‘History is not what happened’: Howell Raines on the civil war and memory
“Norman Mailer said every writer has one book that’s a gift from God.” So says Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, now author of a revelatory book on the civil war, Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written Out of History.
“And agnostic as I am, I have to say this was such a gift, one way or another.”
Raines tells the story of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, loyalists who served under Gen William Tecumseh Sherman in campaigns that did much to end the war that ended slavery, only to be scorned by their own state and by historians as the “Lost Cause” myth, of a noble but traduced south, took hold.
For Raines, it is also a family story. As he wrote in the Washington Post, his name is a “version of the biblical middle name of James Hiel Abbott, who … help [ed] his son slip through rebel lines to enlist in the 1st Alabama … That son is buried in the national military cemetery at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Until a few years ago, I was among the thousands of southerners who never knew they had kin buried under Union army headstones.”
The 1st Alabama was organised in 1862 and fought to the end of the war, its duties including forming Sherman’s escort on his famous March to the Sea, its battles including Resaca, Atlanta and Kennesaw Mountain.
To the Guardian, Raines, 80, describes how the 1st Alabama and the “Free State of Winston”, the anti-secession county from which many recruits came, have featured through his life.
“My paternal grandmother gave me my first hint, when I was about five or six, that our family didn’t support the Confederacy. It was a very oblique reference but it stuck in my mind. And then, in 1961, I ran across a reference … in a wonderful book called Stars Fell on Alabama [by Carl Carmer, 1934], and it confirmed … that there were Unionists in my mother’s ancestral county, Winston county, up in the Appalachian foothills.
“So those were the seeds, and I just kept over the years saving string, to use a newspaper term. And I could never rid myself of curiosity about what the real story was. And then when I started reading enough Alabama history to see how these mountain unionists had been libeled in the Alabama history books, that, I suppose, fit my natural curiosity as a contrarian.
“… For years, I thought I would write it as a novel. I had done one novel set in that same county [Whiskey Man, 1977]. And it took me a long time to realise that the true story was better than anything I could make up.”
Raines has written history before: his first book, written in the 1970s when he was a reporter and editor in Georgia and Florida, was My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the civil rights years. His new book is also inflected with autobiography and follows two memoirs, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis (1993) and The One That Got Away (2006), the latter published not long after his departure from the Times, in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair affair.
He had, he says, “a very unusual upbringing”, for Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.
“In no house of my extended family was there a single picture of Robert E Lee or any of the Confederate heroes. It didn’t strike me until I was much older that I lived in a different southern world than most other white kids my age in Alabama. Our families not venerating these Confederate icons was the very subtle downstream effect of having had a significant number of unionists and indeed some collateral kin and direct kin who were part of the Union army.
“It’s a curious thing about Alabama. After segregation became such an inflamed issue in the south with the 1954 school desegregation decision [Brown v Board of Education, by the US supreme court], families with unionist heritage quit telling those family stories on the front porch. The only way to find out about it was to dig them out. And it always struck me as the ultimate irony that many of the Klan members in north Alabama in the 1960s, and many of the supporters of George Wallace [the segregationist governor], were actually descendants of Union soldiers without knowing it.”
Reading Stars Fell on Alabama “was a seminal moment. [Carmer’s] observation that Alabama could best be understood as if it was a separate nation within the continental United States: suddenly the quotidian realities that a child accepts as normal or even a young college student accepted as normal, I began to see as odd behavior.
“For example, Alabamians were always complaining in the 1950s and 60s about being looked down upon. And suddenly … I said, ‘Well, there’s a reason for this. If you pick [the infamous Birmingham commissioner of public safety] Bull Connor and George Wallace to be your representatives before the nation on the premier legal and moral issue of the decade” – civil rights – “then they’re going to think you’re strange.”
If Alabamians complained of being looked down upon, many Alabamians looked down on the unionists of Winston county – people too poor to own enslaved workers.
“Even though the story of unionism was suppressed, it survived enough in the political bloodstream of the state that the legislature continued to punish them for 100 plus years after the war. So much so that my cousins in the country went to school in wooden schoolhouses while the schools in the rest of the state were modern, even in the rural counties. And up until I was 10 years old, we had to travel to my grandparents’ farm, only 50 miles from Birmingham, via dirt roads. So this was a matter of punishing through the state budget, this apostasy that sort of otherwise washed out of the civic memory.”
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As Raines writes in his introduction to Silent Cavalry, “History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic and cultural authorities.”
He “had to really dig deeply into historiography to understand how this odd thing came to be: that the losers of the civil war got to write the dominant history … [and how] that revisionist view … became nationalised.” That’s what happened in the Lost Cause crusade of the 1870s to 1890s that in turn produced William Archibald Dunning” (1857-1922), a historian at Columbia University in New York who did much to embed the Lost Cause in American culture.”
Raines discusses that process and its later manifestations, not least in relation to The Civil War, Ken Burns’ great 1990 documentary series now subject to revisionist thinking. Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C Ward, a historian who co-wrote the script, are quoted on why the 1st Alabama is absent from their work. But Raines also discusses historians who have begun to tell the stories of the unionist south.
“Histories of the Confederacy were written by Dunning-trained scholars who delivered a warped version of Confederate history: very, very racist [and] very classist, in terms of their contempt for southern poor whites. And those became the fundamental references which national historians … were writing off. A tainted version of southern history.
“That obtained until the publication in 1992 of a book called Lincoln’s Loyalists. Richard Nelson Current went back and actually discovered that there were 100,000 citizens of the Confederate states who volunteered in the Union army – almost 5% that came from the south.
“The reviews at the time hailed Current’s book as opening up an entire new field of scholarship. But in fact it was not until about 2000 that a new generation of PhD students, hungry for unexplored topics, began to really dig into this new area of study. And it’s a thriving field now, with a lot of really interesting books.
Asked how his book has been received back home, Raines laughs.
“I don’t know about Alabama. I’m having a signing party in Birmingham in January but that’ll be like-minded southern progressives, for the most part. The defensiveness I referred to … will cause many readers down there to say, ‘Oh, this is just another chance to make Alabama look bad.’
“Alabamians take no responsibility for being on the wrong side of history since 1830, and they think anyone who points that out is is being unfair. So that won’t change.”