When Virginia seceded in April 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee chose his state over his oath to the Constitution. On the same day, another Virginian made a different choice. Winfield Scott, the 74-year-old commanding general, remained loyal to the oath he had taken fifty years earlier.
The Unbroken Oath: The Heroes History Forgot: Southern Officers Who Kept Their Oath to the Constitution tells the stories of Southern officers who chose duty over family, Constitution over state. George H. Thomas, a Virginian from a slave-owning family, kept his oath and was disowned by his relatives—they turned his portrait to the wall and never spoke to him again. David Farragut of Tennessee abandoned his Norfolk home and later led the Union fleet to victory at Mobile Bay. John Gibbon, raised in North Carolina, commanded Union troops at Gettysburg while three of his brothers fought for the Confederacy.
These men came from the South's most prominent families. They attended West Point. They owned slaves or came from slave-owning backgrounds. By every measure of culture and kinship, they should have joined the Confederacy. Instead, they kept their oaths—and helped save the United States.
The Lost Cause mythology required these men to be forgotten. If George Thomas—a Virginian who saved the Union army at Chickamauga and destroyed a Confederate army at Nashville—remained loyal to his oath, then secession wasn't the inevitable choice of honor. If 100,000 white Southerners fought in Union blue, then the South was never unified.
The Unbroken Oath reclaims these remarkable stories and honors the Southern officers who chose principle over convenience, even when it cost them everything.
Part of "The Civil War You Never Knew" series, available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback.
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