[The following is in regards to self-professed “Unionists,” southerners who spoke against secession and remained loyal to the United States before, during, and after the American Civil War.]
Across the state, reports circulated of coercion. The St. Louis Democrat published a letter from a wealthy Mississippi planter to a Southern gentleman in New York warning that unless he speedily returned to demonstrate his loyalty, his land would be seized as that of a “disaffected person” and that he himself was “a Union man but dar [sic] not say so, for fear of mob violence.” In Tishomingo County, a twenty-two-year-old mechanic named E. J. Sorrell recalled that all Union men were “threatened in a general way.” In Corinth, according to Union activist M. A. Higginbottom, “it was a common expression that every man who would not take sides with the Confederacy ‘ought to be hung.’” The editor of the local Republican newspaper James M. Jones, was “surrounded by infuriated rebels, his paper was suppressed, his person threatened with violence, he was broken up and ruined forever, all for advocating the Union of our fathers.” In Alcorn County, citizens threatened to put Mathew J. Babb in prison if he “did not cease talking against secession.” In Tippah County, farmer Samuel Beaty had his property destroyed by a mob. In Columbus, when Presbyterian minister James Lyon continually preached that slavery was sinful and railed against “blood and thunder” politics, Confederates retaliated by arresting his son Theodoric, court-martialing him, and sending him to prison in Virginia.
Unionists in the Deep South were in positions of thankless isolation, as the definition of loyalty was turned on its head. Allegiance to country was inverted into treason and supporters of the Stars and Stripes ironically labeled un-American, as Southerners jeeringly called them “tories,” in reference to those who had supported Britain’s George III during the American Revolution.
John Hill Aughey, who would be imprisoned for his loyalty, wrote a letter to Secretary of State William H. Seward describing what the Unionists in Mississippi faced. “Our property is confiscated and our families left destitute of the necessaries of life, all that they possessed… Heavy iron fetters are placed upon our limbs and daily some of us are led to the scaffold or to death by shooting. Many are forced into the army, instant death being the penalty in case of refusal, thus constraining us to bear arms against our country, to become the executioners of our friends and brethren, or to fall ourselves into their hands.”
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Home.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 78-9. Print.
Further Reading:
Eerily similar to today, where one side is shouted down and violence used against them, and censorship of their views are widespread, and support of the President is considered treasonous, while calling for overthrow is deemed 'patriotic'.