13. The most detailed accounts of Morgan’s death and Lucy Williams’s role in the incident are Cecelia Fletcher Holland, Morgan and His Raiders: A Biography of the Confederate General (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 339–48; and James A. Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of John Hunt Morgan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 232–40. For a more recent historiographical discussion of the incident, see Fisher, War at Every Door, appendix B, “Union Informants and the Death of John Hunt Morgan,” 186–87.
14. Alberta and Carson Brewer, Valley So Wild: A Folk History (Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1975), 170.
15. A mere sampling of the literature on Appalachian families and kinship includes John C. Campbell, The Southern Mountaineer and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921); Patricia D. Beaver, Rural Community in the Appalachian South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Jack E. Weller, Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1965); We’re All Kin: A Cultural Study of a Mountain Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and many of the works cited in the following notes.
16. Philip S. Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Mountain Community, 1818–1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), chap. 5; Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 29–33; Ralph Mann, “Family Group, Family Migration, and the Civil War in the Sandy Basin of Virginia,” Appalachian Journal 19 (Summer 1992): 374–93; Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles: Sandy Basin, Virginia, as a Test Case,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 59–66; Martin Crawford, “Confederate Volunteering and Enlistment in Ashe County, North Carolina,” Civil War History 37 (March 1991): 29–50, and “The Dynamics of Mountain Unionism: Federal Volunteers of Ashe County, North Carolina,” in Civil War in Appalachia, ed. Noe and Wilson, 55–77; Jonathan D. Sarris, “Anatomy of an Atrocity: The Madden Branch Massacre and Guerrilla Warfare in North Georgia, 1862–1865,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (Winter 1993): 679–710; Sarris, “An Execution in Lumpkin County: Localized Loyalties in North Georgia’s Civil War,” in Civil War in Appalachia, ed. Noe and Wilson, 131–57; and Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Prudent Silence and Strict Neutrality: The Parameters of Unionism in Parson Brownlow’s Knoxville, 1860–1863,” in Enemies of the Country, ed. Inscoe and Kenzer, 73–96. See also John W. Shaffer, “Loyalties in Conflict: Union and Confederate Sentiment in Barbour County,” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 109–28.
The fullest account of divided families elsewhere in the nation is by Amy Murrell Taylor, in The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), which focuses on the border states of both the Union and the Confederacy.
17. Mann, “Family Group, Family Migrations,” 374, 385.
18. James Gwyn to Rufus T. Lenoir, May 2, 1861, Lenoir Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For more on the tentativeness of Unionist sentiment, see John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 4.
19. Oliver P. Temple, Notable Men of Tennessee from 1833 to 1875: Their Times and Their Contemporaries (New York: Cosmopolitan Press, 1912), 243.
20. Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 218.
21. Quoted in Paludan, Victims, 64.
22. Fellman, Inside War, 193. Fellman’s chapter 5 is devoted to women’s roles in Missouri’s guerrilla war. On the role of women in Appalachia’s Civil War, see McKinney, “Women’s Role”; Dunn, Cades Cove, chap. 5, esp. 135–38; Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles,” 59–67; “Coping in Confederate Appalachia,” the next chapter in this volume; David H. McGee, “ ‘Home and Friends’: Kinship, Community, and the Role of Elite Women in Caldwell County during the Civil War,” North Carolina Historical Review 74 (October 1997): 363–88; and Stasser, “A Terrible Calamity.”
23. G. W. Hunt to John Hunt Morgan, November 26, 1864, quoted in Fisher, War at Every Door, 117.
24. Quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 200.
25. Shepherd M. Dugger, War Trails of the Blue Ridge (Blue Ridge, N.C.: n.p., 1932), 204–5.
7
Coping in Confederate Appalachia
Portrait of a Mountain Woman and Her Community at War
Late in the summer of 1863, an anonymous “Voice from Cherokee County” wrote a letter to the North Carolina Standard in Raleigh, bemoaning the oppressive impact of Confederate policy on the state’s mountain region. He paid tribute to those highlanders he maintained were most victimized by the hardships—its women, that “class of beings entitled to the deepest sympathy of the Confederate government . . . the wives, children, mothers, sisters, and widows” left behind by those fighting for the southern cause. This voice from the state’s westernmost county went on to extol “the thousand instances of women’s patriotism, in resigning without a murmur the being in whom her affections centered, to all the horrors of war, and after her husband’s departure, uncomplainingly assume all the duties of the sterner sex; accompanied by her little brood, labor from mom to night in the cornfield, or wield the axe to fell the sturdy oak.”1 The glorification of Confederate womanhood was obviously well under way by the war’s midpoint and was pervasive enough to have reached what was among the remotest parts of the Confederacy and of the Carolina highlands.
Among those “thousand instances” so glorified by the chivalric Cherokee County resident was Mary Bell in adjacent Macon County. She did indeed spend much of the war laboring in the cornfield, chopping wood, and caring for a growing “little brood.” But she did not do so “uncomplainingly” or “without a murmur,” and most assuredly, she did not do so from any patriotic sentiments toward the Confederacy or sense of duty to the southern cause.
This essay is an examination of Mary Bell’s Civil War experience. Her husband left home in November 1861, and, except for intermittent visits and an extended stay in 1863, was gone until February 1865. Throughout that period, Mary wrote lengthy letters at frequent intervals that provide the basis for reconstructing in considerable detail the impact of the war on her, her family, and her community.2 At one level, her account serves as a case study of the plight of Appalachian women on the Confederate home front; at the same time, it provides another variable to the growing collection of individual experiences through which historians are coming to new understandings of how the Civil War shaped the status and role of southern women and how those women, in turn, affected the war effort.
In Womenfolks, her 1983 paean to her southern distaff ancestry, Shirley Abbott maintained, with tongue somewhat in cheek, that “the fortitude of upper-class southern women during the Civil War is one of the sacrosanct themes in the mythology of the region: great-granny defying those blue-coated sons-of-bitches under the portico, just after she had personally buried the silver and put down a small mutiny among the field hands. . . . The backwoods women (lacking any such melodramatic props) had little to be heroic about.”3 That view may well have reflected not only popular perceptions but also the focus of scholarly scrutiny at the time. The latter at least has changed substantially in the intervening years, thanks to significant work dealing with the ways in which southern women at all socioeconomic levels and in various parts of the Confederacy coped with the crisis.4 Even for Appalachian women, who would certainly qualify under Abbott’s categorization of those whose efforts were so unappreciated, such neglect is being remedied as
historians of the region are providing new insights into the dynamics of highland home fronts from a variety of angles.5
Thus Mary Bell’s version of the war years does not so much fill a void as it corroborates, amplifies, and personalizes the conclusions drawn by other studies of wartime women at community, regional, or national levels, while at the same time offering some unexpected variations on a number of those conclusions. Bell’s vivid descriptions and often outspoken assessments of both her own problems at home and those of her neighbors provide a unique perspective on a mountain community caught in a war from which, in some respects, it was snugly insulated, yet that in other respects intruded daily into the lives of its residents. Bell’s letters also portray a woman who grew over the course of those years without her husband. Though not always conscious of the direction or degree of that change, she left in her letters a rich chronicle of the adjustments in her life and in her attitudes from 1861 to 1865 that allows historians to trace the course of her personal development in the midst of crisis.
Mary Bell was twenty-six years old when she moved with her husband to his North Carolina hometown only a year before the Civil War broke out. Little is known of the early life of either husband or wife. A native of Rome, Georgia, Mary married Alfred Bell in 1856 and moved with him three years later to the mountain community of Clayton in Georgia’s northeastern corner, where Alfred’s older brother was a physician. Alfred himself was a dentist and went into practice with his brother for about a year, when he decided to return to Franklin, North Carolina, just thirty miles north of Clayton, where his father, Benjamin W. Bell, among the community’s founding fathers and the county’s first sheriff, lived and operated a jewelry and clock-making business.6 The Alfred Bell family, which then included two young daughters, bought a house in the village and a nearby farm. Alfred quickly established a thriving dental practice and took an active role in his father’s enterprise as well. The farm he turned over to a tenant and hired slaves, whose activities he closely supervised.7
Franklin was a small community of fewer than 150 residents in 1860, when the Bells made it their home. The seat of Macon County, Franklin was also the county’s only village, serving the commercial and governmental needs of its more than six thousand inhabitants. Situated in the Little Tennessee River valley on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains about seventy miles southwest of Asheville, Franklin was built on the site of what had once been a sacred Cherokee village and was settled by whites only after the area was wrenched from that tribe in the 1830s. In some respects it remained a frontier community throughout the antebellum period. The few travelers who reached that remote southwest corner of North Carolina commented on the physical beauty and fertile setting but noted too the only partial appearance of civilization. British geologist George Feather-stonaugh, moving through the area in the early 1840s, wrote of Franklin: “What a dreadful state of things! Here was a village, more beautifully situated . . . that might become an earthly Paradise, if education, religion, and manners prevailed. . . . But I could not learn that there was a man of education in the place disposed to set an example of the value of sobriety to the community.” Some progress may have been made by the time Charles Lanman journeyed through the area five years later, for his comment, after encountering a few leading citizens, was that, “like all the intelligent people of this county, [they were] very polite and well informed.” He went on to describe the village as “romantically situated on the Little Tennessee . . . surrounded with mountains and as quiet and pretty a hamlet as I have yet seen among the Alleghanies.”8
In 1860, Macon County was extremely rural, even by Appalachian standards, with Franklin the only place that bears some semblance to a concentrated community. Like most mountain holdings, Macon’s 632 farms were relatively small; almost 60 percent had less than fifty acres and only 12 percent had more than a hundred acres. The diversity of the farms’ output was also typical. Corn was the basic commodity, but it was supplemented by a variety of grains, as well as apples and peaches (the majority of which were distilled into their more potent liquid form). Sixty-two slaveholders (6.5 percent of the household heads) and 519 slaves (8.6 percent of the population) lived in Macon County in 1860, both totals higher than those of adjacent counties. Only two men owned more than twenty slaves; one of them, Dillard Love, a member of one of western North Carolina’s oldest and most influential families, owned seventy-one.9
During the secession crisis, feeling in the county was strongly divided as to whether or when North Carolina should withdraw from the Union. But unionism never gained the firm foothold there that it did in other parts of the Carolina highlands, and Macon County residents rallied to the Confederate cause as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Soon after the war broke out, Franklin became a recruiting center for Confederate troops, and Macon County, like the rest of the southwestern counties, quickly fulfilled its initial enlistment quota as called by Governor John Ellis.10 Alfred Bell delayed in joining that surge. Only in the fall of 1861 did he raise a company of Macon County volunteers and, as their captain, lead them to Asheville, where as part of North Carolina’s 39th Regiment they spent three cold and frustrating months awaiting assignment to active duty. “We are very willing,” he assured his wife at the end of January, 1862, “to leave this Buncombe War & goe to Jeff Davises War.”11
Two days after he left home in November 1861, the correspondence between Alfred and Mary Bell was under way, and her new roles as wife, manager, and local citizen began to take shape. Among the most striking of those roles, as reflected in her early letters, was her very active interest in Captain Bell’s military affairs. She was never shy about expressing her views or dispensing advice as to how he should conduct himself in his relationships with his officers and fellow soldiers or in commenting on the military affairs of other local residents. In her first letter, Mary reported to Alf that two Macon County men who she felt should have gone into his company were thinking of organizing their own instead. She expressed contempt for such unrealistic ambitions and for those of another acquaintance who had stayed home “to attend to his business,” waiting to enlist until he could do so as captain of his own company. “I am in hopes he will not get into your regiment,” she wrote, “unless he would volunteer & risk his chances” regarding officership.12
Mary continued to provide regular reports of the comings and goings of her husband’s volunteers and of other Macon County men who had or had not enlisted, along with her speculation as to their motives for doing so. On several occasions she told him of efforts to retrieve his men and others who either temporarily or permanently abused furlough privileges. Because his company remained so close to home for so long, keeping the men in camp and committed to the cause proved difficult. By the end of January, Bell was referring to some in his company as “traitors and deserters” and inquiring of his wife as to their whereabouts.13
One of those, Tom McDowell, fled south into Georgia to avoid arrest. Mary reported that McDowell’s wife blamed Bell for his fugitive status and that “she would rather see him die than see him go into your company.” Mary feared that Mrs. McDowell and others “were making up rumors against” Bell, presumably for his role in the attempt to reclaim his troops. Those rumors were the first hint of military tensions growing out of the discontent of fellow residents. Mary was quick to dismiss the worth of those elusive charges, advising Alf that he should tell Tom McDowell what she had heard another wife tell her defecting husband: that he “was a disgrace to the Southern Confederacy and Jeff Davis would blush to own him.” “If I were you,” Mary mused, “I would blush to have such a man as Tom in my company. If you were to ever get in a close place he would be certain to stump his toe and fall down. The yankees would get him and great would be the loss.”14
Mary was just as resentful of wives who had not yet had to make the same sacrifice she was making. In March 1862, she admitted that for herself and a neighbor, “our daily prayer is that a draft will come and take every married man
that can leave home as well as our husbands could. It makes us very mad to see other women enjoying themselves with their husbands and ours gone.” A month later she repeated in even stronger terms her discontent at the inequality of local sacrifice as she saw it: “Whilst some are made to mourn all the days of their lives on account of some dear one who has died whilst fighting for their country, others will be glorying in the wealth they have made by staying at home and speculating while the war was going on and other poor wretches were fighting for them.”15
It is quite apparent, however, that Mary’s resentment of those not serving the cause militarily or otherwise had little to do with her own commitment to the Confederacy. As early as March 5, 1862, she urged Alf not to reenlist when given the option. Only the week before, he and his company had been sent to East Tennessee, already the site of considerable activity as what amounted to a Confederate occupation force sought to control a large and unruly Unionist populace. That move, along with the arrival of the first of many corpses to be returned to Franklin, may have inspired sudden concern in the young Mrs. Bell for her husband’s safety. “I do not care what inducements is held out,” she insisted, “you must not enlist.” Nor did she hide her very personal reasons for such a request: “I hope for my sake you not think of doing it for I am a poor miserable wretch without you—the world is dark and dreary and everything is a blank without the presence and cheering smiles and devoted love of my dear husband.”16
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