| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Margaret M. Storey. Loyalty and Loss: Alabama's Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction. (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 296. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.95.
In northern Alabama's hills and in smaller pockets of resistance in other parts of the state, feisty and courageous dissidents held out against majority secessionist sentiment, and when they failed to derail the secession movement they plunged the state into an inner civil war that continued through Reconstruction. Northern Alabama, like eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, was a "dark and bloody ground" featuring violent confrontations between Confederate and Unionist neighbors. The story of Winston County, where more people fought for the Union than Confederacy, is familiar, but few know how widespread the opposition to war and disunion was in other counties. In prose that is crisp, clear, and free of academic jargon, Margaret M. Storey provides readers with a comprehensive view of Alabama's "Unconditional Unionists." She describes the geographic breadth of their dissent, the reasons behind their apostasy, the multiple ways they served their cause, the fratricidal violence that spread across the northern part of the state, and the suffering that came to Unionist families.	1
Storey bases her book on the work of the Southern Claims Commission, which the federal government sent into the South in 1871 to determine which persons lost real or personal property as a result of their loyalty to the United States. Conducting extensive interviews with some 22,000 southern claimants, members granted compensation to more than 800 Alabamians. The interviews survive, and their contents enriches our view of the Civil War home front. If examiners found the slightest hint that an applicant might have helped a Confederate, even if the Rebel was a brother, assistance was denied. Far more aid was denied than given, and while Storey recognizes that Unionism was more extensive than the commission discovered, she grants the title of Unionist only to those people who maintained their loyalty throughout the war. Those who opposed disunion, no matter how stoutly, but then supported the Confederacy are not dealt with here.	2
Storey leans a bit too heavily on Claims Commission interviews, where claimants usually put their stories in the best possible light, but she offers an appendix explaining her use of these materials, and her overall research is extensive. She uses a variety of other sources, including the papers of Alabama's Civil War and Reconstruction governors, other official government records, oral interviews with surviving descendants of the Unionists, the letters of Unionist families and of northern soldiers who served in Alabama during the war, diaries, several sets of family papers, Alabama newspapers, and all relevant secondary sources on the subject.	3
Unconditional Unionists never constituted a majority, or even a near majority of the population, argues Storey, except in a couple of hill counties. In other counties there were enough of them to become a major problem for Confederate authorities, but the author believes they were no more than ten to fifteen percent of the state population, and that they were heavily concentrated in the northern half of Alabama. However, there were even small communities along the state's Gulf Coast that were Unionist dominated. Scholars interested in researching Unionism in particular counties or towns will find the book's relatively thin index a bit frustrating, although Storey does provide an alphabetical list of Unionists mentioned in the text.	4
Those seeking compensation for their Unionism came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Most were middle-class farmers, but some were wealthy and a few were from the poorest element. In the Tennessee River Valley, where there were larger plantations, there were also slaveholding Unionists, but a majority of Unionist Americans in Alabama held no slaves. Some white Unionists formed close political relationships with slaves during the war, exchanging military intelligence with bondsmen.	. . .

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