Your family’s story has many similar elements as those found in “divided” families throughout the South. So much of what determined a man’s decision was dictated by circumstances that could be quite fluid. It certainly resonates with many of the personal stories Ed Payne has recently uncovered for his Renegade South posts on Unionism in Piney Woods Mississippi.

Thank you again for sharing your family’s story. How wonderful that so much of it was preserved through the generations.

Vikki

Thank you for this additional information about the brutal treatment of your ggg grandfather. There is no doubt that extreme measures were taken by Confederate authorities and vigilantes to quash Unionism; examples of such, like that of Unionist activity, are scattered throughout documents, letters, and court records.

Vikki

After posting this, I thought about how historians have commented that Lincoln overestimated the numbers of white Southerners willing to rise up against the Confederacy given the chance. Fitzgerald’s comment that the “masses” of Southern men were ready to do so may have been one of those letters that contributed to that overestimation.

I too was struck by Fitzgerald’s passionate denunciation of slavery followed by his recommendation that slaveholders loyal to the United States be compensated by the U.S. for the loss of their slaves. I agree that his advice to Lincoln represents a realistic, pragmatic assessment of what it would take for the Union to hold the support of that class.

It’s interesting that Fitzgerald had a better grasp of the fragility of the South’s Unionist coalition in regard to slaveholders. Seems he desperately wanted to believe that class resentments among the farmers and poor folk could be elevated to a revolution of sorts from below. He wouldn’t be the first–or last–over the span of history to make that mistake.

Vikki

Vikki