Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Praise for Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

  “Deftly combining telling detail with cautious generalization, Inscoe offers us a nuanced interpretation of race, war, and remembrance in the era of Appalachia’s ‘discovery’ and describes how ideas born in this era survive today to shape Appalachia’s problematic but persistent identity, both as a region apart and as a part of the South. The book is essential reading for anyone fascinated by this special and complicated part of the world.”

  —John Alexander Williams, Appalachian State University

  “No historian better captures the complex conjunction of Appalachia, race, and the American South before and after the Civil War than does John Inscoe. His greatest contribution in this fine volume of essays lies in his ability, amidst lucid analysis and explication, to illuminate the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this fascinating region.”

  —Durwood Dunn, Tennessee Wesleyan College

  “For a quarter of a century John Inscoe has dedicated himself to rescuing nineteenth-century Appalachia, and its involvement in the sectional conflict in particular, from the disdain of history. Each essay makes essential reading; together they provide a compelling overview of the political, racial, and familial imperatives governing upcountry survival in the crucible of war.”

  —Martin Crawford, Keele University

  “Over the last two decades, John Inscoe’s pathbreaking scholarship did nothing less than redefine what scholars think and write about life in antebellum and Civil War Appalachia. Consistently exciting and enlightening, these essays not only represent penetrating historical research at its best, but stand as milestones in an ongoing revisionist conversation that continues to revolutionize southern history.”

  —Kenneth W. Noe, author of Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle

  “Meticulously researched, unfailingly judicious and balanced, these essays highlight Inscoe’s defining strengths as a scholar.”

  —Robert Tracy McKenzie, University of Washington

  “John Inscoe’s broad imagination, deep research, and engaging writing over the past two decades have given us new ways to think about Appalachia and the South. He has led the way in shaping how we understand race and the Civil War in these contexts. His deep empathy for the people he studies is balanced by a careful analysis of their thoughts and actions. Inscoe clarifies the complex history of Appalachia and, by extension, enables us to see more clearly the South and the United States.”

  —David C. Hsiung, author of Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes

  Race, War, and

  Remembrance in the

  Appalachian South

  Race, War,

  and

  Remembrance

  in the

  Appalachian

  South

  John C. Inscoe

  Copyright © 2008 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Inscoe, John C., 1951–

  Race, war, and remembrance in the Appalachian South / by John C. Inscoe.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-2499-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Appalachian Region, Southern—Race relations—History—19th century. 2. Slavery—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th century. 3. Mountain life—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th century. 4. Community life—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th century. 5. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Social aspects. 6. Appalachian Region, Southern—History, Military—19th century. 7. Guerrilla warfare—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th century. 8. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements. 9. Appalachian Region, Southern—In literature. 10. Appalachian Region, Southern—In motion pictures. I. Title.

  F217.A65I57 2008

  973.7′115—dc22

  2008013170

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  To Meg and Clay

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Race

  1. Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia: Myths, Realities, and Ambiguities

  2. Between Bondage and Freedom: Confronting the Variables of Appalachian Slavery and Slaveholding

  3. Olmsted in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery in the Southern Highlands, 1854

  4. Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists: The Slave Trade in Western North Carolina, 1861–1865

  War

  5. The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image: The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee

  6. Highland Households Divided: Familial Deceptions, Diversions, and Divisions in Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War with Gordon B. McKinney

  7. Coping in Confederate Appalachia: Portrait of a Mountain Woman and Her Community at War

  8. “Moving through Deserter Country”: Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War

  9. “Talking Heroines”: Elite Mountain Women as Chroniclers of Stoneman’s Raid, April 1865

  Remembrance

  10. The Racial “Innocence” of Appalachia: William Faulkner and the Mountain South

  11. A Fugitive Slave in Frontier Appalachia: The Journey of August King on Film

  12. “A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy”: Explaining Civil War Loyalties in the Age of Appalachian Discovery, 1900–1921

  13. Unionists in the Attic: The Shelton Laurel Massacre Dramatized

  14. Appalachian Odysseus: Love, War, and Best-sellerdom in the Blue Ridge

  15. Guerrilla War and Remembrance: Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War

  16. Race and Remembrance in West Virginia: John Henry for a Postmodernist Age

  17. In Defense of Appalachia on Film: Hollywood, History, and the Highland South

  Credits

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  I have incurred many debts over the years in which I have generated this work. Many of us historians moved into and through this brave new world of nineteenth-century Appalachia together, and my efforts have been much enhanced and expanded by collaboration and frequent exchanges, in person and in print, with these fellow travelers. I owe my biggest debt to Gordon McKinney for having provided me with the most rewarding, and lengthiest, of those collaborations. Coauthoring a book on the Civil War in western North Carolina was far more enriching than it would h
ave been to undertake the same project alone, and the sheer fact that it took us so long to do—nearly a decade—allowed us both the chance to spin off separate essays and articles on related topics. Several of them appear here. Whereas we coauthored only one essay (reproduced here with my thanks to Gordon), his fingerprints are on far more of these pieces than authorial attribution indicates, and I am very grateful that we undertook the war together and that we both survived it to move on and fight on other fronts.

  I am also indebted to fellow historians Durwood Dunn, Kenneth Noe, Martin Crawford, Ronald Lewis, John Alexander Williams, Richard Drake, David Hsiung, Tracy McKenzie, Paul Salstrom, Altina Waller, John Stealey, Tyler Blethen, Ronald Eller, Curtis Wood, Richard Starnes, Ralph Mann, Marie Tedesco, and Shannon Wilson for their friendship, for their good work, and for the feedback they’ve provided on my work for many years now. I especially thank Tracy and Ralph for their careful readings of this manuscript and offering useful suggestions and insights, nearly all of which I’ve incorporated into its final version.

  One of the great benefits of working on Appalachia has been the opportunity to interact with scholars in other disciplines. The Appalachian Studies Association has provided an invaluable forum for interdisciplinary discussion and exchange of ideas, and I am one of many beneficiaries of contacts and friendships forged through its annual conferences. In addition to the historians just named, I’ve found some of the most provocative and valuable work on race and gender in Appalachia is coming from sociologists, anthropologists, and literary and film critics, among others. (We historians still have the Civil War pretty much to ourselves.) I am much indebted to the insightful, multifaceted, and often far more sophisticated work on race by Barbara Ellen Smith, Dwight Billings, Kathleen Blee, Larry Griffin, Wilburn Hayden, Cecelia Conway, Phil Obermiller, and Wilma A. Dunaway that has come to inform my own views on the subject. Wilma and I have not always seen eye to eye on matters of mutual interest, but I’ve enjoyed our friendship over the years and have learned a great deal from her groundbreaking work on slavery and much else about frontier and antebellum Appalachia.

  Barbara Ellen Smith and Mary Anglin have much enriched our historical understanding of Appalachian gender as well. Both have chided me—quite rightfully—for my shortcomings in incorporating women into some of my work. I hope I’ve redeemed myself somewhat in making gender a significant component of many of the essays collected here. Loyal Jones, Jerry Williamson, Jack Wright, Pat Beaver, David Whisnant, Ross Spears, and Jamie Ross all deserve honorary status as historians for the rich and varied ways in which their own work has informed so many people’s work, including mine, and I’m grateful for all they’ve done for and with me over the years. I owe a special thanks as well to George Frizzell, archivist extraordinaire at Western Carolina University, for his proactive efforts to keep me—and I’m sure many other scholars—fully abreast of the rich holdings he oversees in the Hunter Library there.

  I have had the great good fortune of working with and learning from a number of graduate students at the University of Georgia, past and present, whose work has in both tangible and intangible ways influenced my own. I am grateful to Mark Huddle, Keith Bohannon, Jonathan Sarris, Craig Brashear, Michael Buseman, Bruce Stewart, Jennifer Lund Smith, Steve Nash, Drew Swanson, Mary Ella Engel, Kyle Osborn, and Alex Massengale, each of whom has made or is making significant contributions to our understanding of nineteenth-century Appalachia. I owe just as much to many more students in our program whom I dare not try to name, who have worked on the Civil War and its aftermath in non-Appalachian settings, though I can’t resist thanking Emory Thomas for luring most of them to UGA in the first place, where I—as his trusty sidekick for many years—became the beneficiary of the accomplished history they produced both while here and since. Nor will I try to name the numerous UGA students in other fields—from anthropology and religion to English and landscape design—whose work is set in Appalachia, and on whose committees I’ve served. All have further reinforced my appreciation for the healthy cross-pollination that has informed so much of our work separately and together. I have gained much from exchanges with fellow UGA colleagues and southern film historians Hugh Ruppersburg and Richard Neupert, that have helped shape some of my thinking on several of the films I discuss in the latter part of this volume.

  We in Appalachian studies have been an unusually collaborative group, as far as gathering our work between single book covers. Much of the best and most cutting-edge scholarship on the region has appeared in essay collections, most of which still provide invaluable samplers of different approaches and perspectives to similar topics and issues. These include Appalachia in the Making, edited by Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region, edited by Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine E. Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society & Development in the Preindustrial Era, edited by Robert Mitchell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, edited by Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier, edited by Michael J. Puglisi (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place, edited by Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); The Handbook of Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region, edited by Grace Toney Edwards, JoAnn A. Asbury, and Ricky L. Cox (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); The Civil War’s Aftermath in Appalachia, edited by Andrew L. Slap (forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky); and Appalachians and Race (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), which I edited. I feel privileged to have been a part of a few of these projects; several of the pieces here were originally commissioned for such volumes. I am particularly grateful to the various editors who called on me to write them, and for their feedback as they worked their way into print.

  I’m especially grateful to Dwight Billings, who served as co-editor of two volumes in which my essays have appeared and as editor of the Journal of Appalachian Studies, where another was published, so that three of these pieces bear his imprint in one way or another. I very much appreciate how often Jerry Williamson and Sandy Ballard have asked me to contribute pieces or serve as parts of debates, roundtable discussions, or forums in the Appalachian Journal; I’ve benefited tremendously from those exchanges and from their input as editors.

  It’s a real pleasure to work with the University Press of Kentucky again, and I’m especially grateful to Joyce Harrison, now an old friend, for her initial and sustained enthusiasm for this project, and her guidance in getting it pulled together. The entire staff, now under Stephen Wrinn’s dynamic leadership, has always been a joy to work with, and I’m always delighted to be in their good hands. I especially appreciate the much-improved prose that has resulted from the good, sharp copyediting provided by Penelope Stratton.

  I’m grateful to several people who have enabled me to spend much valued time in western North Carolina settings in ways that have contributed to this volume. I’ve enjoyed parts of two summers on the campus of Mars Hill College in different capacities provided by Kathy Newfont in the history department and Rick Morgan and Bill Gregg of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater, who allowed me and Dan Slagle, from whom I’ve also learned much, to be small parts of an extraordinary theater project, which I write about in chapter 13 of this book.

  I thank Nancy and Charlie Midgette for their generosity in letting me use their beautiful house in Montreat, North Carolina, as a getaway, where I’ve enjoyed a great deal of time for uninterrupted writing and thinking. As much as I love Athens, Georgia, it’s great to be able to write about the mountains while nestled in them, and somehow whatever I try to say about that world seems to flow more freely at higher
elevations and cooler climes.

  Finally, I thank my father in Morganton, North Carolina, for his love of our mountains, and for having spent over fifty years now exploring them with my brothers and me and our families and instilling in us all his enthusiasm for the flora and fauna, trails and vistas, people and history of the region.

  Introduction

  Late in the fall of 1861, James W. Taylor, a Minnesota journalist, published an extraordinary series of articles in the St. Paul Daily Press in which he contemplated the Civil War, then well under way, and the demographic and geographic factors that would affect the course of that conflict and the North’s chances of victory. More specifically, as the title of a pamphlet comprising these pieces indicates, Taylor’s focus was Alleghania: The Strength of the Union and the Weakness of Slavery in the Mountain Districts of the South. His contention was that “within the immense district to which the designation of Alleghania is here applied, the slaves are so few and scattered” and that its residents were imbued with a “complete dedication to Free Labor.” He proposed that with the federal government’s protection and encouragement, southern highlanders—all “ready to strike for Liberty and Union”—could rise up against the Confederacy to which they had been unwillingly bound, and be reinstated into the Union. This “Switzerland of the South . . . a land of corn and cattle, not cotton,” could then become a military base of operations from which the Union army in conjunction with native highlanders could launch “a powerful diversion of a hostile character against the insurrectionists.”1

  Taylor was not alone in these assumptions. In March 1862, James R. Gilmore put readers of The Continental Monthly, a newly established journal based in New York and Boston, on alert as to the “possibility of a counter-revolution among the inhabitants of the mountain districts, who hold but few slaves, who have preserved a devoted love for the Union, and who are, if not at positive feud, at least on anything but social harmony with their aristocratic neighbors of the lowlands and of the plantation.” In those southern highlands, Gilmore declared, there “exists a tremendous groundwork of aid to the north, and weakness for secession. The love of this region for the Union, and its local hatred for planterdom with its arrogance towards free labor, is no chimera”; with aid from the North, it could “light up a flame of counter-revolution . . . that would sweep the slaveocracy from existence.”2