My cousin took this dramatic testimony with a grain of salt. His theory was that our ancestor was taking liberties with the facts to wheedle some money out of the government. Somehow, to me, that didn’t make sense. If this was a scam, it was an incredibly elaborate one (240 dozen bundles of oats, 80 bushels of corn…), pursued at a time when the federal government was hardly scattering largesse across the South. Surely a hard-working farmer had better things to do. Abolitionist sentiment? No evidence of that. Pacifist? Unlikely: a Georgia tenant farmer, son and grandson of veterans? And pacifism didn’t explain why he had tried to defect, assuming he hadn’t lied about that part.

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Pro-Union sentiment? That didn’t fit with anything I’d read up to then about the Civil War, which depicted pro-Union Southerners as either border state residents or mountain folk who saw no reason to fight for rich slave-owners. But Georgia is the Deep South by anybody’s definition, and the area just south of Atlanta was a Piedmont region of small farms—not plantation country, but home to plenty of slaves. As for class resentment, that was easily trumped by racism. As long as there were slaves, poor farmers and rich planters alike belonged to the same arbitrary aristocracy of skin color.

So maybe he’d just been a coward. That, at least, would explain why we had no heroic family legends. But the more I thought about it, the more things just didn’t add up. Why had Thomas Thompson so adamantly refused to fight?

My search for answers got put on the back burner. For the next few years I was busy working on a book, keeping track of two little girls and making frequent trips from my home in Maryland to Georgia, where my mother was dying of heart disease. In the summer of 2005, with my book finally off to the publisher, I started a project that had been on my list for years: finding my mother’s father.

Everyone called my mother Ruth. Few people knew that this was her middle name, or that her first name was Enley. She was named for the father she had always longed to know, but who had disappeared shortly after her birth. Thanks to the Internet, a search that might have taken her years took me only weeks. I’ll never know for certain, but I found a man who had the right name, was born at the right time and place, had also died of a heart ailment and who (to me, anyway) looked like my mother. A few months before she died, I was able to put his picture into her hands. It was the first time she had seen his face.

When my mother died, her aching need to find the missing pieces of her past somehow got passed on to me. Part of my grief was the realization of how much of my life had gone with her—the dates of certain events, her chowchow recipe, the names of distant relatives. My father had died in 1981. The house where I had grown up was gone. The grove of century-old red oak trees that had towered over that house had been bulldozed to create an industrial park. Life had taken me out of the South, and I would probably never return. And yet: I always was, am now, and expect to be while I live, a Southerner. I wanted my daughters to know who and where they came from.

One day about that time, I found a new book on Amazon.com: Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction, by Margaret Storey. A look inside revealed a bunch of tables with titles such as “Distribution of Wealth Among Allowed SCC Claimants, White, Hill Country Subregion, Ala., 1860.” I put off buying it, fearful of spending $43 on an academic tome that would bore me cross-eyed, but finally I caved in. It was fascinating.

Storey, an assistant professor of history at DePaul University in Chicago, is a friendly woman with a ready laugh, as I discovered when I called her. We quickly established our regional connections, as Southerners do: She’s from Chattanooga, where my cousins live, and finished her doctoral thesis at Emory University, my alma mater. Her thesis, drawn from her study of more than 400 Alabama families whose cases were heard in the 1870s by the SCC, was a striking addition to the conventional wisdom. She did not take issue with existing explanations, but to her there was another rationale for Union loyalty among Southerners that was equally important: patriotism. Her research revealed a picture of pro-Union Southerners as people who felt loyalty to a nation and a Constitution their fathers had fought for in the War of 1812 and which their grandfathers had fought for in the American Revolution. As one claimant put it, “I loved my government, and I was not in favor of no other one.”

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