Many of the people spoke of their pride in their families’ military traditions (the South has sent more sons and daughters into the military per capita than any other part of the country). Theirs was a deeply conservative ideology, Storey maintained, rooted in concepts of honor, filial obedience and personal integrity—values that were not unique to the South, certainly, but especially prized in an agrarian society where family roots ran deep, and where a person’s politics was considered inseparable from his personal morality. As one Mississippi woman put it in a letter: “If [a man] will cecede from the government that has always sustained his Rights he would cecede from his family.”

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Unionist sentiment was not uncommon in the South before the war, but after the war began anyone who was still a Unionist became a pariah. Unionist men of draft age often spent months hiding from the local conscript office, especially after the Confederacy instituted a draft in April 1862; others were drafted and deserted. Others fought for the Union. Their families endured harassment, ostracism, arson, death threats and, after the war, Ku Klux Klan raids.

It was that dogged adherence to an unpopular viewpoint in the face of withering opposition that Storey found the most amazing. “It was not a rational thing to do,” she said when we spoke. “Their interests were not served by their choices at all. Something far more intangible and profound was at work….I think that these folks were really brave people, and that sometimes you have to be a little crazy to be that brave.” Here, at last, was an explanation that might make sense. The SCC records were at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., only about 20 miles from my home; it was time for me to read the file myself.

It consisted of Thomas Thompson’s statement as well as testimony from two of his sons—William, by then 22, and James, 20, as well as two neighbors. At times, a vivid sentence leaped from the page in a way that made me feel I’d been there—like this, from James’ testimony: “The soldiers said nothing, just asked where the horse and the cow were. They went to the pasture and put a halter on the horse and led him off.”

Vivid, all right, but was it true? One way to get a feel for a story’s believability is to check the details. If the little pieces fit, chances are the big ones fit too. In his testimony, James had mentioned “Stoneman’s men” and a “little skirmish” fought a few days earlier near Campbellton, less than 10 miles away. I decided to check that out.

“Stoneman,” of course, was Union cavalry General George Stoneman (mentioned in the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”), who served under Sherman in the Georgia campaign. But then I ran into an apparent inconsistency. I assumed the raid had happened after Atlanta fell, as Sherman’s army fanned out south of the city. But on July 13, Sherman was still north of Atlanta, on the other side of the Chattahoochee River from my ancestor’s farm and at least 25 miles away. Was the date wrong? And if so, what else was?

Unexpectedly, Uncle Billy came to my rescue. Sherman’s memoirs are brilliantly written and vividly detailed; thanks to them, for instance, we know that it rained 19 days in north Georgia that June, then turned “intensely hot.” Sherman’s notes on the Atlanta campaign included a note on July 5 that he had sent Stoneman down to the Chattahoochee on his right to create a diversion by pretending to be looking for a place to cross the river. Then, on July 13, Sherman wrote, “Stoneman had been sent down to Campbellton, with orders to cross over and threaten the railroad below Atlanta” (italics mine).

Thomas Thompson’s testimony, meanwhile, fit the pattern of the cases Storey found: “Every time I was home, I was threatened more or less. In 1864, one Lt. Benfield and three others told my wife that if they ever got hold of me, they would hang or shoot me, because they believed I was going to the Yankees….My feelings were for the Union entirely, and my language for the Union too.”

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