Southern Loyalty Through Marriage

An admirer of Southern society and culture, John Pope held in very high esteem Southern officers he had served with or under in the old army to include Joseph E. Johnston, Beauregard, G.W. Smith, and Barnard Bee. He feared that had General Winfield Scott departed Washington to serve his native State of Virginia, “no man can now tell how many more officers would have gone South with him.”

Bernhard Thuersam, ChairmanNorth Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commissionwww.ncwbts150.com"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Southern Loyalty Through Marriage:

“The Adjutant-General of the Army when the war broke out was Samuel Cooper, a native of New York and a graduate of West Point. He married a Virginia lady and had long before identified himself with that section of the country. It was a noticeable fact that, whilst almost every Northern man who married a Southern woman attached himself at once to his wife’s country and became naturally the most violent and bitter partisan of the South, very few Northern women were able, perhaps they were not anxious, to hold their [Southern] husbands loyal to the [Northern] government.

One of the strangest social phases that characterized the years before the war was the recognized social supremacy of the South and the deference paid to it. The South did not possess the wealth, the culture or the polish given by the experiences of foreign travel, yet in any society anywhere they dominated almost without question.

The South had been ruined in fortune and their customs and habits of life altogether overthrown. Yet poor, indeed well-nigh destitute, they still hold their heads high and are recognized as among the leaders of men of society by their far more prosperous fellow-citizens of the North. If things go on as they have been for the past ten years, the South by the end of another ten years will be as fully in possession of the government and will as completely direct its policy as in 1858….[the South] blazes that power to rule and that fitness to command which characterized them before the war and which is rapidly being recognized and submitted to now.

General Cooper, as I have said, was a native of New York and except through his wife could have had neither interest in the South nor sympathy with its purpose…..I do not now recall a single Northern officer who married a Southern woman who did not go South with her.”

(The Military Memoirs of General John Pope, Cozzens & Girardi, editors, UNC Press, 1998, pp. 200-201)