the First Alabama, except that they existed and they came from the area around Winston County.  What I learned was the political views of the author and his family.  I don't read history for lectures about 2024 politics, and I couldn't care less about his politics.

[Ben S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mercilessly researched and cited (as you might expect from a longtime reporter), Silent Cavalry is a sprawling feat of historical journalism by Howell Raines that was literally decades in the making. The story is both personal and political for Raines, and his frequent anecdotes of family history and genealogy--some may find these boring, but I didn't–-might leave him vulnerable to accusations of bias by those who disagree with his thesis.

But if he has an axe to grind, he grinds it well, and while the narrative can become slightly unwieldy and repetitious at times this book is absolutely packed with information about fascinating and heretofore mostly unknown characters who fought the civil wars within (and beyond) the Civil War. If you are a nerd (and if you choose to read this book, you probably are), you will enjoy the literary criticism, sociological asides, and archival research. Silent Cavalry adds something new to the discourse, tackling yet another subject that was long obscured by the “Lost Cause” industrial complex.

Raines also succeeds in initiating a national audience into some North Alabama lore. In every “group” and in every part of the world, there are stories and lives that have been filtered out at some point in time by self-appointed guardians of history. Those stories can still be told, you just have to work a little harder to find them.

Recommended companion listening: Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell. (4.5)

[Reilly Hatch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another journalist discovers historiography and thinks they invented it.

[Bob May · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Howell Raines has a bone to pick. History has forgotten his ancestors, or, it seems, ignored them on purpose. His book is a saga—a long, slow, meticulously described saga—of journalist Raines’ life-long efforts to unravel this conspiracy, and indeed he mostly succeeds.
It is the story of the formation and exploits of the Alabama First Cavalry U.S.A., a military unit mustered primarily from among the hill people of Alabama, Raines’ ancestors among them, who chose to flee the Confederacy and fight instead with the army of the North, eventually joining General William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth, so-called “March to the Sea,” burning Atlanta and crushing the will of the South to fight on. It is also the story of a subsequent one-hundred-year, almost successful, cover-up of the First’s story by generations of backward-facing politicians and academic gatekeepers to maintain the myth of “The Lost Cause.”
The so-called “Lost Cause” is the lingering myth of a monolithic, unified Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, and the romantic vision of the Old South as a charming, gallant, benevolent slaveocracy built on an agrarian cotton economy perpetuated in modern times by Gone With The Wind and other similar sources, It included the lingering notion that the South may have lost the war, but its cause was still right and righteous. It is the sentiment that motivated the enactment of racist Jim Crow laws after Reconstruction and drives voter suppression even now, It is promulgated by the same people who today falsely claim the rebellion of 1860-1865 was about so-called states’ rights and not slavery. It is the idea that some people are just born better than others, and it is an idea that refuses to die.
The book is not a brisk read. It’s a slog. I can’t say I recommend it, but I did learn a lot. Who knew there were so many dishonest historians in the field? And Raines gets deep into the weeds in that field ferreting out the conspirators of this deliberate cover-up. We hear all about it, starting with his Alabama family’s tree and how he first heard the stories of the First Alabama from his grandma. Some of the book, the war stories and the ones about generals and various scallywags who leveraged the chaos of war to their advantage, are colorful and interesting. But a lot of it is a litany of names, dates, and places, certainly more than I could keep track of.
In the book, Raines asks, “Why do most people not know about the Alabama First?”
Now, to be fair, few people do know much about the details of the Civil War: the battles, the politics, the personages. Almost everyone knows Sherman’s March to the Sea. Almost everyone knows the burning of Atlanta if for no other reason than that it is featured so prominently in Gone With The Wind. But let’s face it, most people can’t identify the three branches of government, so maybe Raines’ expectations are a little high.
The Alabama First Cavalry, U.S.A., made up mostly of simple stubborn Scotch-Irish farmers, descendants of veterans of the Revolutionary War, motivated more out of a refusal to fire upon the “flag of our fathers” than out of any hatred of slavery. Accordingly, the majority of the sparse population of the county of Winston, an area in which the author was raised, decided that if Alabama could secede from the nation, then they could secede from Alabama, and declared themselves “The Free State of Winston.” Combined with opposition to fighting on behalf of elite plantation slaveholders in whose fortunes they had little stake, many of them crossed state boundaries on foot to enlist in the Union Army. As spies, they were uniquely familiar with enemy territory. As soldiers, they fought with the resentment of having been forced from their peaceful lives, families, and homes. The Old South would forever consider them traitors.
A lot of note-worthy people are introduced in the book, chief among them being Chris Sheats, a Walker County farmer and politician who was elected a delegate to the Alabama state succession convention of 1861 in Montgomery and became a lightning rod by being among a minority who voted not to leave the Union. Pursued by enforcers of the Southern Conscription Act, he hid in the hills and began recruiting fellow resisters from among his like-thinking neighbors who would eventually join the First Alabama. His is among the stories that were largely hidden from the historical record by Lost Cause-loving history college professors and historians who built fiefdoms in prestigious conservative colleges like Columbia, Vanderbilt, and the University of Alabama, until new evidence was brought to light through the efforts of revisionists in recent decades.
It’s all here if you want to read it: the liars and heroes. Their names are repeated often as Raines winds his way through five hundred pages and sixty years of searching for the truth. The star of course is documentarian Ken Burns, maker of the acclaimed 1990 PBS series The Civil War, his collaborators, and the star of the series, the late author and historian Shelby Foote. You may remember Foote fondly as the laconic Tennessean spinning 100-year-old yarns about the war as if he’d been there. The trouble is he didn’t tell the whole truth, not about the Alabama First anyway, and as it turns out not about the South. Did Burns lie and cover-up? Did Foote? Was the omission deliberate or accidental? I won’t spoil it for you, but most of the book's best revelations appear in the second to the last chapter entitled, “The Cutting Room Floor.”
After all is said and done, who cares really? Well, historians do. Those, like Raines, whose ancestors have been short-changed do. And, we all should. It’s good to have the record straight. The lesson here, in this reactionary time of voter suppression, book bans, and curriculum censorship, is that should something like it ever happen again, God forbid, there will be loyalists living amongst the rebels. There may come a time again for taking sides. Raines’ book reminds us that history motivates us, and history is not what happens. It’s what gets written down and shared.

[Josh Lacey · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not great. The title is a lie. He uses the story of Alabama union supporters as a way to explain his own political beliefs and his family tree which is so boring it’s not even worth trying to read. Could’ve been 150 pages if he didn’t explain everything in excruciating detail. Bad writer. Bad reporting. Bad everything. Stick to novels next time since you mention your own about 1,000 times in this book.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weirdly and overly digressive, laced with factual errors, and seeded with framing errors? Check, check and check. Add that beyond the digressiveness, this is in general poorly written. The writing, focus and organization issues, by the halfway mark, at which I started grokking, guaranteed a three-star max; the other items, which accumulated more and more, got us to the one-star finale.

The errors? First, multiple dates in the book have the wrong year number.

Custer most certainly did NOT pass through Fort Wallace on the way to the Little Bighorn, except metaphorically, when he went AWOL there nine years earlier and was eventually court-martialed. But, Raines doesn’t say, nor does the context indicate, that he’s talking metaphorically.

Oh, Howell? Nobody calls Longstreet an “Alabamian.” Raines goes on to repeat this half a dozen times in one late chapter. Reality? He was born in South Carolina, and spent ALL his childhood in Georgia, remaining with an uncle in Augusta even after his father died and his mother moved the rest of the family to Alabama. Via relatives there, he got his West Point appointment from an Alabama congresscrittter, but that’s it. Raines repetition of this untruth exemplifies a parochialism that oozes through this book. One four-star reviewer says that the digressiveness could be better understood as picturing Raines in a rocking chair on a family porch in the Alabama hill country. Pass.

As for a partial thesis of this book? Given the exhaustive notes, I don’t think the First Alabama got written out of history. It did get underplayed, perhaps. And, per other reviewers, perhaps Raines has revived its recognition enough that somebody else can write a book about it that needs writing. Hell, there’s a Wikipedia page for it.

On another thesis, the “burning of Atlanta”? Raines must have some inner Margaret Mitchell. Not all of Atlanta was burned. Not even half of it was. That ties in with this book having little to very little actual military history. Speaking of that, where we do get military history, it’s wrong. The failures of the Army of Northern Virginia on Day 1 at Gettysburg? Very much mainly Dick Ewell; Jubal Early, as easy and tempting as it is to take potshots at him for Lost Cause formulation, not so much. Early, bottom line, was not a corps commander, but a division commander under Ewell. (Arguably, to go back to Lost Cause issues, Lee bears blame for not wanting to release Anderson’s division from army reserve to Ewell.)

As for first blaming Ken Burns for the lack of information on Southern Unionists during the Civil War, then dumping all the blame on Shelby Foote? This comes after Raines notes that Eric Foner (and maybe others) backed out of the project after an initial meeting — and yet, Burns STILL labeled him as a consultant. Burns may have been beguiled and enchanted by Foote — but he wanted to be beguiled and enchanted. Note also the decision to not have a Reconstruction section, and has never done a separate series on Reconstruction. (Otherwise, I think his general views there are the same wrong ones of Spielberg at the end of his Lincoln movie.) Otherwise, Burns has produced plenty of other dreck — witness his Vietnam — and, as exemplified by his Vietnam, it’s generally been in the service of, even an apostle of, American exceptionalism, per his WWII miniseries and many others. He also had big errors in his Roosevelts miniseries and, per his outing in 2023 as "America's Empire Whisperer," apparently got bought off at times by Koch money. And, yes, Ken Burns needs throwing under the bus that much, to enlighten more people, and Raines, as one of the apparently unenlightened, needs further throwing under the bus himself.

A writer Raines is not. And, that shows in his journalism career. Seven years as a reporter? And he still rambles like this? His early editors must have edited the hell out of him. Then, seven years as an editor, but by titles, surely more on assignments-type editing than copy editing. Then, seven more years as an AP correspondent.

Per his Wiki page, the part about his eventual firing as NYT executive editor, and the arrogance he showed even before that, he probably resisted any actual editing on this book.

[Ray Metz · Rating 3 out of 5]

“If the hill people, be they Mississippian or Alabamaian, are of lesser importance, what’s the harm of leaving them out of the greatest southern Story?”

This is a book about the how and why a regiment of the North’s army (made up of Southern men) played a significant role in the Civil War and then basically disappear from history.

I have read virtual nothing about the Civil War - probably assuming I know what I need to, assuming most of reading about the Civil War is about battles and 1800’s combat strategy, and assuming it’s bloody and depressing. While this had some of those things, most of it was other things. Things I didn’t know about. Such as…

- Some of the northern part of Alabama was not in favor of the war - so much so that at least one county talked of seceding from the state. 2700ish white men joined the North’s army.
- The vote to secede in Alabama was not a landslide
- Plantation owners with 20+ enslaved people were exempt from fighting for the South
- Alabama was the first state in the US to have archives.
- Their archives department for decades helped shape the narrative about the South and the Civil War.
- Ken Burns’ documentary about the Civil War was heavily influenced by a Lost Cause supporter - misguided by a trusted professional rather than a personal agenda of Burns.
- The North been fighting to end slavery, but racism in the army of the North was significant.
- The Making of a Murder documentary used the last 30 seconds of each episode to reveal something that make you want to watch the next episode. The author does some of that in this book. One art form influencing another.
- A guy named Dunning was responsible at Columbia in NYC for educating a group of Lost Cause sympathizers that would lead the important universities of the South for decades. Shaping the South’s and the nation’s understanding of the South and “the war between the states.”
- The vast majority of the South army was poor white men that often felt this was a rich man’s war the poor man was fighting.
- Lincoln wasn’t on the ballot in 1860 in Alabama and other southern states. States could decide who was on ballot.
“The first drafting of young men that be in an army in the US was in the South for this war.
- This Southern regiment fought in many battles but was certainly notable as part of Sherman’s March to the Sea and for the number of times they were called on to spy in the South.
- 21,400,000 Northern whites - 5.500,000 Southern whites (3,500,000 enslaved blacks). I tended to think of the North and South being equal in size, but not so.
- I also had a poor understanding of city size especially in the South…
- Atlanta in 1860, population of 9,554
- Wilmington, NC in 1860, population of 9,552
- Savannah, GA in 1860, population of 22,292

“In most of history,“ Ken Burns said, “the story of the past is written by the victors, but Southerners wrote our history – Southerners, like Shelby, who felt the tragedy of it all, the blood, and the sacrifice and the human toll from Ford’s Theatre to Grant tent to Forest critter company.”

“Dunning was perhaps the most influential figure in twentieth-century historiography of the American reconstruction. His graduate students and his colleagues… helped to create a narrative that is essentially false and extremely white supremacist.”

“So while the Lost Cause was a Virginia invention, named by Edward Pollard, and forged into a publicity instrument by Early, was transformed into a national cultural and academic movement by Ivy Leaguers and a colorful set of enablers in Alabama and adjoining states.”

“These are the mountain folk of Alabama, descendants on the same soil of the men and boys who wanted to see the Union preserved. For the rest of my years, I will guard their story. It, unlike so much of what happened around them across the Deep South in the 1860s, does not deserve to be gone with the wind.”

This book and the others I’ve read about the South recently make me admire and love the people of the Appalachian mountains.

[John Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silent Cavalry, by Howell Raines; Crown Publishers: New York; $36.00 hardcover

Our Civil War ended in 1865. Why should it have taken until now to recount the adventures of some 3,000 Alabama mountain folk who fought for the Union? Such a question occurred to Howell Raines, native Alabamian and Pulitzer Prize winning, lifelong investigative journalist. His career brought him from Alabama newspapers to the New York Times. Raines employed his incredibly detail- oriented detective skills to finding the story of an entire regiment, the First Alabama Cavalry, USA, which volunteered to fight against the land and slave owners’ Confederate Army. Yet Silent Cavalry is far more than a war story. We discover it is closely associated with ‘The Free State of Winston’. This is the north western county in Alabama which in effect ‘seceded’ from the Confederacy. Raines wanted to fill in the gaps in our history which the myth of the Noble Confederate Lost Cause had brought about, bearing its legacy to this very day.

The First Alabama was comprised of men from the broken hills and barely arable lands of Northwest Alabama. They only wanted to be left alone. This was not to be. As the Civil War dragged on and on, the Richmond government of Jefferson Davis instituted the draft. This in turn led to many mountain men fleeing to hidden caves, there to be brought food by their families. When this means of escape proved unsuccessful, many would flee, being led by guides, to the Northern military camps. Generals Mitchell and Buell of the Union army had taken most of thee Tennessee River Valley, there to block railroad access east to west across the little industrialized South. So it was that 13 north Alabama counties offered sons and fathers to the Union Army, the better to live a life not beholden to wealthy plantation owners who were behind the war.

Perhaps the most astounding part of this story is how difficult is was to assemble. Raines confronted a culture of believers in the Lost Cause. These were post war to modern southerners who dreamed of the Confederacy as a golden past of gentlemanly knights of the saddle, women pure, and cause of liberty untarnished. They were overwhelmed by sheer Union numbers. Named as generators of this falsehood are Jubal Early, a Robert E. Lee subordinate who wrote tirelessly on this myth, women of the various leagues formed after the war, and other historians beginning in the 1890s.. Matrons of the Alabama Archives preserved only records mirroring this belief. Historians were thus denied, or denied themselves, of any conflicting evidence that all was not moonlight and magnolias. Raines, in this painstakingly assembled work, has set this to rights. He names historians who knew better, but wrote as if the First Alabama was an unimportant collection of misfits. We now know they were instrumental in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, and fought tremendous battles from Resaca to the end, by the Atlantic Ocean. We now know names of those who could have asserted this truth, but did not, the better to preserve a falsehood.Best however, is the voluminous information we discover about General Sherman, many soldiers, spies, and ne'er do wells who feature in this history. We even meet a future mayor of Decatur!

[Kevin Camp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for many reasons: one of them is that I am a direct descendent of a member of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A. My great-great grandfather, William A. Camp, fought for the Union during the Civil War, despite being a native of Alabama, a state that opted for secession from the United States. A fact often unknown about Civil War history is that many Appalachian hill people of the South, starting from the war's beginning, refused outright to fight for the Confederacy. Aware of this fact due to family lore and legend, I read the book hoping that my ancestor's story might be better illuminated, but alas, this was not the case.

In the beginning of the conflict, many hill country whites wished to stay neutral. An 1862 Confederate law that resorted to intimidation and violence sought to force all white able-bodied men into service in the Southern army. Patrols conducted with the blessing of Richmond, the Confederacy's capital, and Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, resorted to intimidation and violence. In retaliation, the hated legislation effectively pushed many southern Appalachian men into the Union army.

The struggle between upcountry whites, most of whom were poor subsistence yeoman farmers, and Black Belt planter aristocratic whites was itself a war within a war, one where regrettably few details of consequence were kept. Or, failing that, historians of a slightly later era did not wish to preserve the records of these so-called Tories of the Hills. Raines, the author, can't prove that archival mischief is to blame for the lack of solid fact, but he can make a solid case in favor of it.

This is a wonderful, if slightly disjointed book. I have deducted a star because the reader is told precious few details about the dealings of the 1st Alabama. In this book, Raines concedes, with deep frustration, that many details have been written out of history. The racist, but pervasive notion of the grand lost cause of the Confederacy took hold following Reconstruction and we are still living with its consequences.

Raines shows how that reactionary mindset wasn't strictly relegated to in Southern colleges and universities. A defeated South and defeated people tried to rationalize its white supremacist past. I am likely the last generation of Southerners who were schooled in this mindset, and in reading the book, I realize how much I absorbed as a child and how much unlearning I still need to do.

Like the author, I, too grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and appreciated a fresh retelling of the history of the city. This city has made great strides since its ignoble Civil Rights past, but one still sees a kind of defensiveness present in residents of this state. Raines is correct. Many Alabamians feel inferior to other Americans for a wide variety of reasons, the three most damning likely to be a history of lingering poverty, general backwardness, and a woefully inefficient and corrupt state government.

[Michael Belcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book will surprise you, because what the cover claims to focus on is not at all what Raines chooses to discuss in his book almost at all.

When I saw the premise of the book I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about the first AL Calvary that fought for the Union. However, I was suprised to find that the vast majority of the book is not detailing their origins but rather focusing on the foundations of the lost cause movement and the reasons why Alabama is entrenched in the Deep South lore and a cultivator of authors and historians who perpetrated the Lost Cause mythology propagated by former Confederates after the Civil War. Raines takes ample shots at Republican leaders today including Trump and many authors who took up the cause over rhetoric course of the 20th century.

While I found myself agreeing with Raines’ analysis and breakdown of what he discussed, I found myself throughly disappointed that he did little to discuss the supposed subjects of the book. Which left me quite conflicted. Since Raines made the claim that the 1st AL Calvary was supposedly written out of History I expected him to state that the Lost Cause and Southern Pride to have been the cause which would have justified his decision a little but he does not even connect it to that at least not explicitly.

Of a book that I listened to which took about 20 hours I estimate that he discussed topics in and around the 1st AL Calvary for about an hour to maybe 2 hours of it. Raines makes his analysis and topics so broad it can be hard to ascertain at all what exact point he was trying to make

If you want to know about he origins of the Lost Cause and how it affected Historical Scholarship after the Civil War and how it was so successful in dominating the consciousness of American Culture regarding the war then this is a book you can get into but if you want to know about the 1st AL Calvary you will be quite disappointed.

[Brandon Benner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I truly wanted to like this book and rate it higher. Howell Raines seems genuinely well-disposed to tracking down good stories, but the weakness with this book was that it took four or five good narratives and combined them into an incoherent jumble.

I can best describe Silent Cavalry like this: right around December 1, you’re rummaging through your attic and happen upon a box labeled “Grandma’s antique Christmas lights.” You’re intrigued and fascinated, and you can’t wait to open up this heretofore forgotten box and bring those beautiful old twinkle lights from your childhood memories back out for the holidays. But when you open the box, oh yeah, the lights are in there alright, but they’re tangled beyond recognition. And all interwoven with them are other eye grabbing old keepsakes, but they’re all such a horrific conglomerate that you can’t tell wear one thing ends and another begins. By the time you end up extricating the lights - the thing you opened the box for - it’s already January 1 and they scarcely do you much good.


That’s how Howell Raines’ collective narrative felt to me. I opened it expecting to find a history of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, USA and perhaps some social history of north Alabama. What I got was a rambling tangle of truly interesting topics that were sadly so scrambled as to be nearly incomprehensible. Southern social history is fascinating. Raines’ family history is fascinating. The evolution of Confederate historiography is fascinating. But the narrative lurched from one to another like a drunk staggering down an alley, with chronology more twisted than a kudzu vine. I really wanted to like this book. I really wanted to learn about the 1st Alabama Cavalry, USA. And while I’m left impressed by Raines’ dogged determination to trace a story to his roots, I feel he failed in what he seemed to advertise in the title - to tell the story of the 1st.

[Ralph B · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you didn't know that Howell Raines was a hard-charging NY Times journalist/executive editor, you would have easily guessed it from the way that he researched and delivered facts related to the Unionist soldiers from north Alabama hill country who served with Gen. Sherman on his march through Georgia. Like a military general, Raines carefully strategized how he would tear apart the fallacies of the South's reliance on the Lost Cause explanation of the Civil War and following years of Reconstruction.

As he weaves his argument from seemingly endless historical sources over decades of inquisitive investigation, you can see how he pursues his opponents and, one by one, picks them off like any backwoods sharpshooter from which his family heralded. His book is dense with military history and academic historiography, and amazingly pulls in disparate individuals, from Union and Confederate commanders to Alabamians who voted against secession to black historian WEB Dubois, documentarian Ken Burns and Jon Meacham.

At times, it was a little too much information to absorb with Raines exploring tangential figures that for me were hard to keep track of. He also repeated characterizations, which for a book this dense was probably a help to readers who could only absorb so many pages in a single sitting. Despite those flaws, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding a granular history of the Alabama Unionists and those historians and archivists who covered up their feats.

[Steve Barney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably more like 3.8 stars. Very well written and quite interesting, to a point.

Uncovering the First Alabama Calvary from the northern counties of Alabama that fought for the Union, and listing their accomplishments was interesting and certainly new to me. Also, showing how the Lost Cause was purposely built and perpetuated, although not new to me, gave me more knowledge of some of its perpetrators - Pollard, Early, Dunning, Fleming, Owen (Tom and Marie), Foote and more. I gave it less stars because there is much detail in the book about others tangentially related (but in the author’s mind, necessary) to uncovering the truths about the First Alabama, or purposely suppressing it, and The lost Cause, that frankly had me lost in the weed at times. Many of the people talked about have meaning to the author Howell Raines, a native of the northern counties in Alabama, and probably other Alabamians, but in some cases, it was difficult for me to follow (and that might be very well due to me - not the author).

In any case, it is a very thorough book that tirelessly tracks down why the First was left out of Civil War history, identifies the people who did leave them out, and their motivation to do so. The book also goes after the many historians that developed the false narrative of The Lost Cause and so ingrained it in US history for a century and a half.

[Steve B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howell Raines' 'Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta --and Got Written Out of History' is a great piece of investigative history on a topic, the First Alabama Cavalry - Union, was written out of history by southern historians who long espoused the 'Lost Cause'. Raines is from northern Alabama where many counties were opposed to the 'rich man's war' and stayed loyal to the Union. As a result, many men of northern Alabama joined the Union cause and their contributions to the war effort were never fully acknowledged by most historians.

I was intrigued by this book because the Colonel who led the 1st Alabama was George E Spencer. That in itself may not mean much but Spencer was a true wheeler dealer - land speculator, miner, cotton buyer, Civil War hero, US Senator, railroad executive and rancher ...and he is the namesake of my hometown! Spencer was certainly not the most scrupulous individual but he was an excellent soldier (he may have said so himself) and received accolades from those he served under including General Grenville Dodge and General Wm T Sherman.

This book is part Raines memoir, part investigative journalism and part detailed historical research.

[Francis X DuFour · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book a little surprising. I expected the usual chronological/ tactical account of the US Army’s First Alabama Cavalry in the Civil War. The vast majority of the book is an account of how Alabama’s White gentry, mostly the former masters of pre-war plantations and ex-Confederate military officers, managed to hide any mention of the role white Unionist Alabamans and freed slaves played in the war. In an effort to push their dominant “Lost Cause” philosophy, these white supremacists locked away or destroyed all existing records of Unionist history in the state. Gaining national support of politicians and academics the supremacists successfully denied any history outside of the “true” account of the Lost Cause. The book was very interesting in explaining how the state’s Unionist history has been revealed in the past few years. I have to wonder if the editors selected the title to increase sales, since I think if the book was named, “How the racists in Alabama suppressed the history of Unionist Activity in the civil war” it would be of less interest; not exactly an eye-catching title and one that would appeal to a much smaller audience.

[Jordan Crump · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite what some low-rated reviews suggest, this book covers what the title suggests it does. It describes the history of the 1st U.S. Alabama Cavalry and the processes by which its role and implications for Civil War memory were intentionally minimized. Raines does interweave personal and family history (he is descended from Alabama Unionists and has a direct interest in the story of the regiment identified in the title of the book), but rather than being put-off I found that it added richness to the narrative and something like actual stakes in the uncovering of the hidden history.

While Raines did weave bits of how the regiment was written out of Southern memory and the motivations behind it throughout the entire book, it wasn’t until about 75% through that a direct analysis of Lost Cause Revisionism and conspiring, sympathetic archivists really took shape. That was my primary interest in picking up this book, so I would have liked to have gotten to that section more quickly.

However, on balance, this was an interesting read and an important volume that examines Civil War historiography and begins to correct the narrative of Southern Unionists.

[Jason Huether · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was difficult to get through and embodies everything wrong with most historical narratives of the post-Trump presidency. Raines tells two very interesting stories. One about a little known regiment who fought under Sherman during the March the Sea. His methods rely more on social narrative than historic anchoring. His distain for historians who don’t approach history with a specific viewpoint is explicit. The other story is how the “lost cause” narrative distorted professional historians perspective. This second story was extremely interesting and told rather well. This was the book he wanted to write, however, his “evidence” for this is weak relying largely on defaming his opponents instead of historic evidence. As a history this book lacks most of the scholarly honesty/objectiveness I would expect. As a social commentary, part four is the only saving grace for the book. I wanted to enjoy this book as Confederates in the Attic helped shape my perspective in the late ‘90s. I just couldn’t get over the overarching bias the author ingrained in every sentence.

[Patrick Bair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to review. For the lover of American, and particularly American Civil War history, it is chock full of interesting historical facts you won't find anywhere else, due almost entirely to the author's dogged research.

However, instead of reading, imagine sitting on rocking chairs on Howell Raines' porch and listening to him relate these often disparate stories over the space of several days. There is little organization to this American/family history, and even the connections to the work's theme of the First Alabama Cavalry USA is not always clear. It is somewhat of a mystery book, but with investigative detail so overwhelming that you may not even care about the outcome.

It seems perhaps ironic to suggest that this major work by the former executive editor of the New York Times could have used a better editor. For the completist primarily.

[Marcia Call · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary story of a band of northern Alabama Union troops who emerged victorious in battle only to be removed from history quickly and systematically after the Civil War. A tangled tale of family, history, and post-war reportage, Silent Cavalry traverses the realms of genealogy, the Lost Cause mythology, and ultimately modern interpretations of the war like that produced by Ken Burns. Raines moves between his subjects quickly and sometimes I found my lost in what story was being told -- the one about his family's participation, the one about what the 1st Alabama actually did, or the post-war storytelling. However, this was a distraction that I could handle in order to learn as much as possible about this extraordinary group of people, their families, and the Confederates who sought to suppress them. The book left me wanting to know more.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could award more stars, I would!!! I've never read Raines' journalist work but this book is a page turner. For Civil War buffs it is a must-read, regardless of your loyalties. Raines researched the history of the First Alabama Calvary, a Union group from mainly north Alabama. The unit saw major action and escorted Sherman into Atlanta and Savannah. Yet, entities that wanted to paint a different picture of public loyalties during the war hid the information about this crucial group of Alabamians who supported the Union. Despite the events occurring over 150 years ago, we may learn more since the Alabama Department of History and Archives still has boxes of documents to catalog.

[Steve Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

hey y'all, mosey on over to my porch, and i'll tell you a rambling, disjointed story about the Civil War. Family history, rambling across time and distance, this book needed a strong editor's hand, and didn't get it. I struggled to read each page, and read most of each chapter, but wow, just couldn't stay into the story.
try again, cutting out the rambling pages of "research" to gather the story, and tell a cogent tale about the key feature of the book, the First Alabama Calvary.
i hope his research results in others writing a concise history of these soldiers.