Book sheds light on obscure 'American patriot'

[Bill Mattocks]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/07/13/entertainment/e030843D68.DTL

A yeoman farmer who lived near Ellisville and owned no slaves, Knight was conscripted into the Southern army. He eventually turned his back on the Confederacy and began his own campaign against the South as leader of a band of "unionists." He went on to start a large family with a freed slave and his descendants — white and black — count in the hundreds.

 

[Empty Hands]

A surprising amount of this sort of thing went on. Defections to the other side numbered in the high thousands at least. Some Northern officers even sided with the South because they had married Southern wives.

This was even more common in the upper South border states. Virginia and Tennessee, for instance, had large areas with few slaves and high Union support. Such a situation resulted in a lot of guerilla style warfare throughout the war, no matter who controlled the state as a whole.

 

[David43515]

History was rarely black and white the way we learned in school. For instance during the Revolutionary war actually only about 1/3 of Americans wanted to seperate from England. Most considered themselves English subjects and were proud of it. And although we sometimes picture early American men going off into the wilderness and taking Indian wives, it was actually the European women that were much more likely to go off and find an Indian husband. Indian society was much more equal than European society at the time and many early American women couldn`t take the pressure to conform that puritan society put on them.