Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Such was certainly true of Southern Appalachia as well. Within the Confederacy, no region experienced more of such internal upheaval, and thus the need for deception and role-playing than did the mountain South. With fewer slaves and more tenuous ties to the market economy, many—but by no means all—highlanders in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia found themselves increasingly alienated from the rest of their states as the sectional crisis unfolded. Some expressed vehement opposition to secession and remained firmly committed to the Union cause, either openly or more subversively, long after the war was under way. Many others resigned themselves to what they saw as the inevitability of the new nation into which they were forced by the vast majority of nonmountain residents who dominated their states, but they did so only halfheartedly. A North Carolina woman probably spoke for many as she bemoaned that new reality: “The Union is gone and all these things follow it. . . . How quietly we drifted into such an awful night into the darkness, the lowering clouds, the howling winds, and the ghostly light of our former glory.”3

  Those political and ideological divisions, and the emotional baggage that accompanied them, were already established, if often still fluid, as the secession crisis played out—and they were exacerbated by the war that followed. A stronger political base and more effective leadership kept Unionist sentiment far more viable among East Tennesseans than among western North Carolinians, who quickly capitulated to the Confederate cause after the attack on Fort Sumter, though pockets of Unionist strength continued to exist there, just as Confederate enclaves emerged across the state line in the Tennessee mountains.4 Thus many households and/or individuals quickly acquired minority status locally as either Confederate or Union sympathizers, depending upon the predominant sentiments of the communities of which they were a part. Some Appalachian families were made more vulnerable by the instability caused by the military and political power struggles that wracked certain highland regions. Such was particularly true of East Tennessee, where Confederate control over a hostile civilian majority during the war’s first half capitulated to Union forces from mid-1863 on. The brutal harshness of early Rebel occupation policies led to equally harsh retaliation and vindictiveness, as once-oppressed Unionists became the oppressors of their disunionist neighbors and kinsmen.

  From such divisions the war degenerated into a harrowing guerrilla conflict in much of the mountain South. As a Georgia Unionist escaping northward during the war noted as he moved into the Smoky Mountains, “I knew that we were now approaching the border country where some were Secessionists and others Union people, and with each step we took our danger from bushwhackers and scouts increased. . . . All showed me that we were gradually getting into the bloody ground of western North Carolina and East Tennessee, where neighbor fought with neighbor and brother slew brother.”5 In so volatile and uncertain an atmosphere, questions of allegiance and commitment were never far from the surface.

  The scholarship on the Civil War in Appalachia is growing by leaps and bounds, and those same issues of identity and divided loyalties now preoccupy historians as much as they did those we study.6 Although we know much about how highland Unionists fared as minorities and majorities in the context of region, of community, and even of neighborhood, we have not yet explored in any substantive way the extent to which divided loyalties penetrated that most intimate of social institutions: the family. These familial divisions—between spouses and between generations—highlight at the most basic level the uncertainties and fluctuations of ideological commitments among southern highlanders. In examining the variety of motives and influences that pushed families into such awkward and on occasion destructive circumstances, we hope to reveal even more about the multifaceted nature of loyalty and patriotism and how they shaped the localized dynamics of family and kinship structure during this most divisive of American wars.

  First, a look at several other examples of such household divisions. An Indiana officer who led a group of escapees from Camp Sorghum in Columbia, South Carolina, toward Union lines in Tennessee crossed paths with three sisters from the Hollinger family in Flat Rock, North Carolina. The fugitives presented themselves as Confederate troops in what they knew to be a predominantly pro-southern neighborhood.7 Only after the oldest, and boldest, of the three young women (who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-four) vehemently denounced the men, the South, and the cause for which they were fighting, did the Indianans reveal their true colors. Once the Hollinger sisters were convinced that they were indeed Federal soldiers, they generously offered them aid. Over the next three days they fed the fugitives, provided them concealed shelter, and procured a guide to lead them across the mountains into Tennessee, as they had already done for other Union fugitives.

  But the sisters too were engaged in survival lying, for as they explained to the men in their care, two of them were married to Confederate soldiers. They also sought to shield their parents from their activities and refused to let the men in their charge approach their house. Although both parents were equally strong Unionists, the family lived as tenants on the summer estate of the Charlestonian Christopher Memminger, secretary of the Confederate treasury. The daughters believed that the less their father knew of their caretaking efforts for Union soldiers, the safer his position would be, both within this Henderson County community and on Memminger’s estate. Thus, in effect, these daughters and wives conducted an Underground Railroad operation for Northern troops and sympathizers without the knowledge of either their parents or their husbands, though the reasons for concealing their activity from them differed.8

  Despite the predominance of Unionist sentiment among Tennessee’s highlanders, strong pockets of Confederate sympathy forced some Unionists there to engage in surreptitious activity, often at considerable risk, to oppose the cause for which other family members fought. Jeannette Mabry of Knox County was married to a rather errant Confederate soldier whose family held strong southern sentiments; yet she remained “unflinchingly true to the Union,” and her actions as an informant and as a caretaker of Union soldiers and their families made her legendary among participants of a guerrilla war that devastated Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Mabry made herself an indispensable contact for Union guides operating in and around Knoxville. No guide, it was said, considered his mission complete unless he stopped to trade intelligence with her. Her relative affluence and social position and the variety of charitable acts she undertook on behalf of refugees and indigents made her a particularly visible figure, and even an inspiration to other Unionists in the area. Oliver Temple, among her most ardent admirers, later wrote of her impact in his decidedly partisan account of the war in East Tennessee: “Around the camp-fires in Kentucky, and in other distant fields where duty called them, no name left behind was uttered more frequently by the exiles, nor with a tenderer or more sincere invocation of a blessing on it, than that of Jeannette Laurimer Mabry.”9 Yet neither Temple nor the other accounts mention what her heroic actions meant to her Confederate husband or in-laws.

  Another group of Federal fugitives encountered such deception across generations—a Unionist mother who kept her subversive activity secret from her Confederate son. While fleeing across the remote wilderness of southwestern North Carolina, West Virginian Michael Egan and two companions made contact with Henry Grant, a “fire-tried Unionist.” Grant, wrote Egan, wanted to “relieve our distress and give us the shelter of his hospitable roof at once, but there is a slight obstacle in the way—there is an armed rebel soldier in the house.” This young Confederate was a neighbor, home on leave, and the dilemma was resolved only when Grant confided in the soldier’s widowed mother, who lived in the adjoining house. To their surprise, they found that “she had no real sympathy with the Southern cause,” despite the fact that her only son was fighting for it. She agreed to take the Union refugees under her roof, concealing both their presence and their identities from her son.10

  Not all such ideological splits between spouses involved deception at t
hat most intimate level; in some cases, deceiving others involved a partner’s complicity. In the poignant case of a North Carolina highlander, related in a memoir he titled The Adventures of a Conscript, W. H. “Buck” Younce revealed the high price he paid romantically for his initial refusal to resort to survival lying. As a committed Unionist in a predominantly Confederate neighborhood in Ashe County, Younce lay low during the war’s first year. Only as the pressures of conscription loomed large in the fall of 1862 did he move with others across the state line into Tennessee, a mere six miles from his home, in order to enlist in a Union company. In so doing, he passed by the home of his fiancée, Edith Carroll, and despite the advice of his two companions, Younce separated from them to spend the first night of his trek at the Carroll home.

  Younce, a mere twenty years old at the time, was fully aware that the Carrolls, including Edith, the youngest of three daughters, were committed Confederates, even though they were among the few families so inclined in this northeastern corner of Tennessee. On earlier visits, according to Younce, Edith had “used all the persuasive powers at her command to influence me to volunteer in the Confederate army, but I always met her arguments with my side of the question, and her influence proved to no avail.” Edith was surprised to see Buck on this particular night, and despite his efforts to obscure his reason for being in her neighborhood, she reached the correct conclusion and protested vehemently: “Oh, no; it can’t be possible that you are fleeing for refuge! You can not only be turning your back upon your own country in the darkest hour of our peril, but by this act blasting every hope for an honorable and useful life in the future.” Seeking to shame her young beau, Edith ended her speech by proclaiming: “O, if I were only a man, how I would teach you a lesson in patriotism by shouldering my musket and marching to the front!”

  Buck responded with an equally impassioned denunciation of “the wicked and unjust cause” she represented and insisted that “the Government to which you refer so eloquently is not my country. . . . I cannot and will not fight for a government that seeks to enslave me and whose cornerstone is slavery.” Edith resigned herself to the firm resolve of her betrothed, with a final speech assuring him of her personal loyalty to him. “It grieves me,” she said, “that you have determined on this course, but I assure you that, come what may, not a word or deed of mine shall ever do you harm. I will shield and protect you so far as it is in my power to do so.”

  Alas, such assurances from his hostess proved worthless, when only minutes later a home guard force from Ashe County, having been alerted by some witness (Edith’s father, perhaps?) to Younce’s presence there, arrived at the house, where they were admitted by Mr. Carroll, who turned Buck over to them. In a dramatic confrontation with his Confederate captors, Edith tearfully inquired about his fate, which led the leader of the group, a Mr. Long, to recognize the reason for Buck’s presence in this pro-southern household. “You are insane, or perhaps worse, in love,” he accused Buck. “I do not know which: but I do know you are not in love with your country.” The young prisoner, still defiant, responded: “Yes, sire, I am in love with Liberty.”

  Buck’s captors escorted him back to North Carolina and into the Ashe County jail. A day later, an influential friend and Confederate captain approached Younce and offered the option of volunteering for service in his company, rather than face conscription or imprisonment as a deserter. Reluctantly, Younce agreed to do so and marched off to fight with fifty other recruits the next day.

  “I was the hero of the occasion,” he later wrote. “There was more rejoicing over one sinner that repented than over ninety and nine that went not astray.” But, he continued, “They could not read my thoughts. My purposes were the same, and I believed that I would find refuge under the flag of my country someday,” which he did indeed before the year was out.

  This lapse into survival lying proved all too temporary and failed to serve Buck Younce’s romantic interests, if indeed Edith Carroll ever heard of his celebrated conversion. These two young lovers were separated by their very different senses of patriotism and a father who proved far less willing than did his daughter to tolerate those differences. Only at the end of Younce’s memoir does Edith’s name appear again. Writing in 1901, he informed his readers that she had married another man just after the war’s end and was the mother of a grown family. “I have never seen her,” he concluded, “since that midnight parting before mentioned”; he made no mention at all of a wife or family of his own.11

  In some cases the tensions caused by these more open divisions within families led to violent consequences. The murder of a prominent Confederate in northwestern North Carolina was the result, in part, of a family squabble resulting from a marriage that linked two families on opposite sides. Late in the spring of 1864, in the North Fork community, which straddled Watauga and Ashe counties, Isaac Wilson was plowing a field on his farm while home on furlough when he was shot and killed by members of the Potter family, into which his niece had married. Tensions between the Confederate Wilsons and the Unionist Potters had escalated as a result of the marriage that had made them in-laws, with particular resentment on the part of the bride’s family. As part of the local home guard, other Wilsons had been among those who had executed Jack Potter, the groom’s father, several months earlier, and in feudlike retaliation other Potter men and their “bushwhacking” accomplices, lying in ambush in woods surrounding Isaac Wilson’s farm, fired upon and killed their in-law, the community’s most prominent Confederate soldier.12

  Another death resulting at least in part from divided allegiances within a Greeneville, Tennessee, household, had even greater historical significance. Because the victim in that case was the Rebel raider and Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, the family in whose home he spent his last night alive remains the most famous, or perhaps infamous, divided house in the mountain South. Greeneville was a major Unionist stronghold and the home of Andrew Johnson, but Morgan knew and often stayed with the town’s most notable pro-southern hostess, Catherine Williams. Williams, the widow of a physician, had two sons in Confederate service and a third who was a Federal officer. It may have been Morgan’s misfortune that the wife of that third son, herself an ardent Unionist, was living with her mother-in-law when he and his staff took up quarters there on September 4, 1864.

  Although historians disagree about the subsequent course of events, circumstantial evidence at the time suggested, and popular opinion quickly assumed, that Lucy Williams, the “Yankee” daughter-in-law, slipped away from the house as soon as she knew Morgan would be staying there and alerted Union forces about fifteen miles away. Early the next morning those troops surrounded the Williams house and killed Morgan as he tried to escape through a nearby vineyard. Lucy herself adamantly maintained her innocence in the affair, but her denials were suspect, given that her continued residence with her mother-in-law probably depended on how convincing she was in establishing her innocence in the events that brought such notoriety to that house and its residents. It is revealing that the presumption of her complicity in Morgan’s death, as detested and feared as he was by most Greeneville residents, led to Lucy’s own social ostracism in this Unionist community. She was soon forced to move to Knoxville and later was divorced from Catherine Williams’s Unionist son. Rather than being hailed as a heroine by her Unionist compatriots, Lucy Williams was shunned for betraying both a house guest and the mother-in-law under whose roof she lived.13

  Women’s roles in these divided households were not always as active or subversive agents. In at least one highland household, a mother served merely as peacemaker between her Union and Confederate sons. A folk history of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains includes the story of Nancy Ghormley’s family in Chilhowee. Visits home by two of her sons, one serving the South as Tennessee’s provost-marshal, the other as a Confederate recruiting officer, were interrupted when three other sons and two grandsons, all wearing Union blue, also returned home. As the two groups encountered each other in the f
ront yard, “talk became spirited,” and “hands rested on sword hilts.” At that point Nancy Ghormley took matters into her own hands by walking outside, announcing that dinner was ready, and instructing her off-spring: “Gentlemen, leave your guns and swords in the yard and come in to dinner. You are all my children.” The fact that the story ends there implies that these were boys who listened to their mother.14

  Each of the divided households described above was an anomaly. No patterns emerge from this varied array of stories to suggest that such familial tensions were integral parts of the social upheavals that wracked the mountain South from 1861 to 1865. In fact, each of these cases flies in the face of what was perhaps the most obvious and universally agreed upon factor in Appalachia’s war within a war—the remarkable extent of kinship solidarity in terms of wartime loyalties. If the strength of family bonds has long been recognized as a predominant characteristic of southern society, it has been an even more conspicuous facet of Appalachia’s image. From early stereotyping of the clannishness and even inbreeding of southern highlanders to the myths and realities of the infamous feuds to sociological analyses of the 1960s and 1970s, family ties for better or worse have been central components in Americans’ perceptions of “this strange land and peculiar people.”15

  The recent scholarship on the Civil War in the southern highlands has also acknowledged the centrality of family bonds. Historians recognize—and debate—a number of determinants of loyalties of mountaineers: socioeconomic and slaveholding status, political partisanship, spatial patterns of settlement and market accessibility, migratory patterns and duration of residence, even religious affiliations. But of all the variables that help explain such allegiances, almost all scholars of the region seem to agree that the most immediate and consistent determinant of one’s Unionist or Confederate identity lay in the allegiance of one’s family.