January 20, 2026
Let’s take a little quiz. Which statement is true?
- The January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol was instigated by George Soros and Nancy Pelosi.
- Only a few of our founding fathers were slaveholders.
- Troops from Alabama attacked Atlanta in the Civil War.
- World War II started when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
The answer? Number three. Why didn’t you know about that? Because Confederate apologists purged it from our history, like Trump is trying to vanquish the truth about J6 and undermine every bit of equality we’ve achieved since 1865.
The First Alabama U.S. Cavalry Regiment came from the northern part of the state, a region whose poor farmers had no use for a “rich man’s war” started by plantation owners and slavers. Some of the local people tried to declare a “Free State” in one county. They hoped to stay neutral, but when the governor launched an often violent campaign to draft them into the Confederate army, they joined the Union side instead. There were also recruits from Tennessee and other southern states.
The 1st Cavalry was mustered into service in December of 1862. In August 1864, the Alabama soldiers broke through enemy lines at Jonesboro, Georgia, forcing the Confederates to begin their retreat from Atlanta. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman later chose the regiment as his escort on his March to the Sea. By the time the war ended, more than two thousand men had served in the unit. Of these, 345 were killed, 88 were captured, and 279 deserted. Fewer than 400 were left to be mustered out.
I’ve read a good bit about the Civil War, and like much of the country I watched the 1990 Ken Burns documentary. From researching my own family history, I learned that even the fierce Union supporters in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois weren’t necessarily abolitionists. Nowhere did I find that all eleven Confederate states had forces like the 1st Alabama (though some were larger than others).
The blind spot in our collective memory is no accident, as author and ex-New York Times journalist Howell Raines reports in his book Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written Out of History. Raines writes, “a cabal of Lost Cause historians founded at Columbia University,” as well as librarians and archivists in Alabama, buried the facts for over a century. The 1st Alabama became a casualty of the myth that the war was heroic and not about slavery. The book makes it plain that the coverup included writer Shelby Foote, who got a ton of airtime in Burns’s series.
Trump is enforcing a bigger, far more destructive coverup. He ordered our national parks and the Smithsonian to remove photos and information about slavery, racial injustice, sexism, the persecution of Native Americans, and LGBTQ+ rights. His Treasury refused to honor abolition, civil rights, and women’s suffrage on commemorative coins for our 250th anniversary. His Defense Department restored the original Confederate names of several Army bases (with the fig leaf of saying they’re named after different people with the same surnames). He waited until Martin Luther King Jr. Day was almost over to issue a proclamation.
Words and memories matter. It’s up to all of us to fight Trump’s racist revisionism and demand that our institutions deliver a complete, accurate, honest account of our history. By the way, most of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, nearly half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and four of our first five presidents were slavers. If you think the Germans did bomb Pearl Harbor, you should look for a job in the White House.
“History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic, and cultural authorities” – Howell Raines, Silent Cavalry.