The History Behind the Novel: The Epitaph of Winston County's Christopher Sheats

Folks,

Absolved is a novel built upon a foundation of reality. Part of that reality is the saga of Winston County in the War Between the States. You have already been introduced to Aunt Jenny Brooks in the chapters entitled Poor White Boys. I'd like to introduce you to someone even more important in the history of the mountain folks of North Alabama: Charles Christopher Sheats.


Charles Christopher Sheats (April 10, 1839 - May 27, 1904)

On Monday, January 7, 1861, one hundred men gathered at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama to determine whether or not Alabama would join other southern states in seceding from the Uniion, a process begun by South Carolina less than three weeks before.

One of those men was Charles Christopher Sheats, called "Chris," a 21 year old school teacher from Winston County. In the whirlwind of state conventions that followed Lincoln's election, Sheats, a staunch opponent of secession, had been elected on Chistmas Eve, 1860, by the yoemen farmers of Winston County, beating a local planter and slaveholder by a vote of 515 to 128.

Typical of the men who elected Sheats was James B. Bell, a farmer who owned no slaves. In a letter to his pro-confederate son in Mississippi on April 21, 1861, he wrote. "All they [slave holders] want is to git you pupt up and go fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o [all] they care." (See "History of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers" by Dean Barber, here.)

Like Sheats, most of the delegates elected from the northern counties of Alabama were against secession and were labeled "Cooperationists" because of their loyalty to the United States. Yet of all of these, Sheats stood out as the bitterest opponent of the planters, labeling their bid for independence as a "rich man's war but a poor man's fight." During four days of debate, it was Sheats who repeatedly advanced the strongest objections in the most stirring language, emerging as a natural leader from among much older men. He rhetorically fought the planters at every turn and they were particularly outraged when Sheats quoted their own hero Andrew Jackson against them. Jackson had warned the South Carolinians on Dec. 10, 1832 during a previous secession crisis:

“Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy State will inevitably fall the evils of the conflict you force upon the Government of your country. It can not accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims.”

Labeled a "Tory" and worse by the planters who would brook no opposition, he was finally, brutally, knocked to the floor of the chamber of the Alabama House of Represntatives and thrown into the Montgomery City Jail until the vote was finalized. Without Sheats (and intimidated by the example that had been made of him), several "cooperationists" changed their votes and the secession ordinance finally passed by a vote of 61-39. Sheats refused to sign the ordinance, even though most of the delegates who had originally opposed it did so.

After the secession deed was done, Sheats was released from jail and returned to Winston County, where he was hailed as a hero for refusing to compromise his principles (and those of the Jacksonian Democrats who elected him) and bow to the planters.

Scant evidence exists of Sheats's actions between the end of the Secession Convention and early July 1861. On July 4, 1861, Sheats was the principal speaker at a well-attended public forum at Looney's Tavern in Winston County. No transcript remains of Sheats's remarks there, but a committee, of which Sheats was most likely a member, issued a declaration stating that Winston County demanded to be left out of the war. The committee stated that the county would not support the Confederacy or the Union. It also argued that if a state had the constitutional right to secede from the United States, then a county had the right to secede from a state. Winston County soon became infamously known as the Free State of Winston County. Unfortunately, the state of Alabama refused to acknowledge the county's declaration of neutrality; Alabama's civic and military leaders argued that Winston County's actions were unconstitutional.

In 1861, Winston citizens elected Sheats to the state legislature, but he would not attend the legislative session because all representatives had to swear an oath to support the Confederacy. As the war proceeded, he continued to be an ardent supporter of the Union, although such outspokenness increasingly caused consternation among state leaders and neighbors. Finally, Sheats fled his home and took refuge in the mountains of north Alabama, as did a large number of Unionists trying to evade conscription into the Confederate Army. In July 1862, Union soldiers led by Colonel Abel Streight came across Sheats while recruiting Unionists in the mountains. Sheats gave a speech to the Union soldiers and his fellow Unionists, stating that he would enlist and join the Union army. Sheats never got the chance to enlist. Shortly after Union soldiers moved out of north Alabama, he was arrested by Confederates for making treasonous comments such as urging Alabamians to enlist in the Union Army. His arrest prompted state legislators, by a vote of 69–4, to expel him from the legislature. Sheats stayed in Confederate custody for several months and at one point was sent to a prison in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was eventually returned to Madison County before being released. Sheats was rearrested in mid-1863 for stating that Alabama should seek peace and surrender to the Union. He remained a political prisoner until the Confederacy surrendered. -- The Encyclopedia of Alabama.

After the war, Chris Sheats came home to fight another, more insidious enemy. Carpetbag Republicans, especially as represented in the person of George Eliphaz Spencer, flooded into the state, gradually using corrupt and even violent means to shoulder aside Alabama-born Unionists like Sheats to facilitate their plundering of state contracts and coffers. (One of Spencer's minions even assassinated a friend and political ally of Sheats just before an election when it looked like he might win a seat in Congress that Spencer wanted for one of his own crooked partners.)

Fighting a war of many fronts for an honest government that represented all the people not just a powerful elite of one stripe or another, Sheats and his fellow Alabamans were destined to lose. Though he would be appointed U.S. Consul to Denmark, and elected to the 43rd Congress in 1873, his battle for the rights of the yoemen farmers of the hills to be free to decide their own destiny ended in bitter faulure.

Sheats did not marry until well into adulthood when on January 27, 1887, he wed the much younger Mary Anderson. Charles Christopher Sheats died on May 27, 1904, in Decatur, Alabama and was buried at nearby McKendree Cemetery.

If you visit his grave today, you will find this epitaph which he wrote himself.

"I love my country, my God and my kind.
I have served them all.
I want no praise of song or prose."