Historical Tidbits of North Alabama

(During the War Between the States)

If anyone has information to contribute to this page, please contact Scott Willliams.
I will be adding tidbits continually to this page.
 

Domestic Terrorism by US Army on Southern Civilians (Men, Women and Children Held as Hostages)

Gen. Sherman ordered Gen. Wm. Sooy Smith to burn both towns of Florence and Tuscumbia, and deport it's inhabitants North of the Ohio River, if Gen. Forrest moved his forces into Tennessee.
 
"Send notice to Florence [Alabam] that if Forrest invades Tennessee from that direction, the town will be burned, and if it occurs you will remove the inhabitants north of the Ohio River, and burn the town and Tuscumbia, also"
---Gen. Wm. T. Sherman (Official Records Serial No. 75, p. 462)
 
"The Government of the United States has in North Alabama any and all rights they may choose to enforce in war, to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything... because war does exist there, and war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact...Next year their lands will be taken; for in war we can take them, and rightfully too; and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives." "...To the ...persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better."
---Gen. W. T. Sherman (Union Army)

Col. Roddey and Tuscumbia Citizens Give Kind Treatment to Yankee Prisoner

During Union General Dodge's invasion of Franklin County during the "Battle of Leighton",
Capt. Levi Utt, a Kansas Jayhawker of the 7th Kansas Cavalry was severely wounded. A shell had tore his left leg at the ankle.  When General Dodge's army retreated, Capt. Utt had to be left behind at a Tuscumbia hotel and suffer the consequences at the hands of the enemy. Instead, Utt received kindness from Mrs. Inman, landlady of the hotel and "pretty girls" of town brought him strawberries and cream." Col. Roddey "saw to it the man was left undisturbed; and when Utt was strong enough to travel, Roddey paroled him and sent him to the Union lines at Corinth with an escort to protect him from guerillas."  Capt. Utt later showed his appreciation to the girls of Tuscumbia, by getting approval from Gen. Dodge, "to grant several of passes through the lines at Corinth so that they could buy "the various articles dear to the female heart" which were no longer obtainable in the Confederacy." Unfortunately this small kind act did not matter to much as Gen. Dodge's route from Town Creek to Tuscumbia left a path of destruction and hundreds of residents homeless, thanks to the pillage committed by his command.

Confederate and Unionist  Families of Franklin County Suffered Alike

Union troops coming from Town Creek to Tuscumbia were reported to have "burned all the corn and most of the houses. We found the country beyond Tuscumbia about the best and richest I ever saw and left it nothing but a wilderness with nothing scarcely but the chimneys left to show where once had been the habitations of man." This was after the Tenth Missouri, Seventh Kansas, Fifteenth Illinois and First Alabama Cavalry "did themselves credit" with "excellant" fighting, driving "the enemy, no matter what their forces."
"By the end of the war, all of the...population that could get away had 'refugeed' farther south."... "Roddey
'the Defender of North Alabama' and the other Confederate commanders did their best to hold down such terrorists (pro-Yankee Unionist) and to check Federal depredations, but their forces were generally too small to be of much avail" in the long run. By the end of the war, "Tuscumbia was all but destroyed."
 
 
"The United States has the right, and...the ...power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain... We will remove and destroy every obstacle--if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper;...we will not cease until the end is attained... If the people of the South oppose, they do so at their peril."
---Gen. W.T. Sherman

Other Locations Across North Alabama

Florence, Alabama (Lauderdale Co) and Huntsville (Madison Co.)
"At Florence, Colonel Cornyn's 10th Missouri Cavalry, assisted by gunboats, burned an estimated two million dollar's worth of property in 1863. In fact, most of the towns of the Great Bend (Tennessee River) were destroyed...either by shellfire or by deliberate burnings." Even Huntsville, a Federal Headquarters of Gen. Ormsby Mitchel, had it's shops and rolling stock of the railroad destroyed. This financially ruined many Madison County residents for years to come.

Guntersville, Alabama (Marshall Co.)

"With the exception of half a dozen dwellings, which were spared because they sheltered the sick or wounded...the village had disappeared. Nothing but tumbledown walls and a mass of brick debris was left of our home.  The nearest shelter which could be obtained was in a log house on Sand Mountain, five miles from town, and in this my parents found temporary abode.  We were not wholly unprepared for the scene of desolation about us.  As we came west on the train nothing but lonesome-looking chimneys remained of the villages and farmhouses.  They were suggestive of tombstones in a graveyard.  Bridgeport, Stevenson, Bellefonte, Scottsboro, Larkinsville, woodville, Paint Rock---in fact, every town in northern Alabama to and including Decatur (except Huntsville, which, being used as headquarters, had been spared)--had been wiped out by the war policy of starvation by fire.  Farmhouses, gins, fences, and cattle were gone.  From a hilltop in the farming district a few miles from New Market, I counted the chimneys of six different houses which had been destroyed."---John Wyeth (Confederate soldier returning home)