Children of the Storm

It's hard to believe that the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment escorted General William Sherman in his march to Atlanta and beyond. An Alabama Cavalry for the Union? The words just don't seem to go together! In my last blog post I mentioned the Alabama Cavalry Regiment consisted largely of men from Eastern Tennessee. That is not true. The folks from Alabama that formed the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment were from the northern mountain part of that state and they believed in the Union. They did not own slaves and saw no reason to support secession. Like those in Eastern Tennessee, they were harassed and their families brutalized, driven from their homes into the Alabama hills, then into Union lines, and at last into the ranks of the U.S. Army. Paraphrased from http://www.1stalabamacavalryusv.com/1sthistory.aspx :  It is ironic that the Confederacy, created to preserve the principle of states’ rights over the primacy of the central government, instituted the first wartime dra...