Excerpts from the World History Blog:
I was surprised to read about the 1st Alabama Cavalry today. This unit was from the deep south and it fought for the Union during the American Civil War. I had no idea that such a unit ever existed! Reading further, I discovered that large portions of Northern Alabama had been opposed to secession and remained loyal to the United States. Further, these areas were never under Confederate control and they raised several units which supported Union forces. The 1st Alabama Calvary even served as escorts for General Sherman on his infamous March to the Sea late in the war. ...
I would have expected that the black population of the south supported the Union. However, I was surprised that so many white southerners (some who were slave holders) refused to join the rebellion and openly fought to preserve the United States of America. The loyalist in the south were a major hindrance to the rebellion and they certainly tied up Confederate troops that were needed elsewhere.
And from the 1st Alabama Calvary site:
Indeed, a majority in the hills of Northwest Alabama, mostly poor yeomen dirt farmers, saw little value or reason in taking arms against the federal government. They recognized quite early that this was not their fight, but that it was the landed gentry. It was obvious to the hill folk that the plantation owners and their political spokesmen were fanning the war flames and talked the loudest about separation. With their money and property and political power, it was the planters who felt most threatened by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. ...
But in the rugged landscape of northern Alabama, slaves were few and far between. The same was true in the mountains of East Tennessee and North Georgia and western North Carolina, and western Virginia, which would later become a state because of its overwhelming anti-confederate sentiment. Few slaves were owned in the upland South, simply because the land would not support a plantation economy. Those who did work the land in the mountain South were a fiercely independent breed, poor but proud, and of no mind to lend support to plantation owners who looked down upon them as uneducated and inferior.
