Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Mary laid blame for this bleak situation squarely at the feet of one man and more than once cursed him for the misery he had inflicted upon her. “I believe we have a just God, and that sooner or later Abraham Lincoln will meet with his just rewards. I may be called heartless and wicked, and doubtless am, but it does one good to think that a retribution awaits such tyrants as old Abe.”17 But such hatred of Lincoln did not necessarily entail any patriotism for the new nation created in response to his election. Mary’s apathy toward the Confederate cause was apparent from her earliest letters. Never did she profess any patriotic sense of duty as a motive or reason for pride in her activities and considerable achievements during the course of the war. Indeed, on more than one occasion she showed as much contempt for Confederate policies and efforts as she did for the Union cause and its most localized manifestation, the detested “Tories.”

  In her first letter to Alf, Mary wrote of some dresses she was having made and asked him if he could obtain needed materials more cheaply in Asheville than she could get them in Franklin. “I do not ask the Yankees any odds if I can get thread and dye stuffs. . . . I see no sense in relying on things that are made entirely in the South.” The following May she was somewhat derisive in describing the efforts of local women who, at the request of Governor Ellis’s wife, were “getting up a subscription here to make a gunboat for the defense of North Carolina.” “Don’t you think it is too late to think about making gunboats?” she asked Alf. She contributed only fifty cents to the cause, and her daughters gave twenty-five cents that “their grandpa gave them to throw in.” She claimed she “told the girls I had sent all [to] the gunboat I thought I ought to send, that I would be willing to subscribe a good deal more if I had you at home.”18

  By April 1862, Mary could take some satisfaction in the fact that a Confederate conscription act had passed, but she was realistic—or cynical—enough to predict that it “will take some who ought to go as well as some who really are excusable, whilst some will be left behind still who ought to go.” She was quick to agree with her husband that the proposed age span of eighteen to thirty-five should have been extended, for, she observed, “there are men here at 45 just as able and who have just as much right to go as men at 35.” Ultimately, her interest in any conscription policy was how it would affect her beloved Alf, and she was not particularly optimistic, fearing that “it will also hold on some who are already gone that ought to have the privilege of coming home a while if they wish too.”19

  Like many wives, Mary Bell expressed grave concern about her husband’s moral character. Her letters to him admonished him on his sobriety (“Mashburn says that he got drunk while he was gone with you, I am afraid that you had it on the road and by so doing gave him encouragement to drink”); urged him to take up religion (“My earnest prayer is that you will prepare yourself for a better life”); and questioned various vices of which she had heard rumors, especially infidelity (“Reports are that you, Capt. Bell, a man in whom evry one had the utmost confidence as being a true devoted and virtuous husband, could play cards, drink whiskey, and —— as many women as any man in camps and by so doing had won the love and respect of nearly evry man in the regiment . . . I should think that if by such acts I had to gain the love of men, I should consider it dearly”).20

  Strikingly, the pervasiveness of alcoholism filled her letters and homilies. As even outside observers had noted of Franklin and other mountain villages, alcohol abuse was very much in evidence among the citizens well before the war, and the strains of the crisis merely aggravated the situation.21 Mary commented frequently on the drunkenness of local soldiers on leave. When Bell had sent men back home to round up deserters, she reported, “in place of going sober as they ought to have done, they had to have whiskey and get drunk.” She particularly resented the fact that they had drawn her younger brother Dee into their company. He got “drunk with the rest of them & has been drinking ever since.” She hoped that Alf could persuade Dee to go to war “as the best thing that can be done for him.” Nor was she alone in seeing the therapeutic value of military service for alcoholic menfolk. She told Alf of an acquaintance whose public and reckless displays of drunkenness had made his wife so “perfectly miserable” that “I think she would be glad for him to join the army hoping it will do him some good.”22

  But where Mary’s advice and wifely wisdom proved most needed—though there is little indication that Alf listened—was in her counsel on a series of disciplinary actions that stemmed from the mutual dislike of Bell and his commanding officer, David Coleman. That situation, which took most of the war to play itself out, is revealing not only in regard to Alfred Bell’s problems and his wife’s insights into them, but also for its indication of the active if long-distant roles wives could play in company politics and military relationships.

  Soon after Bell’s regiment moved to East Tennessee, it reorganized and elected new officers. Much to Alf’s chagrin, David Coleman, a well-connected Asheville businessman and legislator who had served as the regiment’s colonel since its formation, was reelected to that position.23 Captain Bell conveyed his bitter disappointment to Mary, who knew her husband’s hot temper and independent streak better than anyone else, sensed problems arising from his resentment, and urged him “not to be too hasty” in any decision he made about leaving the regiment for another. “Remember,” she cautioned, “you are all fighting for the same cause and there ought not to be any tumult or strife among you.” Perhaps unconsciously, she even adopted Lincoln’s biblical epigram to make her point. “A house divided against itself,” she concluded, “cannot stand.”24

  Mary’s fears were confirmed when, in June 1862, her husband initiated and circulated a petition among his fellow officers calling for Coleman’s resignation as colonel on the grounds that he spent far too much time drunk and was reluctant to lead his men—or allow others to do so—into battle. Coleman responded by promptly arresting Bell and four other officers, suspending their commands, and threatening them with courts-martial. Mary showed greater concern over Alf’s fate than he did because much of her information on her husband’s behavior came from other wives in Franklin. She urged moderation, writing Alf that “I do not want you to be satisfied with men who do not do their duty, but I do not want you to get prejudiced and think everything they do is wrong. Perhaps you are prejudiced against Coleman,” she gently suggested. “It is rumored here that you have been, or are about to be, reduced in rank for some hand you took in the election. Has anything happened that could start such a rumor?” Alf refused to take the situation seriously and remained cocky, claiming that he welcomed a court-martial because it would accomplish his ultimate goal, “an investigation of the facts as they are.” He reported that “our prayers is peace or a battle that our rongs may be avenged . . . nobody scared thoe.”25

  Mary’s letters during that period were far more consumed with Alf’s predicament than his own were, and she mustered a variety of tones in responding to it. In the same letter she could boost his ego (“I do not want to make you vain, but the news got back home that you are the most popular captain in the regiment”); gently humor him (“You must not get too saucy and get into mischief . . . if you do and I find it out I will request Coleman to put you to digging up stumps”); offer serious advice (“Please be calm and do nothing in your difficulties that you can be reproached with. I do not think you will do anything wrong if you will govern your temper”); and even rationalize the situation from her own perspective (“I feel almost in hopes that you will be cashiered and then your men cannot blame you . . . as I have a use for you at home”).26 Only rarely was she explicit in laying out her worst fears: “I am in dread continually for fear that you will in a mad fit do something you ought not to do. I hope for my sake and the sake of your little children that you will be willing to take more than you would otherwise do.” That was not the first time she reminded him of his growing family: “You must not forget that you have a darling babe at home that you have n
ever seen.”27

  Though the situation seems to have abated with no real resolution by the end of the summer, Alf’s problems with his colonel continued. He had to write Mary in September, “I am againe under arest againe not by myself.” Coleman had ordered the arrest of all officers for “not marching our companys in line.” Bell dismissed the trumped-up charge as more indicative of the disturbed commander’s state of mind than of Bell’s own behavior. “He is drunk all the time,” he claimed. “The boys pray for a fight.”28

  The ongoing divisiveness within this western Carolina regiment was apparently a major topic of discussion among the women of Franklin. Sooner or later many sided with either Coleman or Bell, most likely reflecting the biases of husbands who served with both. Yet even women whose husbands were not associated with the regiment had opinions on the matter. Mary Bell reported a visit from Lizzie Woodfin, the wife of the community’s only physician, who thus was still at home. She assured Mary that she was “as bitter against Coleman as any of us.” Mary had doubts about her sincerity, however. Earlier Mary had written of a public spat between Mrs. Woodfin and a Mrs. Copeland, and now she feared that the former would hear that “I had written to camp about her quarrel” and “will probably not like it if she hears it.”29

  The role of wives at home proved even more central to a later episode in the ongoing feud. In March 1864, with his regiment still intact and stationed near Pollard, Alabama, Bell wrote Mary that once more Colonel Coleman had arrested him. The charges this time, said Alf, related to “my neglegince of my dutys assigned me in western N.C. and absents without leave all for spite.” The charges originated from local reports that during an extended mission in Macon and surrounding counties the previous fall to round up deserters and gather new recruits, Bell had built a house, practiced dentistry, and (in connection with his father’s business) made jewelry. His service record summed up the charges as “alleged speculation.” The sources of these accusations, Bell informed his wife, “were my good lady friends at home who have been writing their husbands.” He blamed their maliciousness on regimental politics: “all caused by my being the Sen. Capt. and the Office of Maj. to fill and others more desirous of promotion than I.” Salena Reid seems to have been the primary culprit, and Bell saw in her action, among other things, a lack of gratitude that serves as yet another indication of the interdependency the war forced upon the mountain community. She “ought to remember my father hailed wood for her when her own father would not do it and my wife loned her money when she needed it. Such ungrateful women I have no use for.”30

  Mary too, of course, deplored the new trouble Mrs. Reid had apparently brought upon her husband; she seemed particularly bothered by the fact that as a result of correspondence home from Bell’s fellow soldiers, the story “is going evry where here.” “The first time I see that good lady friend of yours I shall tell her of it good,” she ranted but then, deferring to Alf’s judgment, added, “unless you say for me not to.” Although John Reid and his wife insisted to Mary that they were not the source of the reports of Bell’s activities at home and earnestly sought to make amends, Mary’s opinion of them softened only when the bright side of her husband’s latest arrest and confinement became apparent: it kept him out of harm’s way during the Atlanta campaign in which his regiment was by midsummer fully engaged. Both Bells took satisfaction too in the fact that Reid never was promoted to captain, “as that was his sole object to get me out of the way.”31

  The involvement of Mary Bell and other wives in their husbands’ military affairs resulted in part from the small close-knit community from which they came and the fact that so many of that community’s residents served together in the same unit during the course of the war. Tensions, disputes, or rivalries that may have had prewar roots carried over from home to camp and from camp back home. As the Bell situation demonstrates, the behavior of wives and other family members could and often did exacerbate such tensions, if only through the very effective and all-important conduit of correspondence to and from the field. That power of the pen in linking home and battlefront gave gossip or hearsay added force in shaping the relationships, ambitions, and rivalries among soldiers from the same area who served together.32

  If the closeness of Mary Bell’s mountain community proved a sore point in her husband’s ongoing problems in his regiment, it also had much to do with her success in coping with the hardships of the war years. Far more than many in her situation, she succeeded in making the best of the hard realities she faced. Equally significant, perhaps, was the fact that she was fully aware of her achievements and viewed them with great satisfaction.

  Mary Bell was unlike the many southern women who began the war as determined and duty-bound partners in the Confederate war effort, only to be worn down by frustration, weariness, and self-pity that led to anger or indifference toward that very cause. As already demonstrated, she never professed a commitment to anything more than herself and her family, which perhaps explains why her bitterness and anger were vented so early during her husband’s Confederate service. Yet as the war progressed, the tone of her letters suggests that her continued efforts to cope with home-front hardships without her husband made her an increasingly independent and self-confident woman who almost thrived on meeting the various challenges thrown her way.

  In addition to caring for her growing family—she bore two children and lost one during the war (thus spending more than a third of the war pregnant)—Mary took on new responsibilities in Alfred’s absence as manager of their farm and as fiscal agent for his dental practice and other business interests. Alf’s early letters to her gave her detailed instructions for dealing with a variety of financial concerns, from negotiating with hired hands or (in the case of slaves) with their owners, to collecting debts owed him, paying his own debts, and authorizing new loans, most often to men in his company or their wives. During the same period, Mary’s letters to him were full of questions that reflected her unfamiliarity and uncertainty in fulfilling those new responsibilities.

  Mary reported in April 1862 that Alf’s brother had proposed a swap of some property but that she declined what was most likely an advantageous bargain. She stated: “I was afraid to do it for fear I might get cheated” by her own brother-in-law and “for fear it might not prove good and you would not like it.” Later that month, she informed Alf that a note he held on a debt owed him was not in their money box and reluctantly confessed that their young daughters had somehow removed it, used it for drawing paper, and misplaced it.33

  Otherwise Mary’s reports indicated dutiful adherence to his instructions and demonstrated little initiative or judgment in so doing. It was also obvious that she took little pleasure in those duties. Yet her success quickly boosted her self-confidence and earned her the respect of other Franklin residents, male and female. By the summer of 1862, she had begun to exercise her own discretion in making loans to Captain Bell’s men, which she reported to him so that he might collect from the men when they returned to camp and were paid. She wrote in August that “as usual I had to loan some of your men some money.” After laying out the particulars—in that case, five-dollar loans to three different men and the mother of another—she wrote, “I hope I did nothing wrong.” Her rationalization for such generosity—“I seem to have their good will as well as their Capt. and I thought perhaps I had better keep it by being good to them”—is yet another indication of how conscious she was of the impact wives at home could have on their husbands’ interests in camp.34

  Shortly thereafter, however, Mary began to express misgivings about Alf’s generosity. She confided to him her fear “that in your dislike to do anything that appears stingy or niggardly, you would allow yourself to become a looser.” After a gentle warning that he not over-extend himself with handouts merely to assure his popularity among his troops, she concluded, “Please don’t think your little wife is medling with things that don’t concern her dearest, or if you do, try to excuse her.”35

  M
ary grew more and more self-assured in conducting other types of business as well. She was especially proud of her skill in bartering, which as the war went on became an increasing but never exclusive means of doing business locally. She became more adept and confident in handling transactions that were often complex, sometimes involving a variety of currencies as well as produce. In one typical report, she described a series of barters she negotiated in April 1864. Those transactions also revealed the community’s interdependence and the degree to which Mary Bell had made herself an integral part of an intricate local trade network:

  John McConnel has paid me five bushels [of corn] and says that I will have to wait until he goes south after corn before he can pay me any more. Mr. Lores Ell owes me 4 bushels of Apples which he promised to bring this week but has not done it yet. Alfred and Simeon still owes the 4 bushels they have not brought any corn yet. Alfred sent me two hams which I credited on the old account which leaves him $1.64 in debt. Albert has only paid 1 ¼ bushels which leaves him in debt 3 ¾ bushels, Joe 2 ½ bushels, Arther 1 bushel, Adie McConnell 1 ½ bushels.

  She continued in the same letter to explain her attempts to get payment for corn sold on credit to a neighboring woman, payment of which was to include dried fruit; her unsuccessful attempts to obtain straw from people who still owed her for corn; and another neighbor’s payment of a past debt in freshly milled wheat.36 By December she had swapped milk cows with Amanda Cunningham and, in a deal in which she took particular pride, traded a calf to Benny Dobson for his pregnant sow. “I want to raise my own meat,” she wrote Alf, and two men told her “they would have give two such calves for such a hog” as the one she acquired. One of them, Mary boasted, “says I can cheat.”37

  Her role in the Bells’ jewelry business also provided Mary with experience that made her a shrewd businesswoman. In December 1864 she informed her husband with great satisfaction that she had charged a soldier twenty dollars, which he willingly paid, for the repair of his watch. She explained that she had arrived at the fee based on what she believed was the current equivalent of two bushels of corn, apparently a standard for such a service for much of the war. When she asked her father-in-law the next day whether that charge had been reasonable, he replied that he would have asked for a mere dollar and “sorter opened his eyes wide” at her minor windfall in acquiring twenty times that amount. “So you see,” she concluded to Alf, “I did not learn to cheat from either of my dadies, it must have been from my husband!”38