Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Yet she could not have done it on her own. Her success was very much the result of community interdependence, as reflected by the reciprocal nature of her relationship with fellow Franklin residents that emerges as a dominant theme in her letters. Despite her self-absorption, Mary relied heavily on her neighbors, just as they often called upon her for aid of various sorts. The war’s demands forced new levels of cooperation and interaction on that mountain community as it did many others. Despite Mary’s cynicism toward the “cause” and her disdain for many of those in whose midst she lived, she used them and was used by them.

  Perhaps what most distinguishes Mary Bell’s experience as Appalachian in nature is the sense of community that it so vividly conveys. Gordon McKinney maintains that it was the disintegration of community structure and economy that so victimized many western North Carolina women and placed them at the forefront of the bitter and often destructive divisiveness that plagued much of the southern highland populace.64 But the conditions that rendered other communities dysfunctional do not seem to have been as acute in Franklin. While Mary Bell’s descriptions suggest that the potential for internal disorder was present, the Macon County seat also enjoyed a variety of circumstances that insulated it from the worst ravages of the war and enabled it to weather the crisis far better than other mountain communities.

  The flexibility of local trade patterns and labor arrangements that characterized the antebellum economy of much of the southern highlands proved a tremendous asset to the Bells and other Macon County residents in adapting to the new demands imposed by the war. Faced with manpower shortages as acute as those elsewhere in the South, families with the financial wherewithal, such as the Bells, turned to long-established practices of long- and short-term slave hirings and tenant employment. The great diversity of highland agricultural production allowed for a degree of local self-sufficiency that sheltered the community from the deprivation such a crisis might, and often did, impose in the cotton South.

  Franklin’s physical remoteness shielded it from much of the military movement that disrupted so many southern lives and households. Even the brutal and destructive bushwhacking that plagued so many sections of the southern highlands was never a serious threat to that particular corner of Appalachian North Carolina.65 Yet Franklin was never so inaccessible that constant contact with its men in the field or access to goods and services well beyond the local supplies was ever denied those of its residents with the means to acquire them.

  Perhaps the most significant factor in Franklin’s avoidance of internal collapse or upheaval was that political sentiments there were never as divided as they were in East Tennessee or other sections of the Carolina highlands. Though in neighboring Cherokee County, Unionists and deserters threatened Confederate wives and Confederate raiders harassed the wife of a prominent Unionist, unionism never achieved a stronghold in the state’s southwestern corner; nor do Franklin residents (perhaps buffered by Cherokee County from spillover of Tennessee’s Unionist influence) ever seem to have engaged in such confrontations.66 The tensions and disagreements that arose between the Bells and fellow residents were limited to petty jealousies or personality conflicts that never split the community to the extent that more basic disagreements over commitment to the Union or to the Confederacy would have. Thus local animosities were never a threat nor a barrier to the mutual dependency on which Franklin residents came to rely so heavily, animosities that could well have negated the advantages their insulation and self-sufficiency provided.67

  Unfortunately, Alf’s return home in February 1865 brought the Bells’ vivid record of their wartime lives to a sudden halt. One can only guess what long-term effects Mary’s “emancipation” had on her marriage, her household, or her place in the community. Nor can one know how either spouse reacted to the loss of their newly acquired slave property; how much of a role Mary continued to play in Alf’s business affairs or farm management; or to what extent Confederate defeat and its subsequent burdens demoralized her or punctured her steadily growing self-esteem. From an 1890s perspective, John Andrew Rice wrote that “in 1860 the South became a matriarchy.” If Mary’s wartime role does not fully support such hyperbole, Rice’s subsequent analysis seems a remarkably apt description of the Bells’ situation: “The men went away from home to other battlefields, leaving the women free to manage farm and plantation directly, without their bungling hindrance; when they returned, those who had escaped heroic death . . . found their surrogates in complete and competent charge and liking it.”68 That being very much what Alfred Bell returned home to in February 1865, it is hard to imagine that his household ever reverted to the full patriarchy it had been before he marched off to war.

  Notes

  1. North Carolina Standard (Raleigh), August 19, 1863.

  2. The Bell correspondence is found in the Alfred W. Bell Papers, Special Collections Department, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.

  3. Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (New Haven: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), 62.

  4. George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995); Jean Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), chap. 5; Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 5.

  Some of the best works on those issues focus on North Carolina women, including Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), chap. 3, esp. 63–67; Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chaps. 5 and 6; and Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of Southern White Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), which focuses on North Carolina and Virginia women.

  5. Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 37–56; Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Ralph Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles: Sandy Basin, Virginia, as Case Study,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 59–66; and Mann, “Family Group, Family Migration, and the Civil War in the Sandy Basin of Virginia,” Appalachian Journal 19 (Summer 1992): 374–93.

  For more general recent work on Appalachian women during the nineteenth century, see Milton Ready, “Forgotten Sisters: Mountain Women in the South,” in Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region within a Region, ed. John C. Inscoe, vol. 3 of Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association (1991): 61–67; Sally W. Maggard, “Class and Gender,” in The Impact of Institutions in Appalachia, ed. Jim Lloyd and Anne G. Campbell (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1986); Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “Waiting for the Millennium, Remembering the Past: Appalachian Women in Time and Place,” in Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Christie Anne Farnham (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 165–88; Mary K. Anglin, “Errors at the Margins: Rediscovering the Women of Antebellum Western North Carolina,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and “Talking Heroines,” chap. 9 in this volume.

  6. Lawrence E. Wood, Mountain Memories (Franklin, N.C.: privately published, n.d.), 75.

  7. Information on the Bells’ antebellum life was gleaned from the inventory description, Bell Papers.

  8. George W. Featherstonaugh, A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor . . ., 2 vols.
(London: R. Bentley, 1847), 1:281; Charles Lanman, Letters from the Alleghany Mountains (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849), 81. For other nineteenth-century observations of Franklin and Macon County, see A. R. Newsome (ed.), “The A. S. Merrimon Journal, 1853–1854,” North Carolina Historical Review 8 (July 1931): 313–14; Myron H. Avery and Kenneth S. Boardman (eds.), “Arnold Guyot’s Notes on the Geography of the Mountain District of Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 15 (July 1938): 282–83; and Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup, The Heart of the Alleghanies; or, Western North Carolina (Raleigh: Alfred Williams, 1883), 82–83. For recent but impressionistic histories of the county, see Wood, Mountain Memories, and Jessie Sutton (ed.), The Heritage of Macon County (Winston-Salem: Hunter Publishing, 1987).

  9. For Macon County statistics on population, landholdings, agricultural output, and slaveholdings in 1850 and 1860 in relation to other western North Carolina counties, see John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 3.2, and appendix. For general accounts of Macon County before and during the Civil War, see special issue of the Franklin Press, June 26, 1925; and Sutton, Heritage of Macon County, 43–51.

  10. On early recruiting efforts in southwestern North Carolina, see Vernon H. Crow, Storm in the Mountains: Thomas’s Confederate Legion of Cherokee Indians and Mountaineers (Cherokee, N.C.: Press of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 1982), 10–15; and 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, 2001), chap. 3.

  11. Alfred to Mary Bell, January 30, 1862, Bell Papers. All subsequent references to correspondence refer to this collection. On January 30, 1862, the Asheville News noted that “Coleman’s Battalion is here and eager to meet the enemies of their country. . . . They are tired of listless inaction and would hail with joy the order to march.” For a history of the 39th Regiment and Bell’s service record, see Louis H. Manarin and Weymouth T. Jordan Jr., (eds.), North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1985), 10:104–9, 120.

  12. Mary to Alfred Bell, November 13, 1861.

  13. Alfred to Mary Bell, January 30, 1862. See her letters of November 13, 1861, and January 30, 1862.

  14. Mary to Alfred Bell, February 10, 1862.

  15. Ibid., March 5, April 28, 1862.

  16. Ibid., March 5, 1862. She expressed similar sentiments in letters of April 4 and June 13, 1862. In her March 5 letter, she noted that one victim had died of measles, while another had been one of the men who wanted to lead his own company.

  17. Ibid., June 20, 1862.

  18. Ibid., November 13, 1861, May 22, 1862. In the spring of 1862, North Carolina women organized a statewide fundraising campaign to construct wooden gunboats in Washington and Wilmington, North Carolina, to protect the coast from Union attack.

  19. Ibid., April 28, May 22, 1862. The act, calling for the first draft in American history, was passed on April 16, 1862. In September the age of eligible draftees was raised to forty-five, and in February 1864 it was extended again to cover men from ages seventeen to fifty. See Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 152–55, 260–61, for a thorough account of Confederate conscription.

  20. Mary to Alfred Bell, January 20, March 5, August 26, 1862. Mary’s reference to Alf’s encounters with prostitution was a legitimate concern as long as he was in East Tennessee. A Confederate major stationed near Knoxville wrote of that region in 1863: “Female virtue if it ever existed in this Country seems now almost a perfect wreck. Prostitutes are thickly crowded through mountain & valley in hamlet & city.” Quoted in Bell I. Wiley, Confederate Women (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 162.

  21. See George Featherstonaugh’s comment on Franklin earlier in this chapter. Franklin was not alone in its reputation for the insobriety of its citizenry. Augustus S. Merriman wrote in 1854 of Jewel Hill in nearby Madison County: “I do not know of any rival for this place in regard to drunkenness, ignorance, superstition, and the most brutal debauchery.” Newsome, “A. S. Merriman Journal,” 319. See Bruce E. Stewart, “Select Men of Sober and Industrious Habits: Alcohol Reform and Social Conflict in Antebellum Appalachia,” Journal of Southern History 73 (May 2007): 289–322.

  22. Mary to Alfred Bell, January 30, 1862. See also her letters of June 28 and August 26, 1862, and his letter of September 18, 1862.

  23. Coleman, a nephew of David L. Swain, was an ambitious and accomplished young man, who seems to have been well liked and respected by most others. There appears to be no other evidence of the problems that Alfred Bell cites with his leadership or deportment. For sketches on Coleman, see F. A. Sondley, A History of Buncombe County, North Carolina, 2 vols. (Asheville: Advocate Printing, 1930), 11, 768–69; John Preston Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History from 1730 to 1913 (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1914), 403–4; and Frontis W. Johnston (ed.), The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1963), 1:19n. For a vivid contemporary description of Coleman, see Newsome, “A. S. Merrimon Journal,” 310. The most thorough treatment of Coleman’s Civil War career is found in David C. Bailey, Farewell to Valor: A Salute to the Brothers Coleman . . . of Asheville Days Remembered (Asheville: Hexagon, 1977). Despite a detailed treatment of Coleman’s leadership of the 39th North Carolina, Bailey makes no mention of Alfred Bell or the dissension in his company.

  24. Mary to Alfred Bell, May 29, 1862.

  25. Alfred to Mary Bell, June 18, July 6, 1862; Mary to Alfred Bell, June 28, 1862.

  26. Mary to Alfred Bell, July 20, 1862.

  27. Ibid., July 27, 1862.

  28. Alfred to Mary Bell, September 1, 1862.

  29. Mary to Alfred Bell, July 27, 1862.

  30. Alfred to Mary Bell, March 31, April 8, 1864. Salena Reid was the wife of Lieutenant John Reid, who headed the other Macon County company of Coleman’s regiment. The author is grateful to Richard Melvin for information about these and other individuals in Franklin with whom the Bells interacted.

  31. Mary to Alfred Bell, April 22, June 5, 17, 1864.

  32. On the localistic nature of Union military companies and their linkage to communities, see Reid Mitchell, “The Northern Soldier and His Community,” in Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays, ed. Maris Vinovskis (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78–92. On the impact of such community-composed units on desertion rates among North Carolinians, see Peter S. Bearman, “Desertion as Localism: Army Unit Solidarity and Group Norms in the U.S. Civil War,” Social Forces 70 (December 1991): 321–42.

  33. Mary to Alfred Bell, April 4, 28, 1862.

  34. Ibid., August 26, 1862.

  35. Ibid., August 29, 1862.

  36. Ibid., April 15, 1864.

  37. Ibid., December 16, 1864.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid., November 13, 1861, June 28, 1862.

  40. Ibid., June 18, 1864; Alfred to Mary Bell, June 28, 1864.

  41. Recent studies have made it increasingly apparent that tenantry made up a significant part of the antebellum agricultural workforce in the southern highlands. See Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 116–17, table 6.1, p. 131 [for north Georgia mountains]; Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joseph D. Reid Jr., “Antebellum Southern Rental Contracts,” Explorations in Economic History 13 (January 1976): 69–83 [for Haywood County, North Carolina]; and Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood, “The Pioneer Experience to 1851,” in The History of Jackson County, North Carolina, ed. Max R. Williams (Sylva, N.C.: Jackson County Historical Association, 1987), 83–95.

  42. Mary to Alfred Bell, November 13, 1861. />
  43. Ibid., April 5, 1862.

  44. Ibid., June 13, May 22, 1862. Mary referred to Julius T. Siler, who lived across the street from the Bells, and whose family was among Macon County’s largest slaveholders. Siler’s wife, May, was David Coleman’s sister.

  45. Ibid., August 26, 1862; Alfred to Mary Bell, September 18, 1862.

  46. Mary to Alfred Bell, January 30, 1862; Alfred to Mary Bell, February 8, 1862.

  47. Mary to Alfred Bell, August 26, 29, 1862.

  48. Alfred to Mary Bell, June [n.d.], 1864.

  49. Ibid., April 10, 1864.

  50. Mary to Alfred Bell, July 8, 1864.

  51. Ibid., April 22, July 8, 1864. For context on the traditional roles of women as farmers, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Women in Agriculture during the Nineteenth Century,” in Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lou Ferleger (Ames: Iowa State University, 1990): 267–301.

  52. Mary to Alfred Bell, February 19, 1864, June 5, 1864.

  53. Crow, Storm in the Mountains, 59. The most detailed account of this and earlier raids into adjacent Cherokee County appears in Margaret Walker Freel, Our Heritage: The People of Cherokee County, North Carolina, 1540–1955 (Asheville: Miller Printing, 1956), 225–31. The only such incident reported in Macon County is an “unconfirmed story” of a Union man traveling through the county on his way to East Tennessee who was killed, beheaded, and buried between Franklin and Highlands. Sutton, Heritage of Macon County, 46.

  54. Mary to Alfred Bell, February 19, 1864.

  55. Alfred to Mary Bell, March 17, 1864.

  56. Ibid., December 9, 1862.

  57. For a fuller account of Mary Bell and her slaves, see John C. Inscoe, “The 1864 Slave Purchases of Mary Bell: The Civil War’s Empowerment of an Appalachian Woman,” in Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspective on the American Past, ed. Patricia Morton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 61–81.