Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret M. Storey’s welcome study explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861—and beyond. Her extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. Narratives of their wartime experiences indicate in astonishingly rich detail the chaos and destruction that occurred on the southern home front.
Storey considers the political, social, and military aspects of unionism in Alabama. And by treating the years 1861-1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists’ sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior. In extending the study of unionism into the Deep South, Storey sheds important light on the internal strife of the Confederacy as well as the nature of resistance itself.
