Alabama Review

The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It is not a history of the First Alabama Cavalry, US, which was raised in the mountainous northern part of the state for service with the Union Army. It is instead something quite different, and more important, given that the First Alabama Cavalry, US, has been written about by historians for some time now. The book really is a personal memoir by a native Alabaman who became a well-known journalist outside the state; a memoir oriented around his lifelong quest for information about the regiment in which one of his direct ancestors had served. As the latter part of this long and complicated book title suggests, Howell Raines lays out in much detail how and why this regiment of loyalist Alabamans was written out of history by a cabal of diehard Lost Cause supporters, with the aid of Lost Cause academics like William A. Dunning from the North, during the early twentieth century. [End Page 355]

This book therefore does not neatly or easily fit into the usual categories of offerings on Civil War-related topics. Therein lies its charm and importance. Howell Raines was born in 1943 in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in the segregated South but soon began to realize that the Lost Cause mythology that was spoon-fed to every white person in that haunted era had major cracks in it. He knew that many in his own family talked respectfully of Alabama Unionists. Some members of his family even were friendly with and fair in their dealings with Black people. Raines began, pretty early on, what became a lifelong quest (although in fits and starts) to find out the truth. He writes of "my seven-decade personal quest for the full story of the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A.," and points out that the regiment was "overlooked by mainstream historians" for decades. As he notes, "This book is about how the history of these Alabama Unionists was purposely buried by Lost Cause scholars" (xix-xx).

With a background as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Raines leaves no stone unturned in this memoir-history. In 473 pages of flowing text, he brings in literally hundreds of individuals from his personal life as well as from the history he so assiduously studied. As a career journalist, working for the New York Times since 1978, Raines has a good sense of how to make his characters come alive. And there are few flaws in his understanding of the historic figures. The research base of his book blends historic sources, such as William T. Sherman's memoirs, with the work of recent historians who have explored the history of Alabama Unionism in a number of academically published books. He also includes the work of many amateur historians who in some ways pioneered the exploration of First Alabama Cavalry history. They revealed the story of these Deep South men who were loyal to the Federal government during the Civil War in a way that spurred Raines on in his personal quest. The cast of characters, both in Raines' personal life and on the historic trail he traced, ranges across many spectrums of bravery, venality, misguided devotion to the slave empire that was the Confederacy and its memory, and life-threatening devotion to the Union government. Race weaves its tentacles throughout the book, whether it is racial [End Page 356] bigotry or assertive efforts to create some degree of racial tolerance. There are many people living in this book, and their lives stretch across more than 150 years of time. It therefore touches on a wide diversity of individuals who are in good hands as far as fairness and frankness are concerned. Raines is a master at delving deeply into what makes them tick, both good and bad.

Of the many people incisively described by Raines, the most striking to me are Thomas McAdory Owen and his wife, Marie Bankhead Owen. The pair was mostly responsible for sieving out from the Alabama Department of Archives and History any evidence offering insight into the history of Alabama Unionism, especially the First Alabama Cavalry. Thomas was director of the institution until his death in 1920 when Marie succeeded him. "The biased screening process Tom used from 1901 until his death achieved a dual purpose," Raines concludes. "Not only did it block out from local and national awareness the story of Alabama's mountain Unionism and the First Alabama Cavalry, but its ripple effect had a previously underemphasized role in establishing Lost Cause dogma as a major force in American scholarship and popular culture" (365). Marie was even worse in her desperate efforts to give the world the impression that all Alabamians had been loyal Confederates. "Tom and Marie made the Alabama archives into an institution that was the lengthened shadow of their elitist prejudices about Confederate virtue and the incompetence of African Americans and poor whites" (364). This is actually only one strain running through this complex book, but it stands out as a critical case study of how archives, historical libraries, the Lost Cause, and virulent racism intertwined in the Deep South of the early twentieth century. As someone who has deeply mined the Civil War collections of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, I was surprised by all of this and heartened that when professional archivists finally gained control of the institution in the 1980s its character changed for the better.

This book shows how perniciously the Lost Cause warped, suppressed, and abused history to create a whites-only, Confederates-only myth about Alabama's Civil War heritage. Along the way the [End Page 357] reader is treated to a wide variety of stories and reflections on everything that went into the personal journey Raines conducted along the path of a long and thoughtful lifetime. He writes with respect for his native state even as he criticizes many aspects of its culture. It is an intriguing and fruitful story by a master storyteller.

What one derives from Howell Raines' book is a complicated tale that fuses personal history with local, state, regional, and national history. It also mixes in the story of race in all its complications, from the era of the Civil War to the modern wave of ultraconservatism gripping the ex-Confederate states of the Deep South. Slavery enthralled the southern generation that fought the Civil War and segregation engrossed the southern generation that tried in vain to keep Blacks in a kind of pseudo-slavery. Raines lived through the period when this fragile dam of racial intolerance was swept away in the 1950s and 1960s. If anyone doubts the notion that the Deep South was, and still is to a degree, entangled in its tormented past, one only needs to read what Raines has to say about it to appreciate that it is absolutely true.