Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Most mountain Unionists were sensitive to charges that they opposed black bondage, however, and emphatically asserted their full support of the institution. In fact, highland spokesmen such as Zebulon Vance, William Brownlow, and Andrew Johnson argued against secession to their highland constituencies and readerships on the grounds that slavery was safer in, rather than out of, the Union. Alexander H. Jones of Henderson County, one of western North Carolina’s most vocal Unionists, asserted that “by throwing off those guarantees—the Constitution and the Union—southern states have done the cause of slavery more injury than anyone else could have done.” Others warned of the devaluation of slave property and the difficulties of reclaiming fugitive slaves who went north into what would be foreign territory.48

  “Parson” Brownlow, whose Knoxville newspaper made him among East Tennessee’s most visible opponents of secession, was quick to state that his “contempt for the Abolitionists of the North is only equaled by my hatred of the Disunionists of the South.” Nevertheless, he expressed what were likely the sentiments of many mountain residents: “The Union men of the border slave states are loyal to their Government and do not regard the election of Lincoln as any just cause for dissolving the Union. . . . But, if we were once convinced that the Administration in Washington and the people of the North contemplated the subjugation of the South or the abolishing of slavery, there would not be a Union man among us in twenty-four hours.” Many mountain Unionists felt betrayed by Lincoln when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, and some even abandoned their loyalist stance as a result. Former congressman Thomas A. R. Nelson, one of East Tennessee’s most influential antisecessionist voices in 1861, declared two years later that he would have advocated secession if he “had believed it was the object of the North to subjugate the South and emancipate our slaves.” “The Union men of East Tennessee,” he declared emphatically, “are not now and never were Abolitionists.”49

  The very fact that mountain slaveholders were among the most ardent Unionists is indication enough that abolition was hardly the basis of their anti-Confederate tendencies. Both Zebulon Vance and Andrew Johnson had modest slaveholdings, and many who owned far more slaves were equally as resistant to secession. Analysis of election returns in western North Carolina on a referendum to hold a secession convention indicates a fairly even split between slaveholders and little or no correlation between a county’s slave population and its vote on secession.50

  Perhaps the most striking example of this pattern—or lack of pattern—was the situation in Kentucky’s Tug Valley. In her masterful study of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Altina Waller noted the paradoxical fact that Harmon McCoy, one of the valley’s few slaveholders, was also among the few residents who remained loyal to the Union when the war broke out. But in that area he was not alone. Slaveholders in Pike County were as a rule less likely to support the Confederacy than were most of its nonslaveholding farmers.51 Studies of north Georgia’s mountain counties also indicate that the few residents with substantial slaveholdings were actively Unionist and in several instances served in the Union rather than the Confederate army.52

  Likewise in those parts of Southern Appalachia where support for secession was strong, highlanders’ concerns about slavery’s future under a Republican regime was a vital factor in shaping that support. In 1944 historian Henry Shanks argued that the strong secessionist vote in Virginia’s southwestern corner (85 percent of its delegates voted to withdraw from the Union in May) was due to substantial ownership of slaves by local farmers and their bitter hostility to “abolitionism, to the Republican party, and to the election of Lincoln.”53 Whereas such sentiments were taken for granted in most other parts of the South, highland support of the Confederacy has generally been attributed to the independence and individualism inherent in mountaineers. Even more vaguely, as a western Carolinian wrapped in the romance of the “lost cause” explained in 1905, the mountain South seceded not as a defense of slavery but, rather, over “the real issue . . . a lofty and patriotic sense of duty which animated the Southern people of all classes.”54

  Until recently such rationales were accepted with little acknowledgment of how central slavery’s survival was as a motivating factor for much of Appalachia’s support of secession, despite evidence of considerable rhetoric to that effect. The crisis raised even greater fears as to the impact of slavery’s abolition on the southern highlands, fears that mountain secessionists were quick and effective in exploiting. Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, himself a native of the state’s mountain region, appealed to his fellow north Georgians’ racial fears by urging them to support their state’s separation from the Union. Within the Union, slavery was no longer safe, he reasoned, and “so soon as the slaves were at liberty, thousands of them would leave the cotton and rice fields in the lower part of our State, and make their way to the healthier climate in the mountain region. We should have them plundering and stealing, robbing, and killing in all the lovely vallies of the mountains.”55 Western North Carolina politicians were just as vocal in raising the specter of such an influx among their constituents as they described “the terrible calamity of having three hundred thousand idle, vagabond free negroes turned loose upon you with all the privileges of white men.” By the same token, in seceding from Virginia, West Virginians were sharply divided as to the future status of slavery in their new state constitution, but they had no problem in agreeing to a Negro exclusion policy that would ban either slave importation or free black migration into the state.56

  There are other indications that some sections of Appalachia could claim no exemptions from the evils of southern racial prejudice. Slave markets existed in a number of mountain communities, such as Wheeling, Winchester, and Abingdon in Virginia; Bristol, Jonesboro, Knoxville, and Chattanooga in Tennessee; and London and Pikeville in Kentucky. (Witnessing the cruelties of the slave trade in Wheeling, in fact, set Benjamin Lundy on his abolitionist course.)57 Slave auctions elsewhere in the upper South were apparently dependent on slaves supplied from highland areas, and it was not an uncommon sight, according to British geologist George Featherstonaugh, to see slave coffles moving through southwest Virginia and East Tennessee headed for deep South markets. On an 1844 trip through the southern highlands, he expressed amazement at the sight of slave drivers with more than three hundred men, women, and children in chains, which he encountered both along the New River valley and then again in Knoxville as they moved their human cargo toward Natchez, Mississippi.58

  At least one observer saw the mere living conditions of mountain slaves to be intolerable and was skeptical of claims for their well-being. Joseph John Gurney, a British Quaker traveling through the Virginia mountains in 1841, encountered black workers at White Sulphur Springs and was distressed at the “miserable manner in which the slaves were clad.” After chiding their master, a physician, on their appearance, Gurney reported, “he assured me that the slaves were among the happiest of human beings; but it was nearer the truth, when he afterwards observed that they were remarkably able to endure hardships.” He concluded from this encounter that “certain it is, that the negroes here, as elsewhere, are an easy, placid, and long-suffering race.”59

  Former slaves themselves bore witness to the fact that bondage in the southern highlands was no less abusive than elsewhere. Sarah Gudger recalled the visits of a “specalator” to a neighboring plantation near Old Fort, North Carolina. He and “Old Marse” would pick out a slave from the field, and then “dey slaps de han’ cuffs on him and tak him away to de cotton country.” Mary Barbour, from the same county, testified that her master sold almost all of his slaves, including at least twelve of her brothers and sisters, when they reached age three. Aunt Sophia, a former slave from eastern Kentucky, contended that though her master “wuzn’t as mean as most,” a nearby owner “wuz so mean to his slaves that I know two gals that kilt themselfs.”60

  After the war the racial violence that plagued so much of the South was evident in the
mountains as well. The influx of blacks into such cities as Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Asheville led to open unrest not unlike that in other southern cities. In Asheville, the attempt by a black man to vote in 1868 led to a race riot that left one black dead and several blacks and whites wounded. In his study of this and other such incidents, Eric Olson noted that in terms of reactions expressed in the local newspaper, there was little to differentiate Asheville from Savannah.61

  Several studies of the north Georgia mountains demonstrate that racial violence was no less apparent there than in other parts of the state during the postwar decades. Edward Ayers has noted that although blacks in Whitfield and other mountain counties posed little political or economic threat to white residents during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan in that area was notorious for the brutal treatment it and other mobs inflicted on the relatively few blacks in their midst. “Honor reigned,” Ayers observed, “with as much volatility among the whites of the hills as among their low-country brethren.”62 Yet Ayers argued that the post-emancipation abuse of highland blacks was distinguished from that elsewhere in the South by the fact that it was integral to a long tradition of group violence and extralegal retribution among mountaineers, most of which was inflicted by whites on other whites. In analyses of the “whitecapping” that plagued Georgia’s mountain counties during the moonshine wars of the 1880s and 1890s, both Will Holmes and Fitzhugh Brundage confirm the biracial makeup of whitecappers’ targets but note that blacks were whipped and murdered for offenses that included insolence or miscegenation as well as any threat they might have posed to moonshiners’ security.63

  In his statistical analysis of racial violence in late nineteenth-century Kentucky, George Wright noted that while mountain residents lynched fewer blacks than did other Kentuckians, they did so at a rate proportionate to the region’s African American populace.64 In a more broadly cast statistical study of racial violence in Appalachia, Robert Stuckert suggests that blacks were more often victimized by white mobs in mountain areas than elsewhere. Though only 6 percent of the black population of seven southern states lived in the highlands, more than 10 percent of the blacks lynched in those states were Appalachian residents.65 Brundage confirms these findings with his rather startling discovery that no area of Virginia saw more lynchings than did its mountain counties. Of a total of seventy blacks lynched in Virginia between 1880 and 1930, no less than twenty-four lost their lives in southwestern counties, a phenomenon Brundage credits to the “furious pace” of the region’s postwar social and economic transformations, particularly the influx of itinerant black and foreign workers into mining and lumber camps. The fact that most lynchings occurred in towns, the centers of this change, rather than in the hills or countryside, confirms the economic roots of this particular expression of mountain racism.66

  Although some Appalachians exhibited the same violent and abusive treatment toward blacks as other southerners, there are also indications of “kinder and gentler” race relations in the region. I have suggested elsewhere that slaveholders in the Carolina highlands exhibited more benevolent attitudes and lenient treatment toward their black property than was usual in the lowland South. Despite the conclusions of British Quaker Joseph John Gurney that slaves in southwestern Virginia were no better off than those in other parts of the South, other outside observers have provided among the most explicit testimony that there was indeed a qualitative difference in the treatment of highland bondsmen. Charles Lanman, for example, wrote in 1849 that “the slaves residing among the mountains are the happiest and most independent portion of the population.” Olmsted noted that in the southern highlands, slavery’s “moral evils . . . are less, even proportionately to the number of slaves.” He detected that they were “less closely superintended. . . . They exercise more responsibility, and both in soul and intellect they are more elevated.”67 I also detected among mountain masters in North Carolina what seemed to be a preponderance of acts of goodwill, affectionate references to their slaves, unusual efforts—sometimes including financial sacrifice—to ensure their welfare and happiness, and even occasional pangs of conscience about the system.68

  Other scholars have also noted greater moderation or leniency in highland race relations. In an analysis of political divisiveness in Virginia from 1790 to 1830, Van Beck Hall demonstrated the degree to which western legislators, while fully supportive of slavery itself, often differed from their eastern counterparts on more peripheral issues regarding blacks. On various occasions Appalachian delegates blocked proposals to toughen manumission procedures, to pass retaliatory measures against blacks after Gabriel Prosser’s aborted 1800 rebellion, and to ban the distribution of abolitionist publications in the state. At the same time they supported measures to liberalize restrictions on the state’s free black population, to end compensation for masters of slave criminals who were executed or banished, and to support Richmond free black efforts to establish their own church.69

  Even during the intense racist repression of the Reconstruction era, some highlanders showed more restraint in dealing with the new freedman population than southerners elsewhere. In his comprehensive study of the Republican Party in the southern highlands, Gordon McKinney credited at least part of its success to “the relative lack of hostility between mountain whites and blacks,” though he noted that it was an alliance based far more on political pragmatism than humanitarian ideals.70 Despite John Eaton’s observations regarding racism in Reconstruction Tennessee, a recent study has suggested that emancipation was accepted more quickly in East Tennessee than was true elsewhere in the occupied South.71 Eric Olson concluded his study of racial postwar violence in Asheville with the suggestion that the incidents he described were more the exception than the rule; the disruptions remained more isolated and their effects more easily contained than was the case in similar incidents in Atlanta, for example.72 J. Morgan Kousser, in documenting racial disfranchisement in the turn-of-the-century South, noted that hill country whites were among the few who opposed denying blacks the political rights they had gained a generation earlier, though such resistance had less to do with any benevolence toward blacks than with the realization that they were often the unacknowledged secondary victims of such measures as literacy tests, poll taxes, and understanding clauses.73

  So where are we left in terms of characterizing the racism of nineteenth-century Appalachians? The reality seems almost as contradictory and confusing as the myths. If the evidence presented here does not span quite the extremes of the popular assumptions laid out in fictional form by Fox and Faulkner, it fills in much of the intervening space along that vast spectrum of opinion. The nature of the evidence on racism at the grassroots level of any populace is and must remain scattered, speculative, and circumstantial, so that any definitive or comprehensive statement on how mountain whites viewed blacks remains elusive. But the sheer range of experiences—lynchings and race riots occurring in areas where abolitionism had thrived; blacks moving quickly into some parts of the region when given the option, while deserting others just as rapidly; some highlanders willing to leave the Union to protect slavery while others proved relatively receptive to emancipation—demonstrates the dangers of generalizing about highland attitudes and of drawing any hard and fast conclusions about a society that has been subjected to far more than its share of homogenization, stereotyping, and image-making.

  Barbara Fields has warned us of the dangers of according race “a transhistorical, almost metaphysical, status,” noting that “ideas about color, like ideas about anything else, derive their importance, indeed their very definition, from their context.”74 The variety of white responses to blacks in Southern Appalachia serves as a vivid reminder of the fact that racial attitudes and actions are indeed functions of other social, economic, political, or even sectional forces. The power struggles between a state’s mountain region and its state government or lowland elite; the politicization of slavery, emancipation, and later disfranchisement and segregation; the demographic
shifts, often dramatic, of populations, black and white, into or out of highland areas; the effects of poverty and other forms of material stagnation or deprivation; the new dynamics of community and class, and accompanying tensions, brought on by colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and other forces of modernization—all of these were very real aspects of the Appalachian experience that could, and often did, affect racial attitudes. The actual contacts between mountain whites and blacks were of course a crucial—but far from consistent or predictable—factor in shaping race relations in the region. But these other factors were equally significant, if more subtle, determinants of highlanders’ perceptions and treatment of blacks. The variations in pace and degree at which these changes were felt throughout the region may be the key to explaining the quiltlike character of highland racism.

  Fields reminds us too that racism can be a slippery concept to pin down. “Attitudes,” she maintains, “are promiscuous critters and do not mind cohabiting with their opposites.”75 Such was certainly true of racism’s highland manifestations. The fluidity and often contradictory expressions of racial opinions among mountaineers reflect the diversity and complexity of experience rarely acknowledged about Appalachia and its historical development. Once that range of experience is recognized, it may be that the most that one can draw from this admittedly sketchy overview is that there was nothing truly unique about Appalachian racial attitudes. The region’s residents were first and foremost southerners. Despite demographic deviations in their racial makeup and their political alienation from the South’s dominant slaveocracy, white highlanders’ views of African Americans in theory and treatment of them in practice were for the most part well within the mainstream of attitudes and behavior elsewhere in the South, a mainstream that was in itself by no means monolithic. Likewise those views manifested in the few areas of Appalachia without a significant black presence were not so different from those of Americans in other nonslaveholding parts of the country. On either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, nineteenth-century white America was racist, varying only in degree and in form of expression. The same was true of Appalachia.