The Free State of Winston, Alabama?

Many have heard at one point or another in their reading of the Civil War about the vociferous and controversial Joseph E. Brown, governor of Georgia during the conflict. This is the guy who insisted that Jefferson Davis' nationalist approach to securing independence from the United States was undermining the states' rights doctrine to which the Confederacy supposedly embraced. As the War progressed, Brown's frustration with and contempt for the South's president grew stronger, ultimately reaching the point where he threatened to secede from the Confederacy and form his own country.

Certainly Brown's point of view was valid, though probably unrealistic. And to many, he himself represents the other side of the Confederate ordeal. However, there were others before him who took a similar approach to contesting the happenings in the new country. In fact, one of the first acts of protest, this time coming from Southern Unionists, occurred prior to secession and continued through the longevity of the War.

The setting was the northern Alabama community of Winston County. The citizens of this small section of the state, often called "hill people," were not counted as either plantation or slaver-owners in representation at the secession proceedings. Indeed, the majority of the county was pro-Union. Their situation was a reflection of a common phenomenon all over the South; that is, white farmers not poor enough to own no land, not rich enough to own slaves or plantations, and whose economic interests were represented more by Northern assistance than by the Southern system of slavery. And like Winston, every Southern state had communities opposing secession and the slave interests that drove the movement. This is the sentiment that ultimately gave the United States West Virginia.

But Winston was slightly different in the way they had approached. First they sent a delegate, a schoolteacher by the name of Chris Sheets, to argue on their behalf at the January 1861 Secession Conference in Montgomery. Kelly (1994) writes in his book The Best Little Stories From The Civil War, that

Sheets argued long and vociferously for the hill country's point of view. As cited in Alabama writer Drue Duke's anecdotal history, Alabama Tales, the hot debates in Montgomery led to name-calling...and, for Sheets, even worse. "When Sheets refused to sign any papers of oath that the Secessionists offered him [after voting for secession], tempers flared more violently. 'I am an American,' Sheets declared, 'and an Alabamian, I don't need to sign anything to prove who I am'" (p. 93).

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