Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Community studies make this point particularly well. Philip Paludan’s book on the Shelton Laurel massacre in Madison County, North Carolina; Durwood Dunn’s on Cades Cove, Tennessee; Martin Crawford’s on the war in Ashe County, North Carolina; Altina Waller’s on the Hatfield-McCoy feud in the Tug Valley of Kentucky and West Virginia; Tracy McKenzie’s on Knoxville, Tennessee; Jonathan Sarris’s on two north Georgia counties; and Ralph Mann’s on Sandy Basin and Burkes Garden, Virginia—all find kin networks to have been central in explaining the loyalty or disloyalty of individuals or households within neighborhoods or communities.16 In the most detailed reconstruction of such localized loyalties, Mann contends that the residents of Sandy Basin looked back at the Civil War “as a war of family against family, or more precisely, family group against family group,” and that within neighborhoods that included “a wide range of individual personalities and convictions . . . ultimately kin pressure promoted family group solidarity on matters concerning the war.”17

  So how does one account for these splits within some highland households? No single explanation can account for the various situations described here. For several, though, the very fact of family solidarity serves to explain such divisions rather than contradict them. The ideological differences between married couples more often than not resulted from the differing loyalties of the two families from which they came. It is telling that so many of these households were newly constructed and so many couples newlyweds; one of the most revealing such instances related here is that of the marriage that never took place because of such divisions. The star-crossed, and state line–crossing, lovers Buck Younce and Edith Carroll each adhered to the ideological stance of their parents, even though the Younce family’s Unionism and the Carrolls’ pro-Confederate stance were minority positions in their respective communities.

  Although such differences prevented Buck and Edith from becoming husband and wife, other marriages across similar lines did take place. The Caldwell County “vixen” and her crippled groom, whose story opened this essay, were only just married when he sought to make his escape from her and the Confederate war effort. The Hollinger sisters in Flat Rock adhered to the antislaveholding sentiments of their parents, into whose home they returned, rather than to the Confederate stance of their absent husbands. And the assassination of Isaac Wilson stemmed in part from resentment of his niece’s marriage on the part of her Unionist in-laws.

  The sheer tentativeness and fluidity of sentiment in areas characterized by partisan confusion may account for some of the differences among family members. Such wavering was evident from the war’s beginning and became even more pronounced as the brutality and hardship of the conflict, or mere war-weariness, set in. In May 1861, in the midst of a Confederate rally in Wilkes County, North Carolina, until that time the area’s acknowledged Union stronghold, an observer described the dramatic shift in the community’s sentiments but noted the superficial nature of the change: “The people seem nearly united in the Cause of the South,” wrote James Gwyn, “but I think if an influential man had got up and espoused the other side, he would have had a good many to join them.”18 Oliver Temple, the earliest chronicler of East Tennessee Unionism, also recognized local pressures as determinants of how individuals formed their allegiances. “Sympathy with friends and kindred,” he wrote, “became the bond that united the South. Tens of thousands of men who had no heart for secession, did have heart for their neighbors and kindred. This almost universal fellowship and sympathy drew men together in behalf of a cause which one-half of them disapproved.”19

  It has taken a novelist to pinpoint an even more basic reason that young mountain men at least initially cast their lot with the new southern nation within which they found themselves. In Cold Mountain, his celebrated epic of the war in the Carolina highlands, Charles Frazier suggests that baser instincts shaped those decisions. In reflecting on the reasons men go to war, and this war in particular, his central character, Inman, concludes that it was “change” or “the promise of it that made up the war frenzy in the early days. The powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereby you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed but decorated.” Frazier elaborated: “Men talked of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman guessed that it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. . . . War took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. He had not been immune to its pull.”20 If indeed it was the novelty of the experience that led highlanders to enlist, such sentiments were no doubt among the first to be abandoned as the war dragged on and the novelty quickly wore off.

  The superficial and often fickle nature of those loyalties was fast becoming apparent by early 1862. Increasing desertion rates and other forms of disaffection began to expose what another highlander observed, that many who had sworn allegiance to the Confederacy did so “only from the teeth out.”21 Such shallow commitments may well have led one family member to abandon the cause for which others in the household continued to fight. Desertion was merely one indication of many highlanders’ war-weariness and lack of enthusiasm for the cause they had fought for. While hardships at home often lured men back home, sometimes such desertion came sooner than wives or other family members found honorable or acceptable. Thus the crippled husband ready to accompany Madison Drake and company out of the South completely stemmed from war-weariness in battle, while his bride remained staunchly committed to the southern cause that he, unknown to her, had abandoned. By the same token, those men facing more traditional military situations away from home were not subject to the same demoralizing home front hardships, deprivations, or upheaval that made spouses, elderly parents, or younger siblings more susceptible to fluctuations in their loyalties and commitments to the war. The mother who agreed to shelter Michael Egan and his companions had undergone a thorough change of heart that her Confederate son, still in uniform, had not.

  Equally significant, guerrilla warfare forced full families into a level of participation that more traditional warfare never did. In the process gender roles were blurred or even reversed. Women sometimes found themselves taking far more active, even dominant, roles in protecting their men or defending their property; they also found opportunities to provide military and other intelligence, to aid fugitives and refugees, and on occasion to betray enemies. In the fullest treatment of the subject, Michael Fellman wrote of Missouri’s “inside war”: “Disintegration, demoralization, and perverse adaptation engulfed women’s behavior and self conceptions as it assaulted the family and undermined male-female and female-female . . . relationships. Like male civilians in a guerrilla war theater, women were both victims and actors.”22

  Such was certainly the case in Southern Appalachia as well. Both soldiers and civilians recognized the clout women wielded in waging the unconventional warfare in the mountains. Given the circumstances that later led to the death of his commander, there is a certain irony in the fact that it was one of John Hunt Morgan’s officers who observed of East Tennesseans: “Did I stay long in this country, I should fear losing that respect and regard for the female sex, which I have been raised to have—here they unsex themselves, and by their conduct, lose all claim to be respected and regarded as ladies. . . . Was I in authority here, I should treat them as men.”23

  For some mountain women, the responsibilities such localized warfare thrust upon them in their husbands’ absence instilled an independence of spirit that led them to form loyalties different from those of the men who had left them. Or if other factors may have led to their differing loyalties, the new assertiveness either forced upon or granted to them led women to express their sentiments in visible or vocal ways. Although many engaged in survival lying for very practical reasons even within their own households, others spoke out or even lashed out, becoming like the “talking heroine” that a Winchester, Virginia, woman admiringly label
ed a neighbor.24 Given the volatility of local feelings and the levels of violence across gender lines, to speak one’s convictions was often very risky. Other women—such as Jeannette Mabry, Lucy Williams, and the Hollinger sisters—did much more than talk. Through their actions in support of the Union and Federal troops, they actually shaped to varying degrees the dynamics of the conflict in their area.

  Either articulating or acting upon their convictions, particularly when they differed from those of other family members, these women demonstrated another significant facet of their experience: they were not apolitical. The wives, mothers, and daughters in most of the households depicted in this essay not only made their views known to at least one observer, through whom they entered the historical record. They also took distinctive stands, adhered with great conviction to one cause or the other, and exhibited a strong sense of duty that sometimes put them and their households at considerable risk. It is telling that of all the examples cited here, only one woman ever took a neutral stand—Nancy Ghormley in her efforts to keep the peace among her sons at the dinner table.

  Finally, one must acknowledge what is missing from most of these stories: how these household divisions were ultimately resolved. Although we have used the word “tensions” in describing these relationships, in most cases we have no direct evidence of that tension between spouses or between parents and children. This is in part because of the deception that prevented any open confrontation between family members, and in part, because family members were separated from each other, most often with a husband engaged in military service far from home. But what repercussions were there when the war ended, when these couples and other family members were reunited? Did love conquer all, and the joy of reunion override differing allegiances that by then would have been rendered irrelevant? Did survival lying perhaps extend through those reunions, with the hope that a lack of knowledge of a spouse’s activities would allow a marriage to survive? The few answers we have from the couples we have dealt with here are not encouraging. The betrothal of a Unionist and his Confederate fiancée was broken as a result of these divisions. And in at least one instance, that of Lucy Williams, divorce resulted from her all too fateful betrayal against the Confederacy, or at least the notoriety attached to the assumption of betrayal. In the case of the Unionist cripple and his Confederate bride, one sees a marriage with very low odds of weathering the war-imposed tensions it would have had to endure. But we have no way of knowing the levels of deception, of forgiveness, or of affection that may have kept other marriages and households intact despite the tensions that had divided them during the war years.

  A somewhat different scenario of household division is offered as a conclusion. If the practical necessities sometimes forced the survival lying of spouses, parents, and children, such duplicitous dual loyalties could, on occasion, provide unexpected benefits for those forced into such situations. Napoleon Banner and G. W. Dugger of Banner Elk, North Carolina, sent five sons between them into Union regiments in Tennessee but were themselves “detailed” by Confederate authorities to employment at the ironworks in nearby Cranberry. Such entanglements secured their safety, as Dugger’s son Shepherd later explained: “The Yankees passed over Napoleon for working for the South because he had three sons . . . in the Federal army, and the Homeguard let him off for being a Union man because he was hammering iron for the Confederacy.” The elder Dugger was spared for the same reasons. “Thus,” Shepherd Dugger summarized, “father and Napoleon sat on the top of a four-pointed barbed wire fence that divided the two armies, and so well did they balance themselves that they sat there four years and never got their hide split.”25

  Many Appalachian families found themselves perched precariously atop a barbed-wire fence during those four years of war. Some managed to maintain their balance better than others. In many parts of the southern highlands, Unionists could not afford to flaunt openly their allegiance to what remained a minority cause and an enemy force for the region at large. The sheer variety of ways in which they maintained dual identities and the reasons they chose to do so—ranging from conscientious and ideological to opportunistic and mercenary—testify both to the variables in human nature and to the vacillations in loyalties and commitments toward the war and the fluidity with which they exerted themselves. For the most part, family bonds provided a vital resource in southern highlanders’ attempts to survive the multiple pressures—social, economic, military—the conflict imposed on the region. Yet the fact that, at least on occasion, such pressures forced families to fall on opposite sides of that conflict, often in deceptive or subversive ways, adds to our appreciation of the momentous local impact of this most uncivil of wars on that part of the South in which the bonds of kinship and family otherwise proved most durable.

  Notes

  1. J. Madison Drake, Fast and Loose in Dixie (New York: Authors’ Publishing, 1880), 140–41.

  2. Michael Fellman, Inside War: Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 48–49.

  3. Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 19.

  4. The literature on East Tennessee Unionism is vast. Among the most recent assessments of sentiments there during the secession crisis are Jonathan M. Atkins, Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832–1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), chap. 8; Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chap. 2; Peter Wallenstein, “ ‘Helping to Save the Union’: The Social Origins, Wartime Experiences, and Military Impact of White Union Troops from East Tennessee,” and W. Todd Groce, “The Social Origins of East Tennessee’s Confederate Leadership,” both in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); and Robert Tracy McKenzie’s essay in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). On the minority Confederate presence in that region, see W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996); and Robert Tracy McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War [Knoxville] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  On secession sentiment in western North Carolina, see John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), chaps. 8 and 9. For a comparison of the two regions, see “The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image,” the previous chapter in this volume.

  5. W. H. Parkins, How I Escaped (New York: Home Publishing, 1889), 114–15.

  6. In addition to other work cited throughout these notes, the first four essays in Noe and Wilson’s Civil War in Appalachia focus specifically on this issue. The eleven essays in that volume reflect the extent and range of current scholarship on the war in the highland South, as do several essays in Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999); and several in Inscoe and Kenzer, Enemies of the Country.

  7. The fugitive narratives of Union soldiers or escaped prisoners provide rich and underutilized sources on the war and its impact on the areas through which they moved. For an analysis of those moving through the Southern Appalachians, see chap. 8, “Moving through Deserter Country,” in this volume.

  8. J. V. Hadley, Seven Months a Prisoner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 898), 180–86. In the final paragraph of his memoir, Hadley stated that in the summer of 1897, he returned to North Carolina and visited the Hollinger sisters, “and foun
d them all alive—all married and happy in their mountain homes, with large families about them” (258).

  9. Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (1899; rept., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 426–27. For other references to Jeannette Mabry, see Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 151; Paul A. Whelan, “Unconventional Warfare in East Tennessee, 1862–1865” (master’s thesis, University of Tennessee, 1963), 139; and William A. Stasser, “ ‘A Terrible Calamity Has Befallen Us’: Unionist Women in Civil War East Tennessee,” Journal of East Tennessee History 71 (1999): 74. On the questionable Confederate status of Jeannette’s husband, George Mabry, and the much stronger credentials of his brother, Joseph, see McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels, 131–34.

  10. Michael Egan, The Flying Gray-Haired Yank; or, The Adventures of a Volunteer (Marietta, Ohio: Edgewood Press, 1888), 325–28. On the strains that generational differences within households often put on mothers and wives, see Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 52–53, 55.

  11. W. H. Younce, The Adventures of a Conscript (Cincinnati: Editor Publishing, 1910), 5–16, 105. For a discussion of the authenticity of Younce’s memoir, see Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

  12. The fullest and clearest account of this tangled affair, interpreted as an example of the power of family solidarity in the face of divided allegiances, is found in chap. 5 of Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War. See also the memoir of Isaac Wilson’s son, and commentary on it in Appalachian Journal 34 (Fall 2006), and “Guerrilla War and Remembrance,” chap. 15 in this volume. For an earlier, far less complete version of Isaac Wilson’s murder, see John Preston Arthur, A History of Watauga County, North Carolina, with Sketches of Prominent Families (Richmond, Va.: Everett Waddey, 1915), 170–71. The same book includes a detailed account of another, similar set of tensions that led to a violent break between Keith Blalock and his stepfather and stepbrothers (163–64).