Alan J. Pitts
City Guard
Mon Feb 5 14:49:24 2001


As usual, you are one up on me. Roll for Lockett's City Guard is on microfilm, but where's the roll you cite for Talladega City Guard? ADAH?

Law and order was more of a problem within the Southern states than most of us imagine. The governor's papers at the ADAH are full of complaints about "outrages" and robbery committed by deserters and tories. Home guards and reserves were recruited to solve the problem. However, local units were often not strong enough to overcome the armed resistance of large groups of deserters.

Several years ago I presented a paper to the state historical society on this subject, using West's Home Guard of Shelby County as an example. The area around Jemison was overrun by deserters in 1864-65, and West's company was raised to deal with this group. When the deserters proved too elusive for the home guard, arrests of citizens suspected of harboring deserters began, following by a haphazard series of hangings and murders.

This episode came to my attention by way of the Birmingham News in 1992. Senator Shelby had attended a family reunion in Jemison where an ancestor who belonged to West's unit had been killed a few weeks after the war ended. After reading the article, my mother-in-law grumbled something about "That's not what happened," and I recalled the family stories about the war-era hangings and murders.

Let me conclude this note by saying the Shelby County executions are stranger and murkier than the better-known hangings in Texas. There weren't many fine distinctions made about legal authority when it came to making arrests and hanging folks. Shelby County court records show that one man was arrested by the post commander at Montevallo on the authority of Gen. Richard Taylor with a $1300 bond. Judge Mardis had him released with a strong suggestion that the man's life might be in jeopardy. Family stories say he was arrested a second time and disappeared from sight, the first in a series of abductions which began about November of 1864. You get the idea.

Bottom line: sometimes home guard/local defense units were involved in things that never made the official records.






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