A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams & Howard Zinn

Author:David Williams & Howard Zinn [Williams, David & Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595587473
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2012-03-13T07:00:00+00:00

“Union Men to the Core”

Men like Mason were hardly unusual. Anti-Confederate activists throughout the South established an extensive network of safe houses, guides, and secret signals to aid refugees, deserters, draft dodgers, and escaped Federal prisoners. In southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia, residents of the Wiregrass region helped deserters and draft dodgers make their way south to the Federals in Florida. They even helped Union prisoners of war make their escapes. One day in late 1864, J.B. Norman of southwest Georgia’s Colquitt County came across two Yankee escapees from Andersonville on his property. He fed the men and put them up for the night. The next morning he served them steak, then pointed them toward Florida.120

Those requiring the services of the South’s unionists and antiwar activists were most grateful. A Wisconsin colonel trying to reach Sherman’s army in Chattanooga later wrote that they were “generous, hospitable, brave, and Union men to the core; men who would suffer privations, and death itself, rather than array themselves in strife against the Stars and Stripes, the emblem of the country they loved… . under their homespun jackets beat hearts pure as gold, and stout as oaks.”121

Union men were not alone in their efforts to help escaping prisoners. Some of the most daring allies captured Yankees had were the South’s Union women. In Atlanta, Emily Farnsworth, Cyrena Stone, and other women of the city’s Union Circle slipped prisoners cash and other contraband to ease their escape. In the southern Appalachians, women gave escaping Yankees room and board, pointed them toward safe routes through the mountains, and served as guides to Union lines. Escaping Union Captain Madison Drake encountered one such woman in North Carolina who found him and several companions hidden in a ravine. She “boldly advanced” toward the group and demanded to know who they were. She warned them, “you must not use deceit or you will be shot down where you stand. A dozen true rifles are now leveled at you, and if I raise my hand you will fall dead at my feet.” The woman was relieved to learn that they were Yankee soldiers trying to make it to the Union lines in Tennessee, and that they were no threat to her husband, a deserter from the Confederate army. She took the men to her cabin, fed them, and gave them directions to Federal forces. Drake later recalled they they had “never met such a woman … certainly the bravest of her sex.”122

Like other Union escapees, Drake and his comrades found themselves beholden to former enemies as well. Gangs of deserters and layouts that were common in the mountains occasionally shared their hideouts, their knowledge of the landscape, and what rations they had with Yankees on the run. Drake’s admiration and appreciation of such men came through clearly in his recollections: “Here we were, four Yankee officers, in the heart of the enemy’s country, in a mountain fastness, surrounded by some of the men whom we had encountered in battle’s stern

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