Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  The actions of mountain Unionists in Tennessee after June 8 made that point even more drastically. They were quick to argue that secessionist intimidation elsewhere in the state invalidated the election results and that both secessionist governor Isham Harris and the state legislature had already made “illegal and unjustifiable” military arrangements with the Confederacy, even inviting the Confederate government to make Nashville its capital.17 Congressman Nelson, who had headed up the pre-election Unionist campaign and convention in the east, put into action the contingency plan discussed earlier. He called a convention to meet in Andrew Johnson’s hometown of Greeneville a little more than a week later to propose seceding from Tennessee in order to remain in the Union. On June 17 that body, made up of 285 representatives of twenty-six counties, drew up a “Declaration of Grievances” against the state, which concluded: “We prefer to remain attached to the government of our fathers. The Constitution of the United States has done us no wrong. . . . We believe there is no cause for rebellion or cession on the part of the people of Tennessee.”18

  They submitted a petition to the legislature stating their intention of forming a separate state and asking its cooperation in allowing them to do so, after which they adjourned with plans to meet in Kinston later that month. Nothing further came of the effort, because Johnson felt pressured to leave the state and return to Washington, Brownlow was forced into hiding, and Nelson was captured by Confederate forces and taken to Richmond. From that point on, the status and fate of East Tennessee would be determined by military action; and yet the sentiments of its residents had remained clear and consistent for as long as they could be expressed.19

  The big question all this raises, of course, is why two adjacent and such similar regions parted ways so dramatically as the secession crisis came to a head in the upper South. Much attention and analysis has been devoted to East Tennessee, due not only to the unusual intensity of its Unionism, but also to its military value as the largest predominantly loyal geographic area within the Confederacy (Lincoln saw it as a key to Union strategy early in the war), and to the fact that both the region and its political situation produced the next president of the United States. The standard explanations for its course have always been its small numbers of slaves and slaveholders, its sectional slights within the state, its strong Whig traditions, and the relative poverty it faced outside the Cotton Belt. All of these seem logical enough as causes for its Unionism until one considers them in juxtaposition with that far less fully explored situation in western North Carolina. That all the same factors were behind such different sentiments and consequences tends to undermine the significance of any of them as decisive in shaping the East Tennesseans’ distinctive response to the secessionist crisis.

  I propose that the crucial difference between antebellum East Tennessee and western North Carolina lay in their self-images—that is, how residents of each section perceived themselves and their region in relation to their respective states and to the South as a whole. Those differences, as demonstrated largely by the rhetoric and writings of those most influential public opinion shapers—their political leaders and journalists—are striking and go far toward explaining the contrasting actions each section took in the spring of 1861.

  Many western Carolinians, for example, tended to view their part of the state as a region on the rise. A number of spokesmen for highland North Carolina were quite active in promoting their economic potential through an ever-increasing public appreciation for its distinctive land, mineral, forest, and climatic resources and conditions. The French Broad River valley was one of several in the region described as among the nation’s richest sections of agricultural abundance and diversity.20 Other efforts at local boosterism stressed the special qualities of terrain and growing season throughout the Carolina mountains, and a number of model farms were established by both local landholders and seasonal residents that demonstrated the rich possibilities of highland soil and climate. University of North Carolina geologist Elisha Mitchell did much to publicize the mountains’ potential for becoming “the New England of the South,” and Thomas Clingman, the district’s congressman through the late 1840s and much of the 1850s, vigorously promoted projects to develop his region’s production and marketability of dairy products, sheep, and even wine.21

  Contacts between the Carolina mountains and both the towns and plantations of South Carolina and Georgia increased dramatically during the last two antebellum decades and took two very different forms. A demand for mountain products—from garden and orchard produce to honey and molasses, indigenous herbs and roots, and even bear and deer meat—created a healthy, if limited, participation in the market economy by ever-growing numbers of highland farmers. All of this was overshadowed by the phenomenal livestock trade, particularly in hogs and cattle, that every autumn moved southward through the region’s major valley arteries. Second, the reputation of certain highland areas as summer resorts, with their cool climates, scenic beauty, and health-restoring mineral springs, led large numbers of affluent planters, particularly Charlestonians, to migrate to such communities as Flat Rock, Asheville, Hendersonville, and Warm Springs for three to four months every year.22

  These contacts, perhaps, had much to do with the remarkable lack of animosity between the vast majority of nonslaveholding yeomen and the slaveholding elite within the region. But even more of a factor was the fact that the west’s most ardent champions of development and most influential commercial conduits to markets beyond their own were also its largest slaveholders. With so much of the region’s prosperity dependent on those efforts, local identities and loyalty overrode any class distinctions and did much to defuse potential resentment of mountain residents toward either slavery or slaveholders. Thus, far from anticipating a bleak future of poverty, isolation, or internal class dissension, western Carolinians and their leaders had ample reason for optimism on the eve of the Civil War, with a healthy and expanding economy mutually enjoyed by large and small farmers alike and based on what they recognized as their region’s special endowments in natural resources, which in turn were noted and demanded by southerners elsewhere.

  This awareness of regional attributes and strong southern ties was often emphasized in arguments put forward by highland secessionists, who predicted very beneficial effects on their section’s status as a result of independence from the North. The inaccessibility of popular northern “watering holes” would send more planters from across the South to the Carolina highland resorts. Its geographic location and the fact that Flat Rock and Hendersonville were already the summer homes of several prominent southern officials, most notably Confederate Treasury Secretary Christopher G. Memminger, led some to speculate that the government itself might establish itself in the area. In this “mountain kingdom,” wrote a Henderson County visitor, “it is contemplated to place the capital city of the Southern Confederacy, having its seat of government within 100 miles of the capitals of six other states.”23 William Holland Thomas, a leading secessionist from the state’s southwestern corner, best summed up these aspirations: “The mountains of Western North Carolina would be the centre of the Confederacy,” he pointed out, and as a result: “We shall then have one of the most prosperous countries in the world. It will become connected with every part of the South by railroad. It will then become the centre of manufacturing for the Southern market. The place where the Southern people will spend their money, educate their children and very probably make the laws for the nation.”24

  Ironically, East Tennessee shared many of the same attributes and advantages that Carolina highlanders so actively promoted and in which they took such pride. With its railroad already in place, its residents had even more reason to feel good about their present and future situation. And yet that region’s leading spokesmen during the late antebellum period projected a very different image of their area and its people. Like western North Carolina, East Tennessee was by far the poorest section of its state, but its citizens seemed far more
conscious of that fact than their neighbors to the east. As early as 1826, a Tennessee mountaineer stated what would become a theme echoed throughout his section when he lamented, “Our soil is poor in comparison with what is now called Middle Tennessee or in comparison with the Western District, and we have it not within our reach, as a people, to become rich.”25 Far from acknowledging those characteristics they shared with the rest of the state and the South (much less their dependence on them), Tennessee highlanders stressed their distinctiveness, even when it meant their inferiority. “We are a distinct and peculiar people,” boasted one resident, “not to be confounded with other divisions in the state.” Thomas Gray, a frequent visitor to the region, declared that East Tennesseans were “so attached to their mountains that they would rather live in poverty there than in wealth in cities or even in plains.”26

  Regional spokesmen often translated this long-nurtured inferiority complex into a virtue, so that highlanders came to take pride in the “humble” nature of their society and the egalitarian and independent spirit it reflected. One leading citizen declared that “East Tennessee is a better place to live [than] where there are temptations and opportunity to get wealth. . . . We are more moral and religious and less absorbed in the business and cares of the world than the people of west Tennessee or any cotton country.”27 None pursued this theme more effectively than Andrew Johnson. He parlayed his own modest beginnings into a major political asset, and he achieved impressive success as a Democrat among a predominantly Whig electorate by presenting himself in the Jacksonian mold of a champion of the common man and an opponent of elitism or privilege in any form. Although he played down class distinctions within his own region (he was, after all, a slaveholder himself by 1860), Johnson effectively utilized the regional inferiority sensed by his mountain constituents to augment their antagonism and distrust of the planter aristocracy that controlled so much of the rest of the South. This identity became so firmly entrenched among East Tennesseans that when applied to the secession question, longtime partisan opponents of Johnson, such as Parson Brownlow and Thomas Nelson, were quick to adapt his themes to their pro-Union cause. Johnson equated secessionism with anti-egalitarianism and claimed that the disunionists’ true intention was to enact the very scenario most feared by his freedom-loving listeners: “to form an independent government in the South as far removed from the people as they can get it.”28

  Brownlow proclaimed, “Johnson is right!” and elaborated: “We can never live in a Southern Confederacy and be made hewers of wood and drawers of water for a set of aristocrats and overbearing tyrants. . . . We have no interest in common with the Cotton States. We are a grain-growing and stock-raising people, and we can conduct a cheap government, inhabiting the Switzerland of America.”29 Oliver Temple later wrote of these months: “The overpowering influence of slavery, the fear of falling under the condemnation of the mighty oligarchy of slaveholders, to some extent paralyzed the minds of men” in East Tennessee.30

  It is important to note that this fear of slaveholding power did not grow out of an abhorrence of the system itself, a conclusion that might logically be drawn since East Tennessee had been the site of the South’s most fully developed antislavery movement. Probably as a result of an early influx of Methodists and Quakers into the area from Pennsylvania and Ohio, abolitionist activity flourished there during the first third of the nineteenth century. The nation’s first manumission societies and its earliest abolitionist newspaper were established there in 1815 and 1819, respectively. But their impact on Unionism several decades later seems only indirect. While antislavery rhetoric undoubtedly fanned the flames of class resentment among mountaineers against the planter aristocracy, a rampant racism among these highlanders led very few to support their cause. By 1860, Unionist leaders were sensitive to charges that they opposed black bondage, and most were empathetic in maintaining that they fully supported the institution.31

  One of the major arguments embraced by Andrew Johnson and other Unionist leaders was that slavery’s future was far more secure within the Union where it enjoyed constitutional protection than it would be outside the Union and without that protection. They were quick to condemn abolitionists as well as southern fire-eaters for having brought about the needless crisis at hand. Brownlow wrote, “My contempt for the Abolitionists of the North is only equaled by my hatred of the Disunionists of the South.” In Philadelphia, he engaged in a much-publicized five-day debate with an abolitionist and utilized the by then sharply defined proslavery ideology to the fullest.32 And yet there were those for whom slavery’s survival was not the top priority to be considered in the debate over secession. Temple may well have spoken for more of his fellow East Tennesseans when he said just before the June 8 election: “If we had to choose between the government on one side without slavery, and a broken and dissevered government with slavery, I would say unhesitatingly, ‘Let slavery perish and the Union survive.’ ”33

  Certainly intersectional rivalries did much to embitter the eastern third of Tennessee against the rest of the state. Though often politically aligned with the Whig stronghold at the opposite end of the state against the Democratic middle on national issues, highlanders felt resentment and alienation toward legislatures and governors who they believed imposed excessive taxation on them and yet consistently overlooked them in the appropriation of state funds for railroad and river improvements bestowed on other parts of the state.34 East Tennessee was the earliest settled and oldest part of the state. Knoxville had been designated as the state’s first capital when it entered the Union in 1796, but as early as 1812, the legislature voted to move it west to its fast-emerging rival, Nashville. This move was in itself a real setback in terms of the region’s political influence and stature, the first indication of the region’s diminishing role as a mere “outlying province,” as Thomas Nelson once called it. That loss of political clout was a reflection of economic and demographic drainage from East Tennessee as well. J. G. M. Ramsey of Knoxville bemoaned that outmigration, but he admitted that he had considered moving west himself, for the “insulated position of East Tennessee made farming there, even with the greatest industry and strict frugality, so unproductive and unremunerating,” thus prompting “a constant emigration of the industrious and enterprising . . . to sections of the country having greater commercial facilities.” He, like many fellow East Tennesseans, found it particularly frustrating, and even demeaning, to see so much of the wealth, influence, and power pass over their more historically entrenched region into the more recently settled areas to the west.35

  This was a situation far different from that in western North Carolina, and one could argue that this difference in itself had much to do with the conflicting self-images projected by the two sections. North Carolina’s mountains were the last part of the state to be settled and remained the most undeveloped section of a much older and more fully established colony and state. Thus, whereas western Carolinians were at the same level of underdog status in relation to other sections of their state as East Tennesseans, the former still managed to see themselves as “up and coming” or catching up; whereas many of the latter were left with the impression of having been passed over and left behind.

  These frustrations, along with East Tennesseans’ self-perceived distinctiveness as a region, led to a serious campaign in 1841 and 1842 to withdraw from the rest of the state and form a separate state (to be called Franklin, a reminder of the aborted attempt by an earlier generation to break away from North Carolina in the 1780s). Spurred by a legislative rebuff of internal improvements promised to the region, several counties produced resolutions in support of independent statehood. A young Brownlow, then based in Jonesborough, led the charge, declaring Nashville to be “a seat of Dictation” and that “we have long enough been ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ in the hands of Middle Tennesseans.”36 This proposal actually passed the state legislature’s upper house before it was crushed in the lower. Despite having made significant ga
ins in internal improvements by the time of the secession crisis, the memories and resentment of earlier slights remained strong, so that East Tennesseans had few qualms in attempting, on June 17, 1861, a move they had made twice before—seceding from the state of which they were then a part.

  The mountain residents of North Carolina had also been engaged in serious east–west sectional battles with an “eastern oligarchy” that controlled, and even monopolized, the state government in Raleigh. Intense battles over broadened suffrage and ad valorem taxation were waged between the two halves of the state in the late 1840s and 1850s, as were ongoing disputes over discrepancies in state allotments for internal improvements, just as in Tennessee. Yet, interestingly enough, these differences among North Carolinians left almost no permanent scars that carried into the secession crisis. Far from alienating them from their fellow Tar Heels to the east, mountain residents demonstrated a strong identity with and loyalty to their state throughout the crisis, and they based much of their discussion for or against secession on its effect on the state as a whole.37 In fact, it seems likely that the intrastate sectional rivalry over the previous decades actually contributed to secessionist sentiment in the mountains.