Silent Cavalry: How the Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History by Howell Raines
Book Review No. 3
Silent Cavalry is the product of a decades-long quest by Alabama-born Howell Raines, a former executive editor for the New York Times, to uncover the well hidden pro-Union roots of his ancestors. (Raines left the NYT in 2003 in the wake of the scandal related to reporting by Jason Blair.) Raines was born in Birmingham in 1943, “when it was America’s most segregated city,” but his family was from the “hill country” north of Birmingham, specifically Winston County.
Despite the fact that the city of Birmingham didn’t exist until 1871, Raines was marinated in Civil War Lost Cause mythology growing up as part of the state mandated school curriculum. Raines’ first clue that northern Alabama, including his beloved Winston County, contained pro-Unionists during the Civil War came from the book Stars Fell on Alabama by Carl Cramer. The book includes an anecdote about why the roads in Winston County, the poorest county in Alabama, were not paved: “Folks down at Montgomery ain’t through payin’ em back for stayin’ in the Union in the War Between the States.”
Thus began Raines’ quest.
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