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His brothers fought for the Confederacy, but Jesse “Tobe” Blankenship was the only one of eight Bankhead forest mountain brothers who fought for the Union.

Confederate soldier Joshua Blankenship came face-to-face with his Union Army brother, Tobe, at Shiloh.

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dixiebump

[nicollo]

There's a big historiographical push to prove that southern "yoemen" were "coerced" into secession. The idea is that evil slave-owning planter aristocrats alone wanted secession, and they employed undemocratic methods to impose their will.

Injecting class-warfare into southern identity is a stupidly limited business. You can find distinctions between the classes at every turn, but you'll never prove that all those soldiers fighting for Dixie were rich slave-owners. It's a pathetic endeavor born of elitist paranoia that the common, non-slaveholding man just might have identified himself as southern and Confederate.

[SoCalPol]

My 3rd great grandfather was in the Ohio 54th and was
shot through the right thigh in the Battle of Shiloh.
I have his records. He d. 1924

[groanup]

Bonnie blue flag bump.

[Defiant]

You might want to read Albion's Seed and The Cousin's Wars to understand this story better. The Civil War was basically the third war involving two competing groups. The first was the English Revolution, Puritans vs. Cavaliers. The second was the American Revolution. The third was the Civil War.

Cousins Wars traces family emigration records to document that the same families and regions were on opposite sides of all three wars. One surprising nugget of information is how much support the colonies had in the part of England where Puritans prodominated.

Caught in the middle in the Revolutionary and Civil War were the highlanders, the "Scots Irish", people who originated in Northern England and the borderlands south of Scotland, some of whom had migrated to Ireland under Cromwell. When they came to the US, they headed to the hills, and did not participate as much in politics as the other demographic groups. They didn't care much for Cavaliers or Puritans. They were and are great warriors, and tended to support the military in the part of the country they were from, but they were not as invested in the dispute.

Thus, the hillbilly part of Virginia split from Virginia and became West Virginia. The people of mountain regions of Georgia had more in common with people in the NY Appalachians than with people in Atlanta. The people in this story seem to be from a mountain region.

Albion's Seed adds information about another key part of the American demographic, the Middle Atlantic peoples. Their culture started out as Quaker, and that was supplemented by the German immigrants in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These people have been the "swing vote" in key issues that divide north and south ever since. Their descendants dominate the midwest.