The ordinary fellow up in this area back then called it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. They felt that their forebears had fought for the independence of this country from England, and they weren’t going to help tear it up. Remember, it had only been eighty years since the first war, the Revolutionary War. A lot of folks up here still remembered that. They were more loyal to what they called “the flag of our fathers” than to this new Stars and Bars.
There was talk for a time among north Alabamians of seceding from the state and joining mountain sections of Georgia and Tennessee to form a new state called Nickajack. Nothing came of it, but there was one county , Winston County, that actually did vote to secede from Alabama.
The “Free State” of Winston County in Alabama was not the only county in the hill country of the southern states to secede.
When the Confederacy passed a conscription act in 1862, hundreds of north Alabama Unionists hid in the mountain hollows and caves rather than become part of the Rebel Army. Folks called them “mossbacks” because of the moss that supposedly grew on their clothing in the damp, clammy gullies where they huddled.
These are “my” people on my Grandaddy’s side according to my Dad. It is folklore that some members of my family in the South are unhappy about acknowledging, but there were good reasons for their political decisions which were quite brave if you consider the fact that the Confederates would have not thought twice about killing anyone of these men and their families who “hid in the caves”.
Here is some context...
It says something that in 1860, when cotton planters {read plantation owners here} made up less than one third of one percent of Alabama’s white population and were nearly eighteen times as wealthy as the average white Alabamian, they held one fourth of the seats in the state legislature.
The “Black Belt” of the South is called that not for the thousands and thousands of slaves who were used and abused on plantations, but because the soil in the southern parts of states like Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi was rich black soil capable of producing high yields in crops. Yields that could not only support feeding the large slave labor populations on an average plantation, but also would allow the family owners to do basically zero work.
The northern parts of those states constitute the foothills of the Appalachian Mountain range where rocky soil and the hills, gullies, hollows and narrow valleys limited crop yields considerably. To such a degree that the slave-holding practice to the south was actually an unsustainable economic model. The small percentage of slaves held in the foothills and mountain territories more often lived in the family house, ate with the family at the dining table and worked alongside every member of the family on the farm. That was my Grandmother’s side.
Prior to Emancipation, that part of my family had four or five slaves all of whom lived in the house. The house was a classic and beautiful Georgian-style plantation house, but it was actually quite small compared to all found to the south on the Black Belt plantation. The family and the slaves lived in tight quarters with one another in the same dwellings. Even though this side of my family tended more towards the politics and practices of the plantation owners to the south of them where the soil was more fruitful, they were, in effect, forced to work with and live more intimately with their slaves.
While divisions of race have never been absent in the thinking and practice of my experience of southern life in the north Alabama foothills, there was a recognition — a full recognition — of the fact that people who happened to be black were human beings — an understanding that would have been impossible on a plantation where a family would hold hundreds of slaves whose quarters and lives were lived out in compounds outside of family houses who never really have interaction with the slave labor.
After watching the Beverly Hillbillies reruns quite a lot in my urban, liberal environment far, far away from my Grandmother’s family plantation and at that time having a best friend who was not only black, but also the product of a only recently legalized mixed marriage of a black man and a white woman, I was staying with my Grandmother for a month during the summer as I always did. I asked her if she was mad that her family lost the Civil War. I think I was about eight years old. My Grandaddy had died about three years earlier. It was his side that hid in the caves and outright rejected the Confderacy. Her’s not so much. I also asked why I never say the Confederate flag when I visited her.
I asked aren’t you as mad as “Granny” on the Beverly Hillbillies? She was driving her large car, wearing her lovely well chosen clothes and we were on our way to survey our farmland some of which was inherited to this Southern Belle and some of which was built and amazingly productive because of my Grandaddy’s innovation and hard work and she looked me in the eyes and said, “Of course not.”
Being eight or so and excellent at that time-honored question that children will drive adults nuts with, I asked “WHY?” We pulled up on the farm and she stopped the car putting into park and looked at me for a minute (or an eon given the intensity of her laser look — she was a dangerous adversary, trust me when I tell you that she knew that I was provoking a pledge of allegiance and challenging her to “pick a side” at that moment) she looked at me and said, “Because the Civil War was wrong. We are Americans.”
I know that doesn’t seem like much of a statement on her part, but if you knew her and understood her family history as both a Daughter of the American Revolution and a Daughter of the Confederacy, it was significant.
On so many levels she was flawed and frankly very dangerous — this was a woman who would take on a water moccasin snake — so dangerous that my father married a northerner not only because he fell madly in love with my mother, but also because he was traumatized by my Southern Belle grandmother who was the quintessential poster girl for so many of the complex and confounding traits Southern white women he grew up with. And yet she still somehow attracted the devotion of my Grandaddy who was an icon of humanitarianism whose ancestors did hide in the caves and rejected the slave plantation economy and also as it happens built a business that was so powerful that he was able to significantly advance the lives of his black employees in the 1960’s when no one would give them a loan to buy a house much less allow black people to be considered equals.
The excerpts I have transcribed above come from the autobiography of Carl Elliott, Sr. written with Michael D’Orso who was my Grandaddy’s best friend, a surrogate father to my father and a Congressman whose political career was destroyed by George Wallace.
There are only a few copies available as it is out of print now, but here’s an Amazon link to buy his book, “The Cost of Courage”, which was edited by Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Carl Elliott, Sr. was awarded the very first Kennedy Profile Courage Award in 1990.
I loved him. He was a really sweet and incredibly giant man. Not kidding about the giant part, he was super tall. But more than anything he was “super”. He was a man of men. He cared about people and he cared about helping people to have a shot at realizing the American dream. He believed in education and that was what he focused on when he was in Congress.
I write this in part in reaction to Donald Trump and really also with the rest of the Republican candidates in mind who are engaging either subtly or overtly in divisive, horrible and hurtful rhetoric that is not only NOT good for America, but also horribly dangerous to the poor and working class people who are being fooled, hoodwinked and abused to such a degree by a minority elite group that will NEVER serve them well regardless of skin color, religious affiliation and all of the rest.
Democrats MUST step up their game and champion Main Street in real and meaningful ways if they are to combat this lurch and passion amongst voters to go to the right. People like Trump and the other candidates will prey on them. None of these divisive tactics are new. Read history.
The truth is that America is in trouble given the fact that the Republican Party is largely running away from the concepts and ideals of a democratic republic. America has had prosperous and good eras where the dominant political parties adhered to the ideals of a democratic republic organized and motivated to serve “The People” and at this time in history, the onus is on the Democratic Party to do the heavy lifting on this front because the Republican Party has been gutted of it’s American patriots.
Time to abandon politics as usual. It is time to step up to greatness of what is suddenly and wrongly only considered the political territory of the left. Step up to the greatness that is imagined for our country embracing diversity, government serving its people and not hindered by doubts about how “pragmatic” something is. Greatness that is full of vision, vigor and blind faith in potential.
We need leaders who will serve our country’s citizenry.
We need a citizenry who are willing work with each other to make good on good service.
We need each other to survive. Division is not the answer to national security, personal security or even the most basic aspects of daily life.