There were two major groups of white Republicans in the South. The first were the so-called scalawags. Most had opposed secession, even if they later fought for the Confederacy. Others had remained Unionists during the Civil War. They had been thickest in the hill and mountain counties of the Appalachians, particularly in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia and become a new state. The Alabama hill country, like the border states, had seen a civil war within the Civil War as Unionists and Confederates fought and killed one other.
