Ohio History Journal

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FRUIT OF THE

FRUIT OF THE

RESTLESS SPIRIT

OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS

by CHARLES M. CUMMINGS

The restlessness and constant mobility of the American have impressed

a legion of students before and since de Tocqueville,1 and to these fac-

tors much has been attributed in the story of the nation's development.

Generally, interpreters have turned their inquiries westward in the di-

rection taken by the bulk of the emigrants. Less attention has been given

to an offshoot, the strong North-to-South movement of the three decades

from 1830 to 1860, evidenced in the 355,811 northern-born who were

listed in the 1860 census as living in the South.2

Impelled by a variety of motives, often other than economic, this

stream of Yankees, originally from the Atlantic seaboard, first mean-

dered, later swelled as a modest flood, into cheaply acquirable, worn-out

tobacco lands in Virginia, Kentucky, and middle Tennessee, thence into

the lower South cotton areas, where the removal of Indians in the 1830's

made available great tracts of new and fertile lands.3

These northerners fitted easily into the relatively fluid social structure

of the South, precisely as they had done a few years earlier in Ohio or

western Pennsylvania.4 Soon accepted and assimilated, they rapidly lost

their northern qualities and identities and assumed a parochial loyalty to

a new southern home at the terminus of their travels. When the day

arrived in 1861 to stand up and be counted, they merged indissolubly

with the character, aspirations, and conditions of southernism.

Such a climax to this characteristic vagrant unrest is nowhere more

forcefully exemplified than in the stories of the families of seven Ohioans,

six of them native and one adoptive, who became general officers in the

Confederate army. From the eastern coast some of these nomads drifted

westward to the foothills of the mountain barricade, thence across it,

and later into the new Northwest for a season, but they were seldom

permanently rooted, except by intervening death. While life endured,

never unheeded was the beckoning of far away cheaper land, nor the

glowing promise of new surroundings more compatible with ethical princi-

ples--as in the diaspora of the antislavery Quakers which encompassed

some of the families. The transient parents bequeathed their restlessness

NOTES ARE ON PAGES 197-200