Floyd County was a hotbed of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War. Why do those patriots not have a statue?

Franklin County is getting a monument to the 70-plus Black men from the county who fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War.

The location of that monument has proven controversial, but we’ve already written that story.

Today, let’s look at something else: history, since, as William Faulkner famously wrote, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

A monument to Union soldiers anywhere in the South might seem unusual, but we often forget that support for the Confederacy was not unanimous in Virginia and that Southwest Virginia was something of a hotbed for Unionist sentiment. We don’t see that reflected in our monuments — the Franklin County one will be the first that I’m aware of — but if we want to tell all of our history, well, this is some of it. (Update: There are some Union statues at various battlefields and cemeteries).

According to Encyclopedia Virginia , at least 5,723 Black Virginians enlisted in the Union army. The key phrase there is “at least.” The encyclopedia cautions that “this figure takes into account only those troops mustered into service in Virginia; many African Americans native to Virginia joined units in neighboring jurisdictions, including Maryland, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C.” If we really want to be true to history, we should be erecting monuments like the one coming to Franklin County in lots of Virginia counties.

“I’d bet every county in Southwest [Virginia] had some,” says Louisiana State University historian Rand Dotson, who grew up in Salem, has written about Union support in Southwest. “It’s a story that needs telling.”

More broadly, while 155,000 Virginians served in the Confederate army, about 32,000 signed on with the Union, according to Encyclopedia Virginia. However, many of those Union recruits came from the part of Virginia that is now West Virginia, and some of those came from Ohio and Pennsylvania but were listed as signing up in what was then still part of Virginia. The encyclopedia concludes that perhaps as few as 800 white Virginians joined the Union army and about half of those were in the Loudoun Independent Rangers, a cavalry unit from Loudoun County where Union sentiment was unusually strong.

The most famous Union soldier from Virginia was a general: George Thomas, who acquired a variety of nicknames during his service. He was called “The Rock of Chickamauga” for his stout defense at an 1863 battle in Georgia that the Union lost but where Thomas was credited for preventing a larger disaster. He was called “The Sledge of Nashville” for his victory there in 1864.

Thomas grew up in Southampton County. During his childhood, he and his family were forced to hide during Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and there’s much dispute among historians over how much that experience shaped his later views, if at all. Thomas went to West Point and, after the Mexican War, returned there as an instructor at the same time that Robert E. Lee was superintendent. In January 1861, he applied to become commander of cadets at Virginia Military Institute but the outbreak of the Civil War changed everything. Thomas sided with the Union. It’s said that his family back home in Virginia turned his picture against the wall, burned his letters and never spoke to him again. One of Thomas’ former students, Jeb Stuart, wrote: “Old George H. Thomas is in command of the cavalry of the enemy. I would like to hang, hang him as a traitor to his native state.”

The Civil War historian Bruce Catton held Thomas in high esteem for his generalship, feeling Thomas never got the credit he deserved, but Ulysses S. Grant thought Thomas moved too slow and was better at defense than offense. After the war, Thomas went to California. He sent money home to his sisters in Virginia but they refused to accept it, saying they disowned him. Virginia put up a historical marker noting Thomas’ birthplace in 1965.

Thomas’ decision to stick with the Union was an individual decision. More interesting is the wider Union support in parts of Virginia. Loudoun County produced the state’s only white Union unit, the rangers mentioned above. The Shenandoah Valley, with a history of a lot of German immigration, was home to a lot of pacifist denominations with German origins — Amish, Dunkards, Mennonites. They weren’t necessarily Union supporters; they wanted to avoid war altogether. The Stover family of Augusta County was one particular family of pacifists who resisted the Confederacy, which is notable historically because Ida Stover later moved west, married, and became mother to future general and President Dwight Eisenhower.

However, it was in Appalachia that Union support was most widespread — and, of course, slave ownership less so. Virginia’s western counties broke away to form a separate state. Counties in eastern Tennessee tried to. Western North Carolina gave rise to a secret society called the Heroes of America, or, sometimes, the Red Strings after the sign they used to identify one another (a reference to a story in the Book of Joshua where Rahab helped two spies escape and hung a red cord as a sign of her faith). The group later spread into Southwest Virginia. The community of Paint Bank in Craig County was considered a “Union hole” and Union sentiment in Craig, Alleghany County and Monroe County over the line in West Virginia is discussed in David Scott Turk’s history “The Union Hole. ” However, Floyd County was the most notorious Union county — notorious from the prevailing Confederate point of view at the time.

The future Louisiana State University historian Rand Dotson wrote his master’s thesis at Virginia Tech on Floyd County during the Civil War. His account — “Sisson’s Kingdom: Loyalty Divisions in Floyd County, Virginia, 1861-1865” — is a fascinating look at a part of history that never made it into any of my history books when I was growing up.

While most in Floyd backed the Confederacy, there was enough pro-Union sentiment that in the summer of 1861 one local secessionist wrote the governor to complain about the influence of local Unionist Harvey Deskins, who was said to have persuaded men in his part of the county not to enlist. In time, mountainous Floyd County became a favorite refuge for Confederate deserters, who were gladly welcomed home by their Unionist neighbors. Dotson cites historical documents that show 23% of the Confederate soldiers from Floyd County deserted — a rate twice the Virginia average and three times the overall Confederate average. “By the fall of 1862, more county soldiers were abandoning local units than joining them,” Dotson writes. He also found family papers that referred to 250 Confederate deserters passing through Floyd County each week on their way home, or to other mountain hideouts. Other papers refer to “not less than 500” Confederate deserters who were living in Floyd County, and “their number is almost daily increasing.”

Not everyone in Floyd has wanted to hear about its Unionist history, Dotson told me. “When I published that article, I received mail from the Floyd chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy accusing me of fabricating the county’s Civil War history. The Sons of Confederate Veterans from some Southwest Virginia chapters sent hate mail, too. It does not matter to them what the archival record clearly shows or what historians have written.”

His thesis, though, names names, which will be of interest to any descendents out there. He wrote that “Court House District farmer Miriam Reed and her father provided rations for dozens of Floyd’s runaway soldiers who were ‘strangers’ they ‘never saw before.’ Wealthy Unionist David Weddle Sr. felt by feeding ‘as many as 150 deserters a week’ at his Floyd County farm that he was encouraging more county soldiers to desert. Phillip Ratliff provided 15 deserters with breakfast and then urged them to ‘go to their homes and stir up their friends against the secession cause.’” Women whose husbands were off to war — or were hiding in the woods — were often at the forefront of the local Union cause. Many took to blowing horns, or sending a child out to blow a horn, whenever Confederate home guards were in the area — a signal for deserters to disappear back into the hills. Dotson tells the tale of Rebecca Blackwell. She was arrested by Confederate home guards for her Unionist sympathies “but was promptly released after warning the troops of the violent retribution they faced from a local deserter gang.”

This kind of disloyalty was not without risk. Floyd County descended into a kind of war within a war. Local Confederates harassed their Unionist neighbors. They destroyed Reed’s grain supply. They burned Weddle’s corn crop. They shot Hyram Dulaney, arrested others and threatened to hang still more.

For their part, the deserters often “banded together in gangs” and staged raids on local farms to find food, Dotson wrote. Some turned into Union guerrilla fighters. One band of deserters in the Bent Mountain area ambushed a Confederate recruiter and shot him dead, then burned the home of someone who witnessed the killing. Others simply turned to general lawlessness. One such gang was led by David and James Sisson, which is where the title of Dotson’s thesis came from.

Virginia law put local officials in charge of finding deserters, but some suspected that local officials in Floyd and other Southwest Virginia counties were intentionally looking the other way because they harbored Unionist sentiments. Floyd County magistrate Ferdinand Winston was arrested and imprisoned in Richmond for a time because of his pro-Union activities. Eventually released, Winston went back to Floyd and ran for sheriff on a pro-Unionist ticket. Winston complained that on Election Day, “there was guards placed at every precinct … to prevent men from voting for me.” Even with pro-Confederate officials in charge, attempts to suppress deserters in Floyd were rarely successful for long. “Confederate runaways who were caught, arrested, and confined to Floyd’s jail often later escaped, or were freed in jail-breaks staged by fellow deserters,” Dotson wrote. “This forced home guards and Confederate reserves into cyclical and pointless arresting and re-arresting actions.”

By spring 1864, reports of Union support in Floyd County reached all the way up to Gen. Robert E. Lee, who ordered troops sent to the county to put down the rebellion against the rebellion. Gen. John Echols was put in charge; he later reported that Confederate deserters in Floyd were so numerous, and so open about their presence, that they had “gone so far as to elect what they called a brigadier-general of deserters … and organized what they called a state government, for which they claimed to have elected a governor.” By year’s end, Echols concluded that the assignment was impossible to fulfill: “It has been found very difficult to capture or drive from the county these deserters, because they are supported and sustained in every way by the disloyal citizens of that section, and when pressed by a superior force they scatter and take refuge in the great mountains of Southwestern Virginia, where it is almost impossible to reach them.”

All this may seem dead history, but the strings of that history — shall we say, the red strings — run long past the Civil War. This Unionist support in Appalachia explains why those regions voted Republican in years following the conflict and remain Republican to this very day. Historically, a modern-day embrace of Confederate symbols in Appalachia is out of character with what actually happened. Floyd County has the traditional Confederate statue in front of its courthouse. “I’m continually amazed at the transformation of Southwest Virginia from a region of bitterly divided loyalties during the Civil War to an area that has more Confederate flags flying than any other in the state,” Dotson told me. “There’s no accurate public memory of what occurred during the war or afterward, which is tragic given the heroic stance taken during the conflict by those who remained loyal to the United States.”

To be true to history, Floyd should also have a monument to the county’s residents who stayed true to the United States of America.

There’s more history than what we were taught

If you like learning about some of the history we weren’t taught in school, you might like our Cardinal 250 project that tells the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence. “The forgotten founders,” historian Woody Holton calls them. We also now have a Cardinal 250 podcast.

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