Helpful Hints from Ancestry.com

When working on your family history, it is helpful to receive hints and tidbits of educative stuff!  This is a message I received from Ancestry.com as I was "unpacking" my DNA results:
 1850–1875

Disrupted by the Civil War

North Alabama Settlers

When several years of depression forced cotton prices to plummet and banks to collapse, thousands of farmers left Alabama and joined other migrants en route to cheap or free land in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Market prices improved leading up to the Civil War, a war that left the state divided in the north, which thousands of Southern Unionists called home. Alabama lost more than 25,000 men to the war and  many farms were destroyed. It also brought an end to the enslaved labor the plantation system was built on and laid the foundation for Alabama’s iron and steel industry.

[Does anyone have a personal story about this event impacting their family]?