| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta. By Thomas G. Dyer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xiv, 383 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8018-6116-0.)

Thomas G. Dyer corrects forever the myth popularized by Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind (1936) that only die-hard Confederates resided in Civil War Atlanta. In fact, members of the Union Circle, some one hundred families whom Dyer analyzes, risked social ostracism, military incarceration, property forfeiture, and even death for their loyalty to the United States. From Georgia's secession in 1861 when "almost no one spoke out publicly on issues related to disunion" to the battle, siege, and federal occupation of Atlanta in 1864, Unionists dwindled to fewer than half their prewar numbers. 1

Cyrena Bailey Stone, whose diary sparked Dyer's research, "came as close to unconditional loyalty to the Union" as possible in an area isolated from significant numbers of loyalists. Yet her diary, a novel about her by her half sister Louisa Bailey Whitney entitled Goldie's Inheritance: A Story of the Siege of Atlanta (1903), and records collections in the National Archives indicate that loyalty was a complicated issue even for members of her own household. Her husband, Amherst Stone, an attorney and self-promoter, adjusted his loyalty to circumstances, and her brother-in-law Chester Stone fought for the Confederacy. . . .

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