A Mr. Kilpatrick had purchased Trim, Aunt Patsy, and their daughter through a Charleston agent. Worried about his own mounting debts and recognizing that he had overextended himself with his new slave property, he agreed to let Mary Bell purchase them. In his own explanation of the transaction, Alf’s brother assured him that his wife had pulled off a real bargain, and had gotten these slaves at far less than their current value in the mountain market. Mary provided rich detail in her descriptions of Trim, a thirty-five-year-old cooper who had made paint buckets in Charleston; his wife Patsy, forty years old and pregnant; and Rosa, their three-year-old daughter. Mary suggested that these were not the first low-country slaves who had been moved into her area when she wrote of Patsy: “She is like all the other south niggers—don’t know much about the work as we do . . . but she is willing to try to learn to do anything.” But she insisted: “I have told both [Trim and Patsy], that if they do not make my crib full of corn that I will sell them both in the fall for enough to fill it.”32
Alf was obviously taken aback by the news of Mary’s purchase. But comforted by his brother’s insistence that the deal had indeed been a bargain, he stifled criticism of his wife, limiting his initial comments to: “I supose you will have negroes enough to make corn and rye this year. . . . Well, if they will suit you I am glad for the trade. I will try and pay the money.” A week later he seemed even more resigned to his new status. “I hope we now can get along without having any thing to do with Love’s negroes,” he wrote. “I do crave to be independent and unbeholding to any body.”33
While she took great satisfaction with her new status as slave owner, Mary Bell was not always content with the three individuals whose ownership endowed her with that position, particularly as Patsy’s health kept her from being an effective worker. From the fall of 1864 on, Mary proposed to her husband further slave purchases either to supplement or to replace the family she owned. In particular, she had her eye on a slave couple, Betts and Alfred, whom she felt “would suit us as well as any we could get.” She also learned that Mr. Kilpatrick, from whom she had purchased Trim, Patsy, and Rosa, was willing to buy back at least the father and daughter, though grudgingly admitting he would probably have to accept the sickly Patsy as well.34
Despite her urgency to take advantage of these opportunities, there is no indication that any such trade or purchase ever took place, since Alf’s return home in February 1865 ended Mary’s vivid record of their slaveholding experience. But the mere fact that within three months of the war’s end such transactions were still taking place in the Franklin area suggests that slavery’s death in the Carolina highlands came both suddenly and unexpectedly. It is tempting to pass judgment on Mary Bell’s shortsightedness in making such risky investments in 1864, or to suggest that Alfred’s preference for land over slaves suggests more foresight as to the latter’s precarious future. Yet there is no evidence that he had any doubts as to either the Confederacy’s ultimate victory or slavery’s continued, and even safer, existence under that new regime. Had he had any qualms about the risks involved, he certainly would not have been so quick to encourage Mary in her pursuit of more slaves.
Nor were the Bells alone in such assumptions. That the vitality of the highland slave trade hinged on the ever-growing threats to black property elsewhere in the Confederacy never seems to have worried those in positions to take advantage of the bargain rates such situations generated. Even those selling slaves, like Kilpatrick, cannot be credited with any more prescience than those they sold to. It was, after all, at the end of 1864, with Lee’s surrender less than four months away, that he indicated his willingness to buy back all three of the slaves he had earlier sold to the Bells.
Thus the Bells, more so than the Lenoirs but probably not unlike the majority of mountain slaveholders, were caught very much by surprise when all of their plans, maneuvers, and even skill in playing the slave market came to naught. That Mary Bell moved as readily and as enthusiastically into the ranks of slaveholders at the very point at which the institution was crumbling elsewhere suggests not only how healthy the market continued to be in the mountains during the war’s final year, but also how few doubts either she or her community seemed to harbor about its continued viability and profitability.
In December 1864, Rufus Lenoir wrote Walter about the problems of troublesome slaves and noted that “unless I could feel more interest in the institution as a permanent one, I do not care to be troubled with dishonest ones.” Yet in the same letter he acknowledged the high prices slaves still commanded as he contemplated the sale of his “young Venus.” Only in February 1865 did the Lenoirs acknowledge the possibility that slavery’s demise may have been eminent. In a family estate settlement involving the dispersal of slave property, a new conditional phrase accompanied the list of those slaves bequeathed to Walter: “provided that the events of the war do not result in the abolition of slavery or their removal from his control as owner.”35
With the flurry of sales activity in early 1865, one might conclude that others sensed the system’s doom as well, as they, like the Lenoirs and the Bells, continued to dispose of troublesome property. Only a week after the Lenoir document was drawn up, Mary Cowles in Caldwell County reported that her uncle had sold her slave Mike, “a scamp” and “a miserable drunkard” whom she was glad to be rid of at any price. Mike’s reputation was too well known for him to command the asking price of $850 in Confederate currency at an auction, though a private sale was negotiated soon afterward. That same month Cowles’s mother too was forced to sell a “mean negro” of her own, and while she too could not do so locally because of his reputation for thievery, she was able to sell him to a man near Charlotte.36 Two months earlier in the same county, Rufus Patterson had recommended that his parents exercise the same option for two particularly troublesome slaves: sell them both. They were such troublemakers, Rufus wrote, that he felt sure his mother “would be decidedly happier if George & Rob are away.”37
There is no indication that most such sales reflected owners’ attempts to bail out of a doomed or even declining investment option; rather it was increasing discipline problems that seem to have instigated these sales, a trend that suggests a pervasive restlessness and even defiance among mountain slaves. Some owners sensed this shift in mood. “A general spirit of devilment is thro’ the country,” Rufus Patterson observed in December 1864. “I deem it best to be constantly on the lookout. Our negros need watching.”38 In hindsight, it seems odd that their masters and mistresses were not more sensitive in recognizing the increasing lack of complacency on the part of their slaves as symptomatic of the institution’s imminent collapse. And yet there is little evidence that most drew any linkage between their personal problems with individual slaves and broader patterns of unrest or acknowledged the all too ominous reasons for this shift in behavior.
Alexander H. Jones of Hendersonville, one of the mountain region’s most outspoken and influential Unionists, had expressed great impatience at secessionists’ efforts to make slavery central to their arguments for leaving the Union. News of Lincoln’s election, he wrote, were met with the howl of “nigger, nigger, nigger, as though the salvation of the whole world depended upon the negro and slavery.”39 Highlanders, like southerners elsewhere, did indeed make slavery’s security a basic part of their rhetoric for or against secession, and with the war’s end, the system’s abolishment would prove its most revolutionary and long-lasting effect in that region as in most others. Yet ironically, once the war was under way and for much of its duration, slavery was among the aspects of the mountain economy and social structure that suffered least.
The disruptions and discipline problems slave owners faced remained, from their own perspectives, mere inconveniences; few interpreted such developments as ominous signs of the institution’s collapse. The relative stability of the system, the increased demand for and market value of slave property, and its ever more crucial role in meeting the region’s labor demands and agricultura
l productivity—all combined to create a false sense of optimism and complacency on the part of mountain masters. Such vitality was especially conspicuous in the midst of a region that, in many other ways, felt the full brunt of the conflict’s destructive and disruptive forces. Such contradictions in the Confederacy’s highland home fronts testify to the remarkable variation that characterized the peculiar institution throughout its hold on the American South. Even in its death throes, both the means and the rate at which slavery finally dissolved were subject to the particularities of local circumstances and the exigencies of war. For the mountains of North Carolina at least, that meant a final burst of profiteering and profits among slave owners oblivious to how sudden and complete their losses would be in the spring of 1865.
Notes
1. Calvin J. Cowles to W. W. Holden, October 9, 1861 (Calvin J. Cowles Papers, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh [hereafter NCDAH]); North Carolina Standard, October 16, 1861.
2. Arthur L. Fletcher, Ashe County: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: Ashe County Research Association, 1963), 88; Ruth W. Shepherd, ed., The Heritage of Ashe County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Hunter Printing, 1984), 96; John P. Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History from 1730 to 1913 (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards & Broughton, 1914), 165; and Martin Crawford, “Political Society in a Southern Mountain Community: Ashe County, North Carolina, 1850–1861,” Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1989): 383. Crawford has noted elsewhere that some local accounts claim that both Bower and his black driver were in pursuit of yet another slave who had escaped when the accident occurred. The author thanks Crawford for clarifying aspects of this incident.
3. John W. Woodfin, one of Buncombe County’s most prominent owners, was killed in a skirmish at Hot Springs, about thirty miles from his Asheville home, in October 1863. Partisan Campaigns of Col. Lawrence M. Allen (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1894), 14–15. W. W. Avery, the most politically prominent of Burke County’s largest planter family, was wounded during a skirmish between the county militia and Kirk’s raiders and died at home soon afterward. Edward W. Phifer, “Saga of Burke County Family, Part III,” North Carolina Historical Review 39 (Summer 1962): 314–15. Andrew Johnstone, one of the many Charleston elite who had moved with their slave forces into Henderson County, was murdered by bushwhackers who invaded his Flat Rock estate and shot him as he and his family sat at their dinner table. Eleanor Johnstone Coffin’s account is in “The Murder of Andrew Johnstone, Esq.,” July 13, 1864 typescript, Special Collections, University of Tennessee Library, Knoxville; see also Frank L. Fitzsimmons, From the Banks of the Oklawaha (Hendersonville, N.C.: Golden Glow, 1976), 121–25. Vance quoted from his letter to John Evans Brown in “Conditions Just After the War” [n.d.], excerpts published in Confederate Veteran 39 (June 1931): 215–17; he went on to detail the losses suffered by the Avery and Patton families.
4. On the increasing unprofitability of slavery during the war years, see James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 88–94. Among the best accounts of the new economic demands and opportunities for slave labor during the Civil War are Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Lynda J. Morgan, Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), chap. 5; and Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, and Joseph P. Reidy, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series I, Vol. I: The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985), chap. 9. None of the above refers to an active slave trade unrelated to Confederate military or industrial demands. The only references found to a more conventional trade in slaves during the war years are to areas outside the Confederacy, in Kentucky and Missouri. See Berlin et al., Freedom, 453, 494–95.
5. Various treatments of slavery in Appalachia include essays by Richard B. Drake, Charles B. Dew, Kenneth Noe, Wilma A. Dunaway, David Williams, and John E. Stealey III in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); and two books by Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On Olmsted’s commentary, see chap. 3 in this volume.
6. B. H. Nelson, “Some Aspects of Negro Life in North Carolina during the Civil War,” North Carolina Historical Review 25 (April 1948): 145–47; quote from North Carolina Standard, February 5, 1861.
7. Avery and Erwin circular quoted in J. Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 220–21; William Vance Brown to John Evans Brown, April 15, 1861, Theodore Morrison Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as SHC).
8. The actual percentages of slaves in North Carolina’s mountain counties varied greatly—from Burke County, with more than a quarter of its residents slaves in 1860, to Madison and Watauga counties, where slaves made up a mere 3.6 and 2 percent, respectively, of their 1860 populations. For demographic shifts and fluctuations in the profitability of slaves in the region before 1861, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 82–86.
9. See ibid., 76–81, 89–92, for a discussion of antebellum slave-hiring practices among western North Carolinians. For a broader study of slave hiring, see Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
10. Zebulon B. Vance to Jefferson Davis, October 25, 1862, in Frontis W. Johnston (ed.), The Papers of Zebulon B. Vance, Vol. I (Raleigh: NCDAH, 1963), 277.
11. Mary Elizabeth Massey, “Confederate Refugees in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 40 (April 1963): 159–82, esp. 177–82; C. Vann Woodward (ed.), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 343, 422–24; and Henry C. Capers, The Life and Times of C. G. Memminger (Richmond, Va.: Everett Waddey, 1893), 370–71.
12. Katherine Polk Gale, “Life in the Southern Confederacy, 1861–1865,” typescript, 18, SHC. On Mrs. Polk’s Louisiana slaveholdings, see William M. Polk, Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1915), 1:182–83.
13. Vance quoted in Nelson, “Some Aspects of Negro Life,” 157. Confederate order quoted in Harvey Wish, “Slave Disloyalty under the Confederacy,” Journal of Negro History 23 (October 1938): 442. On the movement of coastal slaves to inland and highland areas, see Nelson, “Some Aspects of Negro Life,” 157–59; Morgan, Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 112–13; Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, chap. 4; Mohr, “Slavery and Class Tensions in Confederate Georgia,” Gulf Coast Historical Review 4 (Spring 1989): 58–72; Wayne Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 2; and Berlin et al., Freedom, 1:494–95, 772, 778–79.
14. N. W. Woodfin to David L. Swain, May 12, 1862 (Walter Clark Papers, NCDAH). For ads, see various issues of Asheville News, North Carolina Standard, and State Journal (Raleigh), December 1861 and March 1862.
15. Gordon B. McKinney, “Premature Industrialization in Appalachia: The Asheville Armory, 1862–1863,” in The Civil War in Appalachia, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 227–41.
16. Calvin J. Cowles to brother Andrew, March 5, 1862; Cowles to E. Foster, January 9, 1863, both in Letterpress Book K, Cowles Papers, NCDAH.
17. Cowles to brother Andrew, June 9, 25, July 8, 1862, January 30, 1863, ibid.; Cowles to his wife, April 5, 1863, Cowles Papers, SHC.
18. See, for example, Cowles’s letters to slave owners in Hyde, Wake, and Pitt counties: D. C. Murray, September 10, October 10,
1863; to brother Andrew, September 15, 1863; to Rev. C. B. Reddick, February 25, April 6, 1865, to sister Mary, November 28, 1862, all Letterpress Book K, NCDAH.
19. A. T. Davidson to John Davidson, February 3, 1863, Davidson Family Papers, Atlanta Historical Society.
20. W. W. Lenoir to Joe Norwood, May 3, 1863, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; William Pickens to Vance, March 2, 1863, Governor’s Papers, NCDAH; McKinney, “Premature Industrialization in Appalachia,” 234.
21. O. P. Gardner suit, Rutherford County Slave Records, NCDAH; Slave contracts, 1861–1865, Corpening Family Papers, Duke University. (There is no 1865 contract for the second woman.) John Cimprich provides the most comprehensive analysis of slave prices juxtaposed with inflation rates for 1861–1863 in Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 15–17. See also Nelson, “Some Aspects of Negro Life,” 163–64.
22. Calvin to Mary Cowles, May 21, 1863, Letterpress Book K, Cowles Papers, NCDAH. See also bill of sale of Ashe County slave to Petersburg, Virginia, buyer, October 20, 1864, in Ashe County Slave Records, NCDAH.
23. W. W. [Walter] Lenoir to Rufus Lenoir, April 14, 1862, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. For an insightful new study of Walter Lenoir and his family during this period, see William L. Barney, The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 13
