Unionists in South and Border States
People loyal to the federal government and opposed to secession living in the border states (where slavery was legal in 1861)were termed Unionists. Confederates sometimes styled them "Homemade Yankees". However, Southern Unionists were not necessarily northern sympathizers and many of them – although opposing secession – supported the Confederacy once it was a fact. East Tennessee never supported the Confederacy, and Unionists there became powerful state leaders, including governors Andrew Johnson and William G. Brownlow. Likewise, large pockets of eastern Kentucky were Unionist and helped keep the state from seceding. Western Virginia, with few slaves and some industry, was so strongly Unionist that it broke away and formed the new state of West Virginia.
Still, nearly 120,000 Southern Unionists served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and Unionist regiments were raised in every Southern state. Southern Unionists were extensively used as anti-guerrilla paramilitary forces. During Reconstruction many Unionists in the ex-Confederacy became Scalawags who supported the Republican Party.
Read more about this topic: Union (American Civil War)
Famous quotes containing the words south, border and/or states:
“Only let the North exert as much moral influence over the South, as the South has exerted demoralizing influence over the North, and slavery would die amid the flame of Christian remonstrance, and faithful rebuke, and holy indignation.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“I have, indeed, even omitted facts, which, on account of their singularity, must in the eyes of some have appeared to border on the marvelous. But in the forests of South America such extraordinary realities are to be found, that there is assuredly no need to have recourse to fiction or the least exaggeration.”
—J.G. (John Gabriel)
“Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)