Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  58. Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 69–82; and Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, chap. 8.

  59. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 82.

  60. Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), ix.

  61. Both Gordon McKinney and Ralph Mann provide richly documented accounts of the brutalization of women by the guerrilla warfare, military raids, bushwhackers, and deserters that plagued southern highlanders. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” 43–46; Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles.” For accounts of women in similar circumstances in Missouri, see Fellman, Inside War, chap. 5.

  62. Perhaps because he was a western Carolinian himself, scores of mountain women wrote to Governor Vance during the war. Much of Gordon McKinney’s analysis of highland women is based on their letters to him. There is little evidence that women’s aid societies or charitable associations were ever formed in the state west of Buncombe County. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” 54.

  63. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1206–7.

  64. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina.”

  65. Although Confederate colonel W. W. Stringfield of Thomas’s legion had used Franklin as the base for his defensive patrols during the latter part of the war, the closest military action to Franklin was the war’s final skirmish in North Carolina, which took place forty miles away in Waynesville on May 6, 1865. Arthur, Western North Carolina, 602–21, and Crow, Storm in the Mountains, 136–37.

  66. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate North Carolina, chap. 5; Freel, Our Heritage, 225–31.

  67. Examples of mountain communities torn apart by ideological differences include Shelton Laurel in Madison County, North Carolina, and Cades Cove, Tennessee. For analysis of how destructive an impact such divisions had on community life, see Paludan, Victims; and Dunn, Cades Cove, chap. 5. See also Kenneth W. Noe, “Red String Scare: Civil War Southwest Virginia and the Heroes of America,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (July 1992): 301–22; and Mann, “Family Group, Family Migration, and the Civil War in the Sandy Basin of Virginia,” 374–93.

  68. John Andrew Rice, I Came out of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 116–17, quoted in Scott, Southern Lady, 100.

  8

  “Moving through Deserter Country”

  Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War

  Outside observers have been vital to both our understanding and our misunderstanding of Appalachian society. Particularly valuable as source material on the southern highlands in the nineteenth century, their works range from the amply descriptive antebellum travel accounts of Caroline Gilman, James Buckingham, and Frederick Law Olmsted, through the local-color fiction and nonfiction of the post–Civil War popular press, to the more socially conscious tracts of missionaries, social workers, and journalists in the latter part of the century. While all these works have been and remain essential to scholars seeking to understand preindustrial mountain life, all too often they have been sources of the many stereotypes, misconceptions, and distortions to which this region, more than almost any other in the country, has been subjected.

  Among the most overlooked of regional commentaries by outside observers are those documenting one of the chapters most crucial in the Southern Appalachian experience (as of course it was for the South and the nation as a whole), the Civil War.1 No other epoch in our history has elicited written records from so vast a number of participants. Edmund Wilson, in the introduction to his Patriotic Gore, asked, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–1865 in which so many people were so articulate?” Or, as Louis Masur more recently stated, “The Civil War was a written war,” one in which hundreds of participants and observers “struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday.”2

  Among the vast literature that indeed did capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday is a considerable body of prison narratives. The most scholarly authority on the subject, William Hesseltine, noted in 1935 that the Library of Congress catalog listed almost three hundred titles of published reminiscences or personal narratives by former prisoners, most of them Union soldiers in Confederate prisons.3 Remarkably, almost a fourth of those works were by men who escaped from such prisons and whose narratives cover their post-prison experiences as fugitives. Among these, I have located twenty-five accounts by Union soldiers whose escape routes led them through the southern Appalachian Mountains.

  Published as early as 1863 and as late as 1915, these books and articles are often sensationalistic in nature and melodramatic in tone. Their titles reflect their various approaches, which range from the stark minimalism of W. H. Parkins’s How I Escaped, Alonzo Cooper’s In and Out of Rebel Prisons, and John Ennis’s Adventures in Rebel-dom to J. Madison Drake’s Fast and Loose in Dixie—which bears a typical mid-nineteenth-century subtitle that doubles as a synopsis: An Unprejudiced Narrative of Personal Experience as a Prisoner of War . . . With An Account of a Desperate Leap from a Moving Train of Cars. A Weary Tramp of Forty-five Days through Swamps and Mountains. Places and People Visited. Etc., Etc.—and Junius Browne’s Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines: Embracing a Great Variety of Facts, Incidents, and Romance of the War, Including . . . six more lines of subtitle. The literary merit of these works, like their scope and format, varies considerably, reflecting in part the very different types of experiences their authors had as soldiers, as prisoners, and as fugitives.

  Yet the narratives of those whose escape routes took them through Southern Appalachia share a great deal. In crossing what was unknown and perilous territory for most, these fugitive-authors observed and experienced the region in ways quite different from those of the more casual antebellum travelers or the late nineteenth-century mission workers and journalists. Union escapees found themselves in the highlands not by choice but by necessity. For many, the risk of capture or death was all too immediate, and their treks through this treacherous terrain were as surreptitious as they could make them. Their judgments of the people and situations they encountered often were matters of life and death. Miscalculating the lay of the land or the loyalties of those upon it could—and on occasion did—prove fatal for these men, whose survival depended on knowing which residents they could trust and which they should avoid. As literature, their writings often are seriously flawed and amateurish; yet, because these men proved so astute in their perceptions of the country through which they traveled, their accounts, taken together, provide an unusually detailed and full-bodied portrait of a section of the Confederacy that suffered as much turmoil, devastation, and deprivation as any area of the South not overrun by Union armies.

  Of the twenty-five fugitives whose narratives are considered here, just over half escaped from Camp Sorghum, a Confederate prison for Union officers in Columbia, South Carolina; most of the rest broke out of a similar facility in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two narratives involve groups of Federal soldiers who fled from a tobacco warehouse-turned-prison in Danville, Virginia. By 1864, all three of these makeshift prisons were vastly overcrowded; in both structure and manpower, security was grossly inadequate, and escapes were commonplace. The Columbia site was so poorly guarded that 373 of the 1,200 officers incarcerated there escaped before the prison was abandoned for more secure quarters.4

  For escapees from these three prisons, the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia offered the most obvious escape routes, if only because they had to be crossed in order to reach East Tennessee and eastern Kentucky beyond, the most accessible areas with predominantly Unionist populations. By the
latter half of the war, the Tennessee highlands were occupied by Union forces and thus offered even more reliable sanctuary. In addition, the rugged, sparsely settled terrain en route to those Unionist strongholds offered good hiding places, remote roads, and a populace sufficiently sympathetic to lend support and assistance along the way. In North Carolina’s highlands, there developed a network among the pro-Union minority that one “passenger,” a New York cavalry captain, described as “an underground railway, as systematic and as well arranged as that which existed in Ohio before the war.” It served two purposes, he wrote: “first to protect or secrete loyal North Carolinians who wished to avoid the rigid conscription of the south; and second, to aid in the escape of such Yankee prisoners as might choose that precarious route to freedom.”5

  Thus, a variety of circumstances made Southern Appalachia a haven for refugees of all sorts—those Ella Lonn once (oddly ignoring the escaped prisoner faction) described as “marauders, bummers, strolling vagabonds, negroes, rebel deserters, Union deserters, all bent on committing outrages.”6 These elements, combined with the divisive character of local sentiment, created an unusually volatile environment, which turned the war into an intensely localized guerrilla campaign fueled by personal animosities, vandalism, and other atrocities that had little bearing on military strategy or even ideological commitment beyond regional or community concerns.

  The prison escape narratives provide an abundance of detail and insight into the dynamics of this inner war. This chapter focuses specifically on how their authors treated the three groups of mountain residents with whom they had the most direct contact, and who thus emerge as the dominant and most sharply etched characters: Unionists, women, and blacks. Because it was those segments of the mountain populace upon whom the success of their escapes and their chances of survival hinged, the fugitive writers, not surprisingly, portrayed all three in the most sympathetic, admiring, and often idealized terms. Despite the obvious bias apparent in these accounts, however, the graphic detail, expansive coverage, and relative consistency of the portrayals of southern highlanders in these twenty-five works make them valuable and generally credible source materials. No other contemporary coverage of the Civil War in Southern Appalachia portrays as vast a spectrum of the population as vividly or with as much complexity and nuance as do these works.

  Among the more elusive aspects of the war in the highland South are the extent and nature of Unionist sentiment in the region. These aspects, too, have been among those most subjected to myth and distortion since the conflict ended. While the fugitive narratives are no more helpful than those of later scholars in explaining why certain highlanders pledged allegiance to either the Union or the Confederacy, they do provide a great deal of descriptive detail and generous commentary on the many individuals and groups the fugitives encountered. Like so many other treatments of the subject, their narratives often exaggerated the extent of Unionist sentiment in the region or tended to see the populaces of all highland locales as committed to the Union.

  A New York officer, moving westward after escaping from Salisbury, stated that western North Carolina “was to the full as loyal as West Virginia.”7 Such an assessment is a distortion and, in part, may typify attempts by many of these authors, particularly those publishing their work during or just after the war, to stress to northern readers the diversity of southern views, the strength of pro-Union loyalties in some parts of the South, and the deteriorating support for the Confederate government among southern civilians.

  Such misconceptions were sufficiently widespread that some escapees actually entered highland areas with a false—and dangerous—sense of security about the prevalence of Unionist sentiment, only to have this complacency shaken once they encountered a very different reality. During his 1864 escape from Columbia en route to Knoxville, Major Charles Mattocks of Maine stated in his journal that, in crossing into North Carolina, “our Rubicon is passed. . . . We now feel highly encouraged and think we have accomplished the most dangerous portion of our journey. Visions optimistic begin to loom up.” His optimism proved premature, though; he and several companions were captured ten days later by Rebel scouts deep in the Smoky Mountains, just a mile and a half from the Tennessee state line.8

  A Salisbury escapee noted, as he and his fellow fugitives entered western North Carolina, “We experienced little trouble in finding ‘friends,’ for they were everywhere.” Soon thereafter, they were startled to find themselves face to face with a local Confederate officer, who charged them with being “d—n Yankees.” The prisoners panicked, but the officer quickly alleviated their fear by informing them that, as the father of three sons killed in battle and another dying of fever in a Delaware prison, he had lost all interest in the war. He allowed the Union men to proceed unharmed, but, once out of his sight, they raced away, still unsure of his intentions or truthfulness. They agreed that “hereafter we must be more careful, and not act on the hypothesis that every person we meet is devoted to the Union, even though he is a North Carolinian.”9

  It is hardly surprising that these authors so often romanticized the heroism and self-sacrifice of the resident Unionists they encountered. J. Madison Drake met “hundreds of this class” in Caldwell County, North Carolina, along with many of their “boon companions, the lyers-out.” “In all my wanderings,” Drake wrote, “I had never seen a more intelligent or determined people. Mingling with them, as I did for weeks, I thought of the brave defenders of the Tyrol, of the hardy Waldenses, fighting and dying among the hills for dear Liberty’s sake.” Although many had been comfortable farmers before the war, during the conflict their loyalties had reduced them to poverty and ruin, he claimed, and forced them to abandon everything—their homes and their families—to go into hiding, all “because of their devotion to the Government.”10

  A Wisconsin colonel, fleeing through the mountains of north Georgia in hopes of reaching Sherman’s army, confirmed this description, noting that “with few exceptions, these were rough, unlettered men . . . but generous, hospitable, brave, and Union men to the core; men who would suffer privations, and death itself, rather than array themselves in strife against the Stars and Stripes, the emblem of the country they loved. . . . Uneducated though they were, under their homespun jackets beat hearts pure as gold, and stout as oaks.”11

  For some, such praise was a bit more forced and required some rationalization. In a chapter on “Union Bushwhackers,” Junius Browne acknowledged that these southern allies were hardly passive victims of Confederate harassment. He admitted that they often took the offensive and that their aggression, like that of their Confederate oppressors, “was treacherous, coldly calculating, brutal.” Yet, he wrote, “I cannot find it in my heart to blame many of the men who resort to it in the mountainous regions of North Carolina and Tennessee.” He explained their transformation: “They were quiet, peaceable, industrious, loyal; opposed to the doctrine of Secession, and all its attendant heresies; the natural antagonists of the Slaveholders; lovers of the Union for the Union’s sake, and regarded as an enemy whoever would seek its destruction. . . . Domestic by nature and habits, they were unwilling to quit their firesides and the few acres that had been their World. They would rather die than surrender all they valued in life. Yet they could not stay at home.” After describing the harassment to which they had been subjected by their neighbors and by Home Guard troops, Browne concluded, “It is not difficult to conceive how a few months of such experience would transform a man from an enduring saint to an aggressive demon.”12

  Albert Richardson, a New York Tribune correspondent (and Browne’s companion in many of their southern exploits), was perhaps the worst offender in patronizing the “Union mountaineers” he met. “Theirs was a very blind and unreasoning loyalty, much like the disloyalty of some enthusiastic Rebels. . . . They had little education; but when they began to talk about the Union their eyes lighted wonderfully, and sometimes they grew really eloquent. . . . They regarded every Rebel as necessarily an unmitigat
ed scoundrel, and every Loyalist, particularly every native-born Yankee, almost as an angel from heaven.” Richardson perhaps strains readers’ credibility most in asserting the mountaineers’ great affection for the North. “How earnestly they questioned us about the North!” he wrote. “How they longed to escape thither! To them, indeed, it was the Promised Land.”13

  The more Unionists Richardson encountered in moving westward toward Tennessee, the more noble they became. He much belabored the extent of their suffering: “Almost every loyal family had given to the Cause some of its nearest and dearest. We were told so frequently—‘My father was killed in those woods;’ or ‘The guerrillas shot my brother in that ravine’—that, finally, these tragedies made little impression upon us.” Later on, after listening to a woman along the Blue Ridge relate stories of her family’s trials and tribulations, Richardson waxed poetic: “The history of almost every Union family was full of romance. Each unstoried mountain stream had its incidents of daring, of sagacity, and of faithfulness; and almost every green hill had been bathed in that scarlet dew from which ever springs the richest and ripest fruit.”14

  Despite the exaggeration and sentimentality that infects much of this work, the fugitive accounts offer some of the most thorough assessments we have of both the extent of Unionist sentiment in the mountains and the varying degrees of commitment associated with it. Even though Unionists are the central and most vividly portrayed figures in these narratives, their authors make it quite clear that they were very much a minority in most parts of the southern highlands. Although some areas of north Georgia and western North Carolina were known as strongholds of Unionist sentiment (one fugitive, for instance, noted that Wilkes County, North Carolina, had acquired a reputation among the rebels as “the old United States”),15 there never was a highland area where local Unionists felt safe or comfortable among their neighbors, or where the fugitives themselves felt that they were not in enemy territory until they crossed the state line into Tennessee.