Bitterly Divided by David Williams

Author:David Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2010-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Seeking safety in numbers, deserters and draft evaders began banding together early on. By summer 1862, there were layout gangs in Calhoun County, Florida, just west of Tallahassee, who had “armed and organized themselves to resist those who may attempt their arrest.” In September, forty men of southwest Georgia’s Marion County “secured and provisioned a house and arranged it in the manner of a military castle.” Though Confederate troops tried repeatedly to force them out, they had little success against these men, determined as they were to “resist to the last extremity.” Illustration from Ellis, Thrilling Adventures.

In Louisiana, James Madison Wells, though a man of means himself, denounced the Confederacy as a rich man’s government and organized a guerrilla campaign against it. From his Bear Wallow stronghold in Rapides Parish, Wells led deserters and other resisters in raids against Confederate supply lines and depots. Further south, in the state’s Cajun parishes, bands of anti-Confederates did the same. One group that ranged west of Washington Parish, known locally as the Clan, numbered more than three hundred. Commanded by a Cajun named Carrier, it drove off home guards and forced plunder from all who opposed them. A woman from Bayou Chicot wrote to Governor Moore of local guerrillas there: “We could not fare worse were we surrounded by a band of Lincoln’s mercenary hirelings.” Confederate Lieutenant John Sibley wrote in his diary that one band of “marauders” had “declared vengeance against Confederate soldiers. . . . After killing five members of the Home Guard, they almost inhumanly beat their faces to pieces with the breach of their guns so no friend would know them again.”111

In Texas’s Rio Grande county of Zapata, local Hispanics denounced the Confederacy, formed a band of pro-Union partisans, and plundered the property of loyal Confederates. In Bandera County, just west of San Antonio, residents became so upset with the inequitable tax system that they formed a pro-Union militia, declined to pay their taxes, and swore to kill anyone who tried to make them do so. At the state’s northern extreme, near Bonham, several hundred anti-Confederates established three large camps close enough that the entire force could assemble within two hours. They patrolled the region so effectively that no one could approach without their knowing of it. In the central Texas county of Bell, deserters led by Lige Bivens fortified themselves in a cave known as Camp Safety. From there they mounted raids against the area’s pro-Confederates. According to an 1863 report, two thousand other Texas deserters “fortified themselves near the Red River, and defied the Confederacy. At last account they had been established . . . eight months, and were constantly receiving accession of discontented rebels and desperadoes.”112

An Arkansas band of anti-Confederates operated out of Greasy Cove, a mountain pass at the head of the Little Missouri River. Made up of “deserters, disaffected, and turbulent characters,” as one newspaper called them, they swept through the countryside harassing Confederate loyalists and challenging Confederate authority. So did anti-Confederates in east Tennessee, a region where open rebellion against the Confederacy was common from the start.

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