The Covington News received the following guest column submission from David B. Parker.

It’s April! Which means that it’s Confederate History and Heritage Month in Georgia.

In 2009, the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution that “the month of April of each year is hereby designated as Confederate History and Heritage Month and shall be set aside to honor, observe, and celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government, and all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause which they held so dear.”

“The cause which they held so dear” had as its cornerstone the institution of slavery. This is according to Alexander Stephens, a Georgian and vice-president of the Confederate States of America, who said exactly that in a speech in Savannah in March 1861.

But forget for a moment that the resolution calls on Georgians to honor and celebrate a nation built on slavery. As a historian, I have another problem with it: “All those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause which they held so dear.”

Georgia’s resolution assumes a unity of support for the Confederacy and the war effort that simply did not exist. Black slaves had little enthusiasm for the Confederate cause, of course, so the “various races” seems a little suspect. But here’s something we seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew: A lot of white Georgians did not support the war.

On January 2, 1860, when Georgians went to the polls to elect delegates for a statewide convention to settle the secession question, candidates who opposed secession received a slight majority of the vote. White support shifted a bit once the convention decided to leave the Union, and especially after the shooting started, but there was always a tremendous amount of white disaffection.

Thousands of Georgians were Unionists, maintaining a strong devotion to the United States. Several hundred of them joined the Union army and actually fought against the Confederacy. 

More numerous were white Georgians who thought of the war as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Sometimes the Confederacy’s elite seemed to go out of their way to estrange common folk. Robert Toombs, one of Georgia’s leading secessionists, continued to plant hundreds of acres of cotton during the war, even after Governor Joe Brown urged planters to grow more food for hungry Georgians and less cotton for their own profit. (Cotton prices tripled and more in the New York markets by 1862, and yes, a lot of that cotton ended up in the North.) Toombs labeled those who criticized his actions “cowardly miscreants.” 

Drafted soldiers resented the way Confederate conscription policies favored wealthy families: they could hire a substitute, or they could get a draft exemption for every twenty slaves they owned. 

Disaffection was perhaps even stronger among women who, with their husbands gone to war and their children hungry, decided to take matters into their own hands. Students in my Georgia history class at Kennesaw State read “‘The Women Rising’: Cotton, Class, and Confederate Georgia’s Rioting Women,” a wonderful article by Teresa Crisp Williams and David Williams that describes dozens of examples of Georgia women going into stores brandishing knives and pistols and stealing food. 

These women opposed the Confederacy, the war effort, and what it all meant for their families’ chance for survival. Students are surprised to hear this—white folks who opposed the war and didn’t love the Confederacy?—even though a lot of those students come from counties and towns mentioned in the article. This is a side of the Civil War that has gone largely unmentioned. 

Sarah Gober Temple, who wrote a history of Cobb county (where most of my students live) back in 1935, understood that Georgians had a distorted sense of the past. The Civil War period, she said, “has been so overcast with sentimentality. . . . It has all become a somewhat confused medley of enormous white columned houses washed with sunlight by day and moonlight by night, endless boxwood hedges, flowers always blooming, beautiful and charming women composed almost entirely of curls and ruffles, gallant men, mahogany furniture, and numberless slaves. It has become legendary.” She ended her discussion with this: “Southerners forgot that by no means all of the South was in sympathy with secession.” Ninety years later, it seems our memories haven’t gotten much better.

So this April, as we observe Confederate History and Heritage Month, let’s not forget those Georgians who refused to support the Confederacy and the insurrection. Despite the General Assembly’s resolution, maybe we can honor them as well.

David B. Parker is a professor of history at Kennesaw State University.