Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  24. James Gwyn to Rufus Lenoir, May 15, 1861, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

  25. W. W. Lenoir to Thomas I. Lenoir, February 25, 1863; James Gwyn to Rufus Lenoir, January 12, 1863, ibid.

  26. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph Norwood, May 3, 1863; James Gwyn to Rufus Lenoir, February 9, 1863, ibid.

  27. See, in addition to letters cited above, A. C. Hargrove to Thomas I. Lenoir, February 13, 1863; Thomas C. Norwood to Thomas Lenoir, March 9, 1863; W. W. Lenoir to Rufus Lenoir, August 17, 1863; and W. W. Lenoir to Aunt Sade, March 27, 1864, all ibid.

  28. For slave population figures for these and other western North Carolina counties, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, tables 3.1 and 3.2, pp. 60–61, 84–85. On Macon County slaves, see also Jessie Sutton (ed.), The Heritage of Macon County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem: Hunter, 1987), 46–48.

  29. The basic source for this discussion of the Bells is the correspondence between Alfred and Mary Bell in the Alfred W. Bell Papers, Duke University. For a fuller treatment of their situation, see chap. 7 in this volume, “Coping in Confederate Appalachia”; and “The 1864 Slave Purchases of Mary Bell: The Civil War’s Empowerment of an Appalachian Woman: Mary Bell and Her 1864 Slave Purchases,” in Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past, ed. Patricia Morton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 61–81.

  30. Alfred to Mary Bell, December 9, 1862.

  31. Ibid., March 17, 1864; Mary to Alfred Bell, March 11, 1864.

  32. Mary to Alfred Bell, ibid. For the description of the sale by Alfred’s brother Benjamin, see his letter of March 11, 1864.

  33. Alfred to Mary Bell, March 31, April 8, 1864.

  34. Mary to Alfred Bell, July 8, 17, November 24, 1864.

  35. Rufus to Walter Lenoir, December 12, 1864; estate settlement, February 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers.

  36. Mary Cowles to Calvin J. Cowles, February 9, 1865, Cowles Papers, NCDAH.

  37. Rufus L. Patterson to his father, December 8, 1864, Jones and Patterson Family Papers, SHC.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Alexander H. Jones, Knocking at the Door (Washington, D.C.: Mc-Gill and Witherow, 1866), 9.

  War

  5

  The Secession Crisis and

  Regional Self-Image

  The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee

  No two adjacent regions of the upper South, and certainly none so much alike, reacted so differently to the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861 as did western North Carolina and East Tennessee. Despite similarities in topography, agricultural output, racial demography, and socioeconomic makeup, highlanders on either side of the border between the two states demonstrated sharp contrasts in their collective views regarding their commitment to the Union and to the South. No other part of what would become a Confederate state—except the northwestern counties of Virginia—resisted secession longer or with more vehemence than did the eastern third of Tennessee. Even after Tennessee passed its secession ordinance in June (the last state to do so), the vast majority of its mountain residents opposed casting their lot with the rest of the South, and even made a concerted effort to secede from their state in order to do so. No other part of the Confederacy supplied so many soldiers (more than 30,000) to the Union army, a contribution greater than that made by Rhode Island, Delaware, or Minnesota.

  Just across their eastern border, North Carolina highlanders were far more divided among themselves as to the wisdom and merits of secession. But pro-secession arguments received as full a hearing there as they did anywhere in the upper South, and a substantial number of western Carolinians actively supported joining a new southern nation, starting with Lincoln’s election in November 1860. A February 1861 referendum on a secession convention fully demonstrated the split among these westerners. But by May, the state’s mountain counties were unanimous in their support of withdrawal from the Union and went on to provide the state’s largest per capita number of volunteers to the Confederate army during the early months of the war. This chapter is an attempt both to characterize the nature of the differences in attitudes demonstrated by these two sets of southern highlanders, and to propose—if only tentatively—an explanation for those differences.

  On the basis of their most quantifiable characteristics, one is struck far more by how much alike East Tennessee and western North Carolina were than by any marked differences. East Tennessee is generally defined as the state’s thirty easternmost counties. It consists of three major mountain chains, the Cumberlands to the west and the Blue Ridge to the northeast and the Great Smokies to the southeast, separated by the broad valleys of the Tennessee and Holston rivers. Western North Carolina was never quite so specifically delineated, but it is defined here as what were in 1860 the state’s fifteen westernmost counties, which for the most part make up a double tier of counties bordering Tennessee. This area also encompasses large parts of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountains, along with all of the small but more rugged Black Mountain chain.

  The vast majority of residents of both sections were small farmers with limited—but, by 1860, much improved—access to commercial markets beyond their region’s bounds. No single cash crop dominated their agricultural output. Cotton was not conducive to either the terrain or the climate of the southern highlands, but corn, wheat, and other grains were grown in abundance, along with flax, tobacco, apples and peaches in more select areas within each section. Livestock proved to be the most marketable of mountain products, with many hogs and cattle and somewhat fewer sheep raised on both sides of the state line. Western Carolinians maintained an active trade with the plantation markets of South Carolina and Georgia, and its leaders eagerly pushed for railroad lines to link their part of the state with its eastern half and/or with those states to the south. By 1860, the Western North Carolina Railroad had almost reached Morganton, the most accessible of the region’s commercial outlets, and construction was under way as far west as Asheville by the war’s outbreak.

  Internal improvements in East Tennessee had made a quantum leap forward just a few years before the Civil War with the completion of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad in 1855 and the East Tennessee and Virginia line in 1858, which together cut through the heart of the Tennessee River valley and linked much of the region to markets both north and south via Bristol and Chattanooga. Both communities, along with Knoxville, the unofficial capital of the region, enjoyed significant growth spurts during the late 1850s as a result of these connections. Their North Carolina counterpart was Asheville, which had emerged much earlier as the vital and growing hub for much of the commerce and tourism that moved through the western part of the state. Thus on both sides of the mountains, Carolina and Tennessee highlanders maintained strong commercial ties with other parts of the South, and although the average farmer was only peripherally involved in the broader market economy, the growing prosperity of both regions very much reflected this expanding commercial activity.

  Politically, both mountain sections had been bastions of Whig Party strength in their respective states until the party’s demise in the mid-1850s, and both continued to mount stubborn resistance to the Democrats through the rest of the decade. Inhabitants of both regions felt victimized by intrastate sectional biases and neglect, and highlanders came to see themselves as beleaguered minorities whose rights and interests were either threatened or ignored by more powerful coalitions representing the central and far ends of their states.

  Finally, and perhaps most important, the number and distribution of slaves within these adjacent sections were quite similar. According to 1860 census figures for Tennessee’s thirty easternmost and North Carolina’s fifteen westernmost counties, slaves made up only 12.5 percent and 10.2 percent of their respective populations. Though just over one-fourth (26.3 percent) of the population of Burke County, North Carolina, was enslaved, no other county in western North Carolina had more than a 19 percent slave population. In eight of the fifteen counties, slaves accounted for les
s than 5 percent of their residents. Knox County boasted the highest number of slaves per capita in East Tennessee, with 16.6 percent, and in fourteen of those counties, slaves made up less than 6 percent of the total. There were several areas in both mountain sections where slavery was nonexistent and whose residents had never seen a black person. Only one man in East Tennessee and two in western North Carolina owned more than a hundred slaves. About 83 and 85 percent (North Carolina and Tennessee, respectively) of slaveholders in 1860 owned fewer than ten slaves in 1850, compared with an average of 67 percent throughout the slaveholding South; less than 6 percent owned more than twenty, compared with 14 percent throughout the South.1

  On the basis of these demographic, economic, and political characteristics, one would expect the highlanders of North Carolina and Tennessee to have reacted in much same way to the crisis thrust upon them in the winter and spring of 1860–1861. Yet sentiments in these adjacent sections were, as stated earlier, as different as any across the upper South. As late as the presidential election in November 1860, there was little indication of the divergent paths the two areas would take over the following months. John Bell, a Tennessean and the Constitutional Union candidate, carried about two-thirds of both states’ mountain counties, but with only a 55 percent plurality in western North Carolina and 58 percent in East Tennessee over John Breckinridge, the Southern Democratic candidate. Debate in both sections, as elsewhere in the South, centered on which of the two candidates offered the greater deterrence to Lincoln’s election and on whether the firm protection of southern rights (Democrats in support of Breckinridge) or the security of the Union (old Whigs supporting Bell) should be the higher priority at this preliminary phase of the crisis that all mountain residents hoped to avoid. Their preference for Bell, though by only slight margins, indicated relatively strong commitments to the Union, which at that point were not much greater than was true of the rest of their states as well.2

  But soon after Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession in December, the views of spokesmen from both highland regions began to take on slight but perceptible distinctions. Strong western Carolina voices urged that North Carolina join its southern sister in immediately withdrawing from the Union. U.S. Senator Thomas L. Clingman of Asheville joined with all three of the mountain districts’ state senators, W. W. Avery, William Holland Thomas, and Marcus Erwin, in presenting a powerful case to their constituents as to the economic and military benefits not only of cutting ties with the Union, but of doing so without further delay. The majority of their fellow westerners, however, demonstrated far greater caution and embraced the “watch and wait” policy of so-called conditional Unionism, a stance based as much on the assurance that their options remained open and later action could be taken as needed. Zebulon B. Vance, then the region’s congressman and most prominent Unionist, probably spoke for the majority of his constituents when he pointed out that “we have everything to gain and nothing on earth to lose by delay, but by too hasty action we make take a fatal step we can never retrace—may lose a heritage we can never recover.”3

  During the same period farther west, East Tennesseans were subject to a far more one-sided response to the crisis at hand. Their own U.S. senator, Andrew Johnson, along with Congressman Thomas A. R. Nelson and illustrious newspaper editor William G. “Parson” Brownlow, were among several spokesmen who were both quick and persistent in affirming their undying patriotism and loyalty to the Union, in denying the constitutional right of secession, and in warning of the dangers of the “slave oligarchy,” under whose rule secession would bring them.4

  Special elections held in February 1861 to determine whether or not to hold secession conventions in both states provide the first quantifiable indications we have of the differences emerging across state lines. On February 9, East Tennesseans resoundingly rejected the option of a convention, and thus any further consideration of their state leaving the Union. With a total vote in the region of more than 33,000 against and 7,500 for a convention, all but two of Tennessee’s thirty mountain counties opposed it by substantial majorities.5 Tennesseans rejoiced at the results, and Brownlow crowed in his Knoxville Whig: “There was never a party so disgracefully beaten in any State in the Union since the formation of the Government as this Disunion party is beaten in Tennessee! . . . Glorious old Tennessee has said at the ballot box that her interests are in the Union, and that under the Stars and Stripes the people will live.”6

  North Carolina’s referendum on the same question took place less than three weeks later on February 28, and the voters of its mountain counties demonstrated far more mixed feelings than their neighbors to the west. By a slim majority (50.3 percent of the vote), the state as a whole rejected a call for a convention. Five of the fifteen mountain counties voted for a convention by margins of more than 60 percent. In three other counties, the electorate was almost evenly divided, and seven counties opposed a convention by heavy majorities.7

  But these figures alone do not indicate the strength of Unionist sentiment in the region, for voters did not, in the end, equate a vote for a convention with a vote for secession. Many seem to have followed the lead of Zebulon Vance and other Unionists who opposed secession but felt that a convention would provide the most credible forum in which to do so. Thus the votes for a convention far exceeded those for secessionist candidates. Of the fifteen delegates elected from the mountain counties, all but one were Unionists.8 The western electorate had clearly indicated that it was not yet ready to abandon the Union, but many voters (almost half) were not opposed the idea of a convention through which the state could make a firm defense of its rights either within or outside of the Union. By the same token, the majority of those delegates were clearly “conditional Unionists,” whose commitment was to oppose immediate session but most of whom had publicly stated their opposition to coercion and their willingness to cast their lot with the Confederacy when and if further developments warranted it.9

  That February 28 election reflected far more hesitancy and indecisiveness on the part of western Carolinians than was demonstrated by East Tennesseans earlier that month—or, for that matter, than was demonstrated by other North Carolinians on February 28. Union sentiment was far more intense and far less conditional in the “Quaker belt” counties of the piedmont than it was in the mountains.10 It was only in response to events as clear-cut in their implications as the attack on Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops that the attitudes of western North Carolinians jelled and a decisive consensus of popular reaction emerged. For a number of reasons, they, like other North Carolinians, were becoming resigned to the inevitability of their state’s secession, if not in favor of it, and to the idea of an ensuing war even before the pivotal events of mid-April 1861. Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops (including two North Carolina regiments) on April 15, followed by Virginia’s secession two days later, ended all lingering doubts. Charles Manly’s observation that “all are unanimous, even those who were loudest in denouncing secession are not hottest & loudest the other way” was as applicable to mountain residents as to those in any other part of the state.11

  When North Carolina at last severed its ties with the Union on May 20, the vast majority of its western citizens approved of its action. The western counties elected pro-secession delegates across the board. (Only two Unionists even ran, and both were handily defeated.) Those elected joined with their counterparts across the state to vote unanimously to join the Confederacy.12 With this response, as with those throughout every phase of the crisis, highland voters were very much in tune with the rest of the state and with much of the upper South.

  The same cannot be said for East Tennessee, and it is through this period that the contrast between the two mountain regions becomes most striking. There, too, Unionists reacted with shock to Lincoln’s call for troops. But those feelings were far more tempered by initial despair and uncertainty than by the blatant outrage that swept so much of the rest of the upper South.
Some, such as “Parson” Brownlow, remained firm in their commitment to the Union. After having looked the matter “full in the face,” he declared in his Knoxville newspaper that he was still for the “Stars and Stripes.” He attempted to dismiss Lincoln’s proclamation as merely a safeguard to protect Washington, D.C., and, as such, an act fully justifiable. Congressman Nelson denied that the war was one between North and South or between Lincoln and the South. It was, he maintained, “a war between the Constitution and those who have violated it.”13

  The consistency of their convictions, along with those of other Tennessee highland spokesmen, did much to overcome those mid-April blows to Unionist strength and organization. The delays that kept another referendum on secession from Tennessee voters until June 8 provided valuable time to revive an only briefly faltering following. Regional leaders were so successful in their efforts that by mid-May, secessionists faced such volatile hostility in much of the region that it became dangerous for them to speak publicly. Knoxville lawyer Oliver Temple recalled that “it was difficult to restrain the infuriated Union men from acts of violence against the disunionists. More than once, the leaders had to restrain them from marching into Knoxville in a body, and as they called it, ‘clearing out the secessionists in the town.’ ”14 In describing one of many Unionist rallies held during May and early June, Brownlow took great satisfaction in declaring that “great oneness of purpose and more determined spirit we have never witnessed among any body of men.” After another such rally, a group of citizens of Clinton informed fellow Tennesseans to their west that “there is no way under Heaven to get East Tennessee out of the Union! We don’t intend to go, and so God help us, we won’t!”15

  Thus, while the state’s popular referendum on June 8 merely confirmed what already seemed to be a fait accompli in the western two thirds of the state, East Tennesseans continued to stand strong in their opposition to secession. Though Tennesseans as a whole voted themselves out of the Union by a margin of more than two to one (105,000 for secession and 47,000 against), the results for the eastern third of the state were a complete reversal of those results, with support for the Union still at more than two to one (33,000 against secession and less than 15,000 for it).16 These results clearly corroborated the Unionist rhetoric that East Tennessee was indeed a distinctive region and demonstrated the extent to which it remained alienated from the rest of the state and the rest of the South.