11/02/2024
ABOUT SILENT CAVALRY, Review by Doug Kisaka
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books.
Author, Howell Raines Is A former executive editor of the New York Times who grew up in Alabama in the mid-20th Century who offers an anecdotal history of white supremacy and its origins dating back to the Civil War.
Silent Calvary provides an unvarnished in-depth analysis of the zeitgeist and the mentality of white nationalism and white supremacists, the connection to White Evangelicals, as well as its cross currents of ideology in the Tennessee Hills, Alabama and the Mississippi Delta, such as the mindset of the gentry including slaveowners — the so-called flatlanders, and their disdain for lower class whites often residing in mountainous regions, hence the term hillbillies, whom they also often denigrated as white trash and moonshiners, as well as their contempt for black people who were equal opportunity recipients to a far greater degree, of the worst instincts and all manner of abuses and negative characterizations by both classes of whites, including derogatory terms cited in the book, but too vulgar to mention in this review. The numerous stories recounted shed light on their justification, including biblical basis for slavery, the denial of civil rights, and racism writ-large, as well as their irrational embrace of eugenics — the attempt to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior—based in this context, on the false notion of biological and mental superiority of non-Jewish whites. He also shows how the humiliation of their defeat in the Civil War gave rise to the Lost Cause, an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war from a perspective sympathetic to the Confederates, and overly critical of the Union, under President Abraham Lincoln.
The stories connect some of the dots between Christian Fundamentalism espoused by White Evangelicals and racism, as part of the through-line to the MAGA movement and Trumpism. If you like gossip, there’s lots of it too. Yet relevant because the tales, often first-hand accounts, reveal how these ideologies and the no-holds-barred efforts to preserve them or to mask the bad embarrassing aspects shaped the history of many prominent, and some of the wealthiest families with sometimes interesting and funny results as well as many tragedies.
But it also describes the disgraces and life-threatening adversities which white families with the courage of their convictions endured for having the bravery to stand up to these racial injustices, indignities and the absurd entitled arrogance of a few and its corollary of rampant corruption on steroids.
