Several counties in North Carolina did not vote for secession and there were
some Union volunteer regiments there as well.  If a definitive source is out
there for Unionists in North Carolina, I, too, would like to get a
reference.  One website discusses the Union volunteer regiments:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~nchyde/NCUV.HTM


In Texas, there were several factions of Unionists.  Many counties around
the Dallas area voted against secession.  Germans in the central Texas Hill
Country were in favor of states rights but wanted to help preserve the
Union.  Confederate forces went to Gillespie County were many of the Germans
lived and tried to draft their young men into the military.  The Germans
were very happy to make home guard units to protect the west Texas frontier
from Indian or Mexican attacks, but the Confederate forces in Texas wanted
them to fight back east.

The following excerpt from the Texas Handbook online is about the Battle of
the Nueces where Germans tried to go through Mexico to get to the Union
forces in 1862.


BATTLE OF THE NUECES.

The Civil War skirmish known as the battle of the Nueces took place on the
morning of August 10, 1862, when a cadre force of Hill Country Unionists,
encamped en route to Mexico on the west bank of the Nueces River about
twenty miles from Fort Clark in Kinney County, were attacked by mounted
Confederate soldiers. The Unionists, mostly German intellectuals led by Maj.
Fritz Tegener, had camped without choosing a defensive position or posting a
strong guard. The ninety-four Confederates, led by Lt. C. D. McRae, came
upon the camp on the afternoon of August 9. Firing began an hour before
sunlight the next morning; nineteen of the sixty-one to sixty-eight
Unionists were killed, and nine were wounded. The nine wounded were executed
a few hours after the battle. Two Confederates were killed and eighteen
wounded, including McRae. Of the Unionists who escaped from the battle,
eight were killed by Confederates on October 18, 1862, while trying to cross
into Mexico, eleven reached home, and most of the others escaped temporarily
to Mexico or to California. Some of the survivors, who included John W.
Sansom and German members of the Union League from the area around Comfort,
a militia organized to protect parts of Kendall, Gillespie, and Kerr
counties from Indian raids and Confederate actions, eventually joined
Unionist forces headquartered in New Orleans. Among the conflicting
contemporary and eye-witness accounts, the version published in 1905 by the
military professional Sansom appears to be the most reliable and complete.
Other accounts vary as to the number of men involved in the fighting and the
number of casualties. After the war the remains of the Unionists killed at
the battle site were gathered and interred at Comfort, where a monument
commemorates the Germans and one Hispanic killed in the battle and
subsequent actions. The dedication of this monument on August 10, 1866, was
covered in Harper's Weekly in January 1867.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert Pattison Felgar, Texas in the War for Southern
Independence, 1861-1865 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1935).
Guido E. Ransleben, A Hundred Years of Comfort in Texas (San Antonio:
Naylor, 1954; rev. ed. 1974).




Another site that has good information on the German Unionists is:

http://www.hal-pc.org/~dcrane/txgenweb/nueces.htm



Patrick L. O'Neill
Fort Belvoir Historian
Department of the Army
USAGFB/DPTMS
9820 Flagler Road
Suite G2, Room 15
Fort Belvoir, Virginia 22060-5929
office phone 703-806-4375
fax 703-806-4381
email [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Wiencek [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 9:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Southern loyalism?


Not wishing to start another battle on the list over race, slavery, and the
Civil War, I nevertheless pose a question that I have been wondering about,
namely the apparent absence of significant grass-roots resistance among
white southerners to secession.  During the Revolution loyalist Americans
took up arms and joined the forces of the Crown in significant numbers.
During the Civil War only a few distinct sections of the South, notably
north Alabama and East Tennessee, remained loyal in spirit and deed to the
United States.  I am wondering if there was any significant public outcry
across the South against secession. Henry Wiencek

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