A
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the
Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil
War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books.
“It is my
sincere hope that this compelling and submerged history is integrated
into our understanding of our nation, and allows us to embrace new
heroes of the past.”—Imani Perry, professor, Harvard University, and
National Book Award–winning author of South to America
We all know how the Civil War was won: Courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But is there more to the story?
As
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only
soldiers from northern states who helped General William Tecumseh
Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground but also an unsung regiment of 2,066
Alabamian yeoman farmers—including at least one member of Raines’s own
family.
Called the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A., this regiment
of mountain Unionists, which included sixteen formerly enslaved Black
men, was the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of
the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So
why don’t we know anything about them?
Silent Cavalry
is part epic American history, part family saga, and part scholarly
detective story. Drawing on the lore of his native Alabama and
investigative skills honed by six decades in journalism, Raines brings
to light a conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of
these renegade southerners—a key component of the Lost Cause effort to
restore glory to white southerners after the war, even at the cost of
the truth.
In this important new contribution to our
understanding of the Civil War and its legacy, Raines tells the
thrilling tale of the formation of the First Alabama while exposing the
tangled web of how its wartime accomplishments were silenced,
implicating everyone from a former Confederate general to a gaggle of
Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League and a sanctimonious former
keeper of the Alabama state archives. By reversing the erasure of the
First Alabama, Silent Cavalry is a testament to the immense power of historians to destroy as well as to redeem.
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