Certainly there were variation across the South, but there is ample proof of widespread regions of real pro-Union sentiment A more high profile example is the heroes’ welcome received by Burnside as liberators of Knoxville. It depended on local and regional sentiment. I’ve read a midwestern Union soldier’s account of the the marked contrast in citizen sentiment after crossing the Cumberland Plateau. Widespread Southern hostility was replaced by a welcome feeling of being at home among appreciative friends. A lot of southern people believed they had much more in common with the midwestern Yankee farmer/soldiers than they did with the under-worked members of the decayed aristocracy who ran the Confederacy.
“A more high profile example is the heroes’ welcome received by Burnside as liberators of Knoxville.”
Knoxville, TN was a divided city, with half its citizens remaining pro-Union and half alligning with the Confederacy. Tennessee itself, of course, seceded. I equate the pro-Union sympathizers in the same light I view thge Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Sudeten Germans welcomed the Nazis as liberators, but they were hardly representative of Czechoslovakia as a whole, just as the pro-Union symnpathizers in Knoxville were not representative of Tennessee. I alluded to this in an earlier post.
It is a mistake to assume anecdotal references bespeak a larger sentiment, as you are doing with the Knoxville illustration.