The title of Howell Raines’ new Civil War book on Alabama troops who fought for the Union suggests it tells two stories. In fact it tells at least four, and while they don’t all pack the same punch, they combine to deliver a mountain of insight into the state’s history and identity.

That title is “Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta — and Then Got Written Out of History.” It promises action and intrigue, and delivers plenty of both.

Story No. 1 is right up front: Union soldiers from Alabama. Many in Alabama have heard of “the free state of Winston,” usually summed up by the trite explanation that when Alabama seceded from the United States, Winston County tried to secede from Alabama. But there’s a lot more to it than that: In a region around Winston County, a substantial portion of the white populace wanted no part of war against a nation their forefathers had helped build. Given their druthers, they’d back the union — though their real preference was to be left alone by both sides.

This was intolerable to the elites who’d driven the call for secession and who wanted to present it as a unanimous uprising of the state’s population. Their response started with manhunting gangs sent to capture and forcibly enlist unwilling soldiers. From there it ranged to murder and what essentially was state-sanctioned terrorism. This in turn helped drive many resisters into the Union army, where some of them became the core of the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A.

Just as the title says, this group played a distinctive role in Sherman’s march to the sea. Knowing the lay of the land and Southern ways, they were an adept scouting force. It was dangerous business, and Raines argues convincingly that Sherman’s decision to keep them close to him, and to make them the tip of the spear, reflects the high value he put upon them.

Raines’ approach here is both entirely respectable and somewhat frustrating: He absolutely refuses to novelize the battle action. The record is full of gaps, when it comes to precise details of the First’s actions, and it’s tempting to want them filled in with a little literary license. Raines instead lets the scattered data add up to an impression that the First spent plenty of time taking the measure of hostile territory.

He does occasionally provide some understated context. “As guides, the First Alabama repeatedly probed [Confederate Maj. Gen. Joe] Wheeler’s skirmish lines and pickets,” Raines writes of Sherman’s campaign in Georgia. “‘Skirmishing’ is a catchall term used dismissively by Civil War writers who’ve never been shot at. But it’s extremely dangerous work that cost a number of First Alabama troopers their lives. At this stage of the war, skirmishes meant encountering potshot artists armed with fast-loading carbines who would unleash a volley and then dash back to their own lines. Andrew Hickenlooper, who had risen to lieutenant colonel in his role as [Union Maj. Gen. Frank] Blair’s adjutant, devised a method of inviting such contacts that must have seemed exhilarating to survivors.”

If Story No. 1 is about the First Alabama Cavalry, Story No. 2 is about the lies that doomed the unit to obscurity despite its unusual place in the war.

The lies go all the way back to Alabama’s secession conference, which produced a lukewarm 61-39 vote to leave the union. That fell short of the preferred narrative, that the good people of the state were rising up en masse against tyranny, with only a few traitorous or cowardly outliers dissenting.

In the short term, that let to payback against unionist regions, fueling internecine guerrilla warfare that in some cases devolved even further into marauding. In the long term, it resurfaced in the “Lost Cause” mythology that dominated Civil War history in the South for a century after the war: The pervasive effort to whitewash the Confederacy’s motivations and failures and to portray it as a nobler culture undone by a morally inferior but materially overwhelming foe.

AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for “State of Denial,” a yearlong series “showing how 150 years of whitewashed history and a rigged political system have left the state stunted.” Raines goes deep in the same territory, so it’ll come as no surprise that you meet some of the same figures. Marie Bankhead Owen, longtime director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, a champion of Lost Cause legendry who injected it into public education, looms large.

Raines considers Owen and other key figures from multiple perspectives: That of a native son, a descendant of hill country unionists who sensed that something about the official narrative was a little off. That of a journalist earning his stripes as the civil rights movement gained steam. That of a historian, methodically holding predecessors to account. It has a way of connecting the dots, to borrow one of the author’s section titles.

That leads us to Story No. 3, which might be called The Vendetta. Early on, Raines’s tendency to whale repeatedly and at length on purveyors of false history becomes a theme. Especially if it’s someone he personally encountered, like onetime University of Alabama chief librarian William Stanley Hoole or conservative Montgomery opinion leader Will Hill Tankersley.

This reader was reminded of a statement once made on “Saturday Night Live” by A. Whitney Brown: “I could go on and on — but there’s really no use in beating a dead horse. I mean, except for the pure joy of it.”

Raines’ joy, in this regard, is exceedingly pure. You can’t be dead and gone enough for him to lay off. But there’s more to it. It’s a pretty easy thing to point the finger and say, “These people should have known better.” But Raines displays the doggedness of a veteran journalist in wanting to show that in fact they did know better. Time and time again, he finds archival materials showing that people who downplayed the First Alabama’s record, or strategically opted not to mention it, knew at least something of the truth.

The value of that doggedness is that it brings out the objective side of this historical debate. Revisionism is often a pejorative label in history; Raines celebrates revisionism that exposes the willful omissions and distortions of the moonlight-and-magnolias take on Southern history, and he provides the receipts to show that it’s a matter of fact rather than a matter of changing sensibilities.

That brings us to the fourth story, which we’ll call The Search. In some ways, it’s the most frustrating part of the book. Raines had a particularly personal motivation for digging into the story of Alabama’s unionists and the First Alabama Cavalry. His familial connection to those unionists, and even to the First Alabama itself, became a source of pride: Pride in showing that his ancestors had been on the right side of history, and so had he. As he writes at one point. “to preserve every scrap of Union sympathy in my family — was the raison d’etre for this book.”

Sometimes the personal scrapbook illustrates the larger historical narrative, sometimes it doesn’t fit in so smoothly. Part I of the book is a 90-page overture that criss-crosses geography, politics, family history and the political landscape of pre-secession Alabama. The first chapter of Part II is titled “How the First Alabama Almost Saved Atlanta From Burning,” which leads one to believe that, finally, the tales of battlefield derring-do are about to start.

Then comes this momentum-killer of an opening: “In the 1980s, I took a long break in my First Alabama research. As I climbed the [New York] Times career pyramid, all the writing I did in my spare time went into a sporting memoir, ‘Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis.’ It became a bestseller in 1993, the only book with ‘fly fishing’ in the title ever to appear on the Times list, so far as I can determine.”

That would have made a fine footnote. As a lede, it’s a real marvel. Some discussion of a potentially pivotal battle near Resaca, Ga., follows, but it’s 150 pages later before the encounter and its significance are fully fleshed out. At that point, Sherman’s unstoppable and well-documented advance provides the action and urgency promised by the book’s premise.

Despite the digressions, it is The Search that gives “Silent Cavalry” its strong final charge. Raines’ research might have been a low-key lifelong effort, often on the back burner, but even so it kept turning up key pieces of evidence in unusual places, including several unpublished academic theses in far-flung university libraries. In the end, he finds unexpected treasure in the Alabama’s state archives. Newly indexed materials from the long reign of Marie Bankhead Owens and her predecessor, her husband, Thomas McAdory Owen, turn out to contain the biggest “they did know” of all.

As eloquently stated by Raines in his closing words, the discovery doesn’t just bring fresh details to the story of the First Alabama. It brings fresh hope that in Alabama, even after 150 years of effort to bury it, truth can be uncovered. If the “Silent Cavalry” can be given a voice, who knows what else might yet come to light?

“Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – and then Got Written Out of History,” by Alabama native Howell Raines, Pulitzer Prize winner and former executive editor of The New York Times, was published in December by Crown.