Sumter County, Alabama, had a very different Civil War than did Pamlico County, North Carolina; Beaufort, South Carolina, and Darien, Georgia. While the Atlantic coast areas were occupied or harassed by Union troops early in the war, Sumter County was far enough inland that farmers could safely grow crops to feed or finance Confederate soldiers.
Hostilities officially began when Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on 13 April 1861. Three days later Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to quell the insurrection. [1]
Three weeks after Lincoln’s proclamation, John Dent organized a troop in Sumter County that was sent to Virginia where it became part of Alabama’s Fifth Infantry. [2] Six weeks later the North Sumter Rifles was organized. [3] The two units enrolled 164 of the 552 white men who were between the ages of 20 and 29 in the 1860 census. [4]
In July 1861, the United States navy captured Ship Island, effectively blocking the port of Mobile. [5] This made it difficult to move cotton south on the Tombigbee river, and harder still to ship imported goods north. On 28 November 1862, Alabama’s General Assembly passed legislation that let Sumter County commissioners borrow $10,000 to aid the poor. [6]
The initial result of the blockade may have been the merger of the Sumter Mounted Rifles, commanded by William Merk Stone, [7] into the Jeff Davis Calvary Legion on 24 October 1861. [8] Its 93 men [9] were sent to northern Virginia. They left 53% of the young male population in the county to superintend crops.
War came closer in February 1862 when forts Henry and Donelson fell, leaving the northern part of Alabama exposed to Federal troops. [10] The South Sumpter Guards was organized on March 4, [11] and the Sumter County Warriors on March 15. [12] They enlisted 233 men [13] from the 617 white men between the ages of 15 and 29 in 1860. More than 56% of the men between those age groups were gone from the farms and plantations. [14]
At least 8,000 Confederate soldiers were wounded at Shiloh during the first week of April. [15] Some were taken to Gainesville in northeastern Sumter County, the gray circle on the map below, where the American Hotel was converted into a hospital. More arrived after the Battle of Corinth [16] in October. [17]
There probably were some deserters from those battles, as disillusionment with war set in. [18] Many volunteers, who had signed for one year periods, returned home. The Confederacy responded with the Enrollment Act of April 26, which dictated all men between the ages of 18 and 35 were eligible for conscription. [19]
Robert Spratt’s father was one who didn’t return to Stone’s infantry unit after his term expired. He and several others in Livingston joined John Hunt Morgan’s calvary regiment [20] that had fought at Shiloh. [21]
Meantime, the Confederacy was rushing to complete a rail line from Selma (the black circle at the right) to Meridian (the black circle at the left) [22] to compensate for the loss of the railroad connecting Memphis with Charleston. [23] It crossed the Tombigbee at Demopolis in Marengo County to go through southern Sumter County.
In the fall, local "planters withdrew their negroes who were working on the road, and left the bridges half finished." [24] On November 15, Governor John Gill Shorter ordered Sumter County provide 150 slaves [25] to complete the work, which was done in December. [26]
Provisions were shipped from York Station to the Confederate hospital in Lauderdale, Mississippi. [27] Slaughterhouses near Cuba Station provided meat. [28] Ramsey Station to the north had corn storage facilities. [29] Life settled into a comfortable, though reduced, mode supported by slave labor.
War in the west intensified when Grant took Vicksburg on 4 July 1863. He paroled the men who surrendered. They were sent to a camp at Demopolis to await exchange for Union prisoners. [30] Many were from John Brown’s First Missouri Infantry Regiment. [31]
War drew close again in February 1864 when Union forces attacked Meridian, which was about 33 miles from Livingston, the dot in the middle of the word "Sumter." While the Confederacy technically won the battle, Sherman destroyed the city and its railroads. [32] One assumes people in the area scattered, with some seeking refuge in Sumter County.
Military action intensified in April 1865 when James Wilson destroyed the foundry and naval yard at Selma on April 2. [3] Nathan Bedford Forest escaped with some of his troops to Gainesville. [34]
Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, but news didn’t reach the area because telegraph communication had been severed [35] by the fall of Richmond on April 2. [36]
Hostilities continued in the west where Mobile was taken on April 12. Barry Wyatt learned John Henry Brigance, of the 32nd Texas Calvary, was "placed aboard a train to a hospital in Demopolis, Alabama. Soon after his evacuation, the ‘well to do’ citizens of Mobile were then evacuated by train to Demopolis, while many other residents fled north on a road out of Mobile." [37]
Lincoln was assassinated on April 15.
On May 4, Richard Taylor surrendered the bulk of the western Confederate forces at Citronelle, north of Mobile. [38] The men were ordered to Meridian where they would take an oath and be issued parole papers. [39] Forrest was the last under his command to yield in Gainesville on May 19. [40]
The parole papers were so valuable that many deserters and evaders showed up. Walter Fleming said that when Taylor surrendered "he had not more than 8000 real soldiers, or men
under arms. It is possible, though not probable, that many were absent with leave. Yet of the 42,293 soldiers paroled in the armies of the Southwest about 30,000 of them were at Meridian." [41]
Sumter County was surrounded by paroled and liberated soldiers in Demopolis to the east, in Gainesville in the northeast of the county, and in Meridian to the west. Taylor worked with railroads to ensure his men could use their parole papers as free passes to return home. [42]
Not all left. Spratt remembered "so many of these were from the State of Missouri that they were all known under the general name of "Missouri Soldiers." Some of the men he named fought with his father in Morgan’s unit. [43] One, W. B. McRae, [44] was in Forest’s Second Calvary unit. [45]
The effects of the war on Sumter Counter are hard to measure. A comparison of last names of the men in the five local military units with the names of slave holders in 1860 shows 70% of those who owned less than 40 or no slaves served in the military. [46]
Within the well-to-do population, the group who owned from 60 to 99 slaves sent the most sons to war: 43%. 32% of the last names of men who owned more appeared in the rosters, while 29% of those with 40 to 59 slaves contributed.
Graphics
Base map from Walter L. Fleming. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1905. 256, "Devastation by Invading Armies 1861–1865."
End Notes
1. "April 15, 1861: President Lincoln Calls for Volunteer Troops." West Virginia Encyclopedia website. 15 April 2020. The president was Abraham Lincoln. Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, most commonly known by his initials, was brigadier general of the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. [47]
2. Robert D. Spratt. A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama. Edited by Nathaniel Reed. Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997. 111. Spratt said his list was incomplete, but the best available. The Fifth Infantry was officially organized in Montgomery on 5 May 1861. [48]
3. B. B. Williamson. "The North Sumter Rifles." 75–76 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama. Edited by Charles Walker. Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005. 75.
4. Statistics on units from Spratt, 111–12, and Williamson, North Sumpter. Census data from Classified Population of the States and Territories by Counties on the First Day of June, 1860. Section on Alabama posted on United States Census website.
5. Wikipedia. "Ship Island (Mississippi)."
6. Act of Alabama General Assembly. 28 November 1862. Cited by Fleming. 197.
7. "Jeff. Davis Legion Mississippi Cavalry." Civil War Data website.
8. Wikipedia. "Jeff Davis Cavalry Legion."
9. Spratt. 113.
10. Wikipedia. "Battle of Fort Donelson."
11. Charles Walker. "South Sumter Guards." In Heritage. 75. His source was Samuel H. Sprott. Cush: A Civil War Memoir. Edited by Louis R. Smith, Jr., and Andrew Quist. Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1999.
12. B. B. Williamson. "The Sumter County Warriors." In Heritage. 75.
13. Sprott, and Williamson, Warriors.
14. These weren’t all the men who served. According to Spratt: "older men disposed of their business affairs and joined other organizations from the county or from other sections. Younger men coming to a suitable age did the same. So we find that many from the town served with organizations from other places." [49]
15. Wikipedia. "Battle of Shiloh."
16. Charles Walker. "Gainesville and the American Hotel." 109–100 in Heritage. 109.
17. Wikipedia. "Second Battle of Corinth."
18. Fleming. 98. For instance, Spratt said Eph Henagan of Stone’s Company "was slightly ill on the retreat from Yorktown and got on a steamboat to go to Richmond. He was never heard of again." [50]
19. Wikipedia. "Confederate Conscription Acts 1862–1864."
20. Spratt. 115.
21. Wikipedia. "John Hunt Morgan."
22. Fleming. 155.
23. Winston Smith. The People’s City. Demopolis, Alabama: Marengo County Historical Society, 2003. 185.
24. Fleming. 156.
25. Gainesville [Alabama] Independent. 15 November 1862. Cited by Robert D. Reid. "The Negro in Alabama During the Civil War." The Journal of Negro History 35:265–288:1950. 266.
26. Fleming. 156.
27. Jud K. Arrington. "The History of York." Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama. 39–40 in Heritage. 39.
28. Jack Vaughan. "History of Cuba." 26–28 in Heritage. 27.
29. Nelle Morris Jenkins. Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961. Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015. 128.
30. Roger Pickenpaugh. "Prisoner Exchange and Parole." Essential Civil War Curriculum website. Ulysses S. Grant was major general in the Union Army of the Tennessee. [51]
31. Smith. 174.
32. Wikipedia. "History of Meridian, Mississippi." William Tecumseh Sherman succeeded Grant as major general of the Union Army of the Tennessee. [52]
33. Wikipedia. "Battle of Selma."
34. Arlin Turner. "George W. Cable’s Recollections of General Forrest." The Journal of Southern History 21:224–228:1955. 224.
35. Smith. 210. Robert E. Lee became General-in-Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States on 6 February 1865. [53]
36. Wikipedia. "Richmond in the American Civil War."
37. Barry N. Wyatt. Response to "Demopolis Civil War Parole Camp & Hospital." 8 August 2004. Original query posted on History Sites website by Brandon Ellis on 7 August 2004.
38. Smith. 214–215. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, was lieutenant general of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana. [54]
39. Robert M. Dunkerly. To the Bitter End. El Dorado Hills, California: Savas Beatie, 2015. 93.
40. Chuck Hamilton. "Surrenders After Appomattox." Essential Civil War Curriculum website.
41. Fleming. 128. Spratt alluded to evaders when he noted "some went to distant parts seeking adventure." [55] John Lomax’s uncle, Tillman Lomax, was described in the post for 27 January 2019 as one of the deserters in Mississippi who spent the war preying on their neighbors.
42. Dunkerly. 94.
43. Spratt. 111. Smith said that after the loss at Vicksburg, many men returned to their home states, but the ones in Brown’s division "could not have returned to their home state anyway as it was fully under Union control." He added, "The people of Demopolis were especially cordial to the Missourians" [56] and identified one "who returned to live in Marengo County after the war." [57] These events may have led to Spratt to believe "after the Civil War a number of those who lived in border states and fought for the Confederacy found it unpleasant to go home, so they remained in the lower South." [58]
44. Spratt said McRae served as town marshal and was "in much demand as a fiddler at the dances." [59] His name and unit appeared in the list of "Arkansas Confederates" on the Arkansas Genealogy website.
45. Michael R. Bradley. They Rode with Forest. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2012. 81.
46. The source for the slave holders was Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website. I reduced both his list and the lists of the military units to last names, then compared the two.
The total for men with few or no slaves was calculated by subtracting the number in Blake’s list from the total in the two eligible age groups in the 1860 census.
This was not a precise method; as Spratt said, men served in other units, which would have increased participation, and men older than 30 served, which would have expanded the base population total. At best, the chart provides a rough approximation of the impact of the war in Sumter County by economic class.
47. Wikipedia. "P. G. T. Beauregard."
48. "Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment." Alabama state archives website. 22 November 1996.
49. Spratt. 111.
50. Spratt. 114.
51. Wikipedia. "Vicksburg Campaign."
52. Wikipedia. "William Tecumseh Sherman."
53. Wikipedia. "Robert E. Lee."
54. Wikipedia. "Richard Taylor (General)."
55. Spratt. 111.
56. Smith. 174.
57. Smith. 179.
58. Spratt. 180.
59. Spratt. 95.
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