Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Even before such moves became official policy, mountain opportunists had reached out to eastern Carolina owners with tempting leasing or purchase offers. Nicholas W. Woodfin was the most aggressive in making this pitch. Along with other Asheville businessmen, he had actively sought hired slave labor in constructing the eagerly awaited Western North Carolina Railroad well before war seemed a possibility. With no intention of letting its progress lag once the conflict was under way, Woodfin continued to run advertisements for slave labor in newspapers across the state well into 1862. In December 1861, one such notice called for “100 able-bodied negroes,” while another in March 1862 sought 50 more. He also used a more personal approach in offering his services as broker to slaveholding friends who sought safer havens for their slave property during the war. In May 1862, he wrote to former governor and Asheville native David L. Swain, then president of the University of North Carolina, with the following proposition: “Now upon the subject of your negroes. If you will send them up to this country I can yet hire them to advantage for the rest of the year. The men especially will command high prices, particularly before harvest commences. There is great demand for labor indeed. . . . It won’t be as easy to place women & children, but it can be done.”14

  When, in early 1863, a Confederate rifle factory in Asheville faced labor shortages as military demands drained much of its original white male workforce, slaves became the logical and most accessible replacements. An advertisement for “ten negro men” in March was the first in a continuing effort by the armory’s commander, Captain Benjamin Stone, to employ a biracial workforce in rifle production. His recruitment campaign for hired black labor also contributed to the influx of lowland slaves into the Asheville area.15

  Calvin Cowles, the most energetic of Wilkes County’s entrepreneurs, was fully aware of the financial opportunities made available by the new demand and was equally aggressive in seeking to bring new slave labor into the area, particularly through hiring contracts that allowed him to sublet those he had hired to his neighbors and relatives. His correspondence during the war’s first two years is full of pleas to slaveholders in which he confirmed the rich opportunities such portable property offered in his own area. He informed a Mississippi business contact of the high demand particularly for adult males, then commanding annual rental rates of $125 or $150.16

  By June 1862 Cowles complained that “hirelings cannot be had for money nor love,” and asked his brother, then in eastern North Carolina, “Can’t you catch me a Negro or two and send them up?” He intensified his search, asking particularly for blacksmiths or carpenters, but willing to consider any women and children that might be for hire. In 1863 he offered to rent at least one of the several farms among his vast landholdings to any refugees seeking to move from war-torn areas who could bring slaves with them. During one of his regular mercantile purchasing trips to Charleston and Savannah in April 1863, he sought to buy slaves as well. He reported to his wife that he had bought “Nancy,” a forty-year-old “cook, washer, and house servant,” for $805 at the slave mart in Charleston, but that he had had no luck in finding a “boy” of comparable worth.17

  If outright purchases proved hard to come by, Cowles’s efforts in the long-distance hiring of slaves seem to have paid off. Throughout the latter half of the war he corresponded with a variety of eastern North Carolina owners over the maintenance and welfare of their slaves then under his own care or of those whose labor he had in turn rented out. When his sister in Lenoir expressed concern over her financial situation in November 1862, Cowles urged her to hire out her slave Wash, noting that “prices rule high here, . . . [and] he ought to fetch you some money as his work is in demand.”18

  Woodfin and Cowles were by no means alone in these pursuits. Some highland residents saw the care and supervision of others’ slaves as a service as well as a financial opportunity. Allen Davidson of Cherokee County, for example, wrote in February 1863 that he and other family members were willing to oblige relatives in middle Tennessee who wanted to send their slaves “up here this summer.” “I would be glad if they’d do so,” he wrote. “Uncle Harvy’s folks would take some and us two or three [and] for a fair price board and clothe them.”19 But for most it was strictly business and it was through earlier business connections that such arrangements were made. Western Carolina merchants found their many antebellum contacts with South Carolina and Georgia markets to be effective conduits for moving slaves into the Carolina highlands for both short-and long-term usage, thus creating a vigorous regional market in which residents bought, sold, and traded slaves until the final three or four months of the war.

  The effect of such activity was a considerable expansion of the mountain slave population. A Haywood County resident noted in May 1863 that the number of slaves in that county “has increased very rapidly since the war commenced.” At least one Asheville resident was alarmed enough about the number of slaves being brought into Buncombe County from the coast that he informed Governor Vance, a fellow Buncombe native, in March 1863 that citizens there wanted more protection “from Negro Ravages.” Two months earlier, a South Carolina–owned slave employed at the Asheville armory fell victim to local resentment at the increasing black presence in that community. A group of ruffians accosted the slave and, upon finding that he was wandering the streets without the proper “pass” from the armory, gave him a severe whipping.20

  Yet despite the influx of new blacks into the region, the demand for their utilization and therefore the hiring rates they commanded also rose dramatically. In 1863 a Rutherford County owner hired six slaves for an annual fee of $618, almost twice as much as he had asked for their services two years earlier. Joseph Corpening, in Caldwell County, hired out four of his slaves, two men and two women, on annual contracts, and his accounts of such transactions show that they remained steady throughout the war years, despite dramatic increases in the rates charged. William, an adult male, earned Corpening a $28 annual fee in 1861. That rate doubled over each of the next two years to $47 in 1862 and $104 in 1863. By 1864, Corpening charged $510 for William’s services and in January 1865, $525. Corpening’s fees for the other male and one of the two women were fully comparable to those charged for William, so that a total of $113 collected in January 1861 for the four had grown by January 1864 to $1,165.21 Such figures say as much or more about the dramatic depreciation of Confederate currency as they do about the increased value of slaves. But the perception was as important as the reality, and mountain residents interpreted these figures to mean slaves were an increasingly profitable investment, which in itself had much to do with the vitality of the slave market in the region.

  Such activity was constant and involved sales as well as hirings, as numerous mountain masters took full advantage of new opportunities to both buy and sell black property. More often than not, such transactions were negotiated locally, but they were never confined to their own region. Just as Woodfin sought slaves for purchase in Charleston and Savannah, so he and others were very much aware of current prices in such major markets and the options for sale or purchase they continued to offer. In May 1863, Calvin Cowles advised his sister in the aftermath of the capture of her two unruly runaways: “Robert could have been sold in Charleston for $2500, but I presume you allowed your philanthropy to influence you in marketing him—he is with old friends. In Wash’s case, I advise you that you put him on the block in Richmond. . . . He has forfeited all claims on your sympathy—get the most you can for him.”22

  The contrasting experiences of two highland families in the wartime slave trade illustrate the variety of scenarios in which these trends could play themselves out. The extensive correspondence of the Lenoirs, among the most established families and largest slaveholders in western North Carolina, represents on the surface a very different approach to their black property from that reflected in the letters of Alfred and Mary Bell, a couple who used the opportunities the war provided to break into the ranks of slaveholders for the first time. Y
et behind the actions of both Bells and Lenoirs lay some shared assumptions about the future security and profitability of slavery in their region.

  Colonel Thomas Lenoir, the eighty-year-old patriarch of Fort Defiance plantation in Caldwell County, died in March 1861 and left his three sons and several sons-in-law to face the early months of the war with the additional burden of settling his substantial estate, including the distribution of his sixty-one slaves. Thomas, the colonel’s eldest son and namesake, was forty years old, and was persuaded by family members not to submit to military service. He moved from Fort Defiance, however, and spent the war years at “the Den,” a crude but vast farm that was part of the family’s extensive but remote highland holdings in Haywood County. Rufus, the youngest son, stayed at home to manage the vast Caldwell County plantation, while Walter, two years older than Rufus, was the only Lenoir to offer himself for Confederate military service.

  The burdens of the war, compounded with that of their father’s estate, particularly his slave property, weighed heavily on the Lenoir brothers. The lion’s share of that burden fell upon Rufus, the sole adult male remaining at Fort Defiance, but he never lacked long-distance advice from Walter, wherever he was. While stationed at Kinston, North Carolina, in April 1862, Walter lectured his younger brother on investment opportunities for the more liquid part of his inheritance. Pointing out that he was already a large landowner, further acquisition of real estate was not a very attractive option, and Walter argued that most forms of personal property were also unreasonably high priced at the time, though he knew they “must fall when public affairs again become settled by peace; and unless with a view to an early profit, [I] would not deem it prudent to invest largely in such property.” But, Walter continued, “there are two kinds of personal property which form exceptions in this respect, negroes and cotton, both of which are depreciated in value, the first from political considerations & the peculiar character of the war waged by our powerful and unprincipled foe, & the other on account of the blockade.” While there were risks in buying either, Walter reasoned from his eastern North Carolina vantage point that “for long investment and in a mere pecuniary point of view, I would prefer buying negroes or cotton near the point where they are in the greatest present danger & removing them to the mountains to any other investment in personal property.”23

  None of the three brothers embraced their new, vastly expanded slaveholdings with enthusiasm. But with the war under way, and their support of the Confederate cause nominal at least, they no longer invoked any ideological underpinnings to their distaste for their black property. They insisted instead—mainly to each other and to other family members—that it was the burdensome and often frustrating responsibilities to which they objected. While the colonel had instilled in his sons a paternalistic respect for slave family links, they were far quicker than he had been to sell much of their excess personnel. The pressure to do so was constant, a reflection of the wartime surge in market activity in the area. James Gwyn, an heir by virtue of his marriage to the colonel’s daughter, recognized the potential and pressed his in-laws to make slaves as large a share of his portion of the estate as possible. He specifically asked for young slaves, an indication not only of his faith in the institution’s future, but also of his awareness of the prices they commanded in an optimistic local market.24

  When, in early 1863, the estate was settled and the division of slaves enacted, the Lenoir brothers moved quickly to convert sizable portions of that property into cash. Rather than carrying through with a public auction as they had advertised, they opted for private sales, and they seemed quite pleased with the prices their slaves brought. But Gwyn by then was a little more cautious than he had been a year and half earlier, due more to doubts about fluctuations in Confederate currency than about the demand for slaves. “I have had several persons to see me to buy George and his family,” he wrote in January, “but I have not sold them yet and I hardly think I will for a while at least, altho’ I do not think I will keep them, but maybe they are as safe as the money I would get from them.” Yet Gwyn was also adding to his holdings. He purchased several slaves from the estate of an elderly widow with no heirs, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in the fact that he acquired them “at two-thirds of traders prices as the will directed.”25

  In May 1863, Walter (who had returned home as an amputee several months earlier and had moved to Thomas’s Haywood County farm) noted that the value of his slaves had doubled since their assessment at the time of his father’s death. Gwyn had written to his brother-in-law Rufus from Wilkes County two months earlier that “there are many negro buyers in this part of the country. I dare say it is the same way with you & that you obtained large prices.” Gwyn went on to complain about his failure to anticipate how rapidly prices were climbing and that he had succumbed too soon to market demands. He elaborated: “I had to sell one of Byram’s and Betsey’s children (Polly) which I disliked very much but she got too far along in the sleight of hand to keep; I only got $1250 for her—could now get $1800. I also sold Lark a few weeks ago, for $2000 which I then thought an exhorbitant price but it seems there is no telling what property will go for.”26

  Both the Lenoirs and Gwyn continued to make periodic sales—usually but not always in family groupings—throughout 1863 and into 1864. They never seem to have had trouble making such sales locally, to residents of Caldwell or neighboring counties. While they became more and more hesitant to accept Confederate currency as payment, they continued to express satisfaction with the profits accrued from such transactions.27

  A very different story, but one equally indicative of the dynamic wartime slave trade in the Carolina mountains, is that of Alfred and Mary Bell in Macon County. Macon was far removed and in many respects very different from Caldwell and Wilkes counties—more deeply entrenched in the mountains and thus more remote, more sparsely settled, and newer than the plantation-scale farms held by several generations of the same family that characterized the fertile river valleys of the Blue Ridge’s eastern foothills. Macon had only half as many slaves and a third as many slaveholders as Caldwell in 1860, yet the system there showed fully as much vigor and vitality as it did in the more affluent community of which the Lenoirs were a part.28

  The Bells moved from north Georgia to Franklin, North Carolina, in 1860. Alfred, a dentist, had grown up in Macon County and returned to be near his father and other family members. He opened a dental practice and bought a small farm just outside of town. The young couple was not among the eleven slaveholders in the village, but like many of their nonslaveholding neighbors, they took advantage of both the white and black manpower sources available in the community. From their arrival until at least the end of 1862, they entrusted their farm to a white tenant and employed two slaves, Tom and Liza, both hired on an annual basis from the county’s largest supplier, Dillard Love, whose ninety-five slaves made him western North Carolina’s fifth largest slaveholder in 1860.29

  After Alfred Bell’s enlistment and departure from home at the head of his own Confederate company in November 1861, Mary continued to rely on the labor of their tenant and hired slaves. Yet they were more determined than ever to purchase slaves of their own. As a result of certain profitable investments, Mary’s collection of back payments for her husband’s dental services, and their share in Alf’s family’s jewelry business, the Bells were in the unusual position of having accumulated considerable capital early in the war, and like many young southern couples in earlier years, they saw slaves as a natural, indeed sound, investment. By December 1862, Alf was particularly eager to take such a step because he was nervous about the stability of the Confederate currency they were accumulating. “I don’t think it good policy to keep money on hand,” he wrote to Mary. “I want you to invest what you have in something, either for a negro or land.” He trusted her judgment in choosing which, and thanked God he had a wife “who is not extravagant and is always trying to lay something up for the future.”30

&n
bsp; Slave trading was brisk in Macon County during the war’s second year, and the Bells were very much interested in purchasing Martha, a cook, and her child from Dillard Love; other local residents also had considerable interest in the pair. Despite their interest and that of Martha herself in belonging to the Bells (she told Mary that she would “beg Mr. Love to sell her” to them), John Ingram, who had himself recently achieved slaveholding status with the purchase of four other bondsmen, beat the Bells in acquiring these two additional hands. Nor did they act on any of the other options they considered that fall. At some point in 1863, as payment for accumulated debts owed Alf, they came into possession of a female slave named Eve.

  Their new bondswoman soon proved to be a nuisance to Mary Bell, and Alf assured her that there was no shortage of buyers in Franklin. With landholding becoming more of a priority for him, he suggested she trade Eve for one of several tracts of land he would like to have owned. In March 1864 he instructed her to try a neighbor’s plot first, and “give any price for it that you think we can pay and live afterward.” His final word on the subject: “I want the land bad.” Then stationed in Alabama, his greatest distance yet from home, Alfred Bell’s advice arrived too late; it crossed in the mail a letter from Mary Bell in which she announced: “Well, I believe I told you that you need not be surprised if [I] made a nigger trade. Well I have done it.” What she had done, in fact, was to negotiate, with the help of Alf’s brothers, the purchase of a slave family from Charleston. “I have swaped Eve for a man, woman, and child . . . and gave $1800 to boot,” she explained.31