Such an assessment is equally applicable to the women of Appalachia, and the escaped prisoner narrators depicted that full range of responses among the women they encountered. While most accounts of the plight of Appalachian women during the war have stressed their victimization, these fugitive narratives suggest that just as often they, like Fellman’s Missouri women, were assertive and effective participants in local conflicts. Although they never neglected, and often movingly conveyed, the sacrifices and hardships endured by highland women during the war, the fugitive narrators were even more impressed with the strength, resourcefulness, and courage of the women—both Unionist and Confederate—they encountered. No doubt because the Federal fugitives so were often the recipients of their aid, Unionist women were among the figures most celebrated in these narratives. More significant, perhaps, these works demonstrate the extent to which such women played key roles in the subversive activity that undermined Confederate strength in the region, often in surprisingly militant and physically aggressive ways.
Women were among the most outspoken partisans in the region, and the fugitives never resisted the temptation to quote their tough talk expressing devotion to the cause. A “voluble, hatchet-faced, tireless woman” in Cashiers, North Carolina, hosted a group of refugees who “listened in amused wonder to the tongue of this seemingly untamed virago, who . . . cursed, in her high-pitched tones, for a pack of fools the men who had brought on the war.”38 Aunt Becky, an elderly woman in Henderson County, North Carolina, was quoted by another fugitive as having said, “I ain’t afraid of those rebels. I tell them, ‘you may hang old Aunt Becky if you want to, but with the last breath I draw I will shout, Hurrah for the Union!’ ”39
A young girl who guarded the entrance to beleaguered Cades Cove in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, using a horn to warn her community of approaching danger, told a Massachusetts fugitive that she would tell anyone attempting to take her horn to go to hell. The reply of this young “sentinel,” he claimed, “was rather a surprise to me as I had always had a great respect for women, but had met only the kind that used soft words.” Yet he obviously admired her and understood the situation that induced such manly language, noting that the soft-spoken women he had known up to that point “had not been on the ‘battle line,’ so to speak,” and had lived in pleasant homes and surroundings.40
In some instances, such defiance conveyed vindictive intent. In an 1887 memoir, Frank Wilkeson, a Union private who had served at an Alabama refugee camp for southern Unionist civilians, wrote of the Appalachian women who had sought safe haven there. They were determined that the Confederate neighbors from whom they had fled should pay for their actions. “I heard them repeat over and over to their children the names of men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle,” he recalled. “These women, who have been driven from their homes by the most savage warfare our country had been cursed with . . . impressed me as living wholly to revenge their wrongs.”41
An intriguing dimension of many of these descriptions of highland women lies in two features that, in terms of Victorian values, seem contradictory. While fully documenting the ways in which these women assumed the roles of protector, provider, and guardian of their homes, their families, and often their husbands, the fugitives spared no romantic cliché or florid Victorian flight of prose in describing the femininity and sexual allure of these hearty belligerents in skirts
Under the chapter heading “A Noble Woman,” for example, J. Madison Drake recounted an incident in which a woman discovered him and his companions as they hid in a ravine near her remote cabin. “She was a typical woman of the North Carolina mountains,” Drake wrote. “No shadow of fear manifested itself in her somewhat masculine features, as she boldly advanced toward us.” Mrs. Estes, as he later learned to call her, demanded that the Union prowlers identify themselves and offered them food if they could assure her that they were not in the area to round up deserters. “You must not use any deceit [or] you will be shot down where you stand. A dozen true rifles are now levelled on you, and if I raise my hand you will fall dead at my feet. . . . If you turn out to be spies, seeking the life of my husband and his friends, you will rue the day you ventured into this wild.” Drake concluded, “We had never met before such a woman . . . certainly the bravest of her sex.”42
Once Drake and his companions had affirmed their northern identities and assured Mrs. Estes that they posed no danger to her deserter husband, she became a kind and generous ally. Her hospitality proved boundless; once ensconced as a comfortable, well-fed guest in her cabin, Drake focused less on her masculine features and fearless demeanor, remarking instead that “she looked quite handsome now, having combed her hair smoothly down her ruddy cheeks, and with her comely form robed in a green dress . . . and a gracious smile, worthy of a queen.”43
Other physically enticing women proved equally hardened to the realities of the conflict encroaching upon their remote highland homes. Along the Nolichucky River in western North Carolina, William Parkins, a fugitive from South Carolina, was taken in by a Unionist sympathizer known as “Old Yank” and his daughters, described by Parkins as “three comely, bright-eyed, lithe but buxom mountain maidens.” In relating the harassment he had endured at the hands of Confederates as a result of his nickname and well-known sympathies, Old Yank told Parkins that, in response to one attempt to force him into service, “I just reached ’round the door and pulled out my Henry rifle, an’ my gals understood it an’ got their double-barreled shotguns, an’ I just told them boys I had lived too long in the mountains to be scared that way, an’ if they . . . laid hands on an ole man like me they’d never do it agin, fur my gals had the bead on ’em.”44
Junius Browne wrote of “A Nameless Heroine” in East Tennessee, who, though only sixteen or seventeen years old, “had assisted many true men out of awkward predicaments and dangerous situations, and had shown herself willing at all times to aid them.” Working closely with that most notorious of mountain Unionist guides, Daniel Ellis, “she had often arisen at night when she obtained intelligence of importance, and communicated it to loyalists some miles distant, preventing their capture or murder by the enemy.” Browne, obviously quite taken with this teenager’s courage and capabilities, devoted several pages of his book to recounting her exploits in much detail. Clearly, he was much taken with her demeanor, noting that she was “decidedly fair, intelligent, of graceful figure, and possessed of that indispensable requisite to an agreeable woman—a sweet voice.” He confessed to gazing at her “as she sat there, calm, smiling, comely, with the warm blood of youth flushing in her cheek, under the flood of mellow moonlight that bathed all the landscape in poetic softness and picturesque beauty.”45 While such descriptions likely reflect the natural proclivities of military males too long denied female companionship, it is obvious that much of the attraction had to do with more substantive and less sexual qualities.
Fugitives’ interest in the women they encountered often lay in their independent and often outspoken views regarding the war and their courage in expressing those views. Soon after moving into North Carolina after an escape from Columbia’s Camp Sorghum, Captain J. V. Hadley and a group of fellow fugitives approached three young women in Flat Rock, in Henderson County, taking the opportunity “to investigate the Union sentiment in the mountains.” The men identified themselves as Confederate soldiers and were surprised to receive a stern lecture from one of the girls, who blamed the men for bringing on the war. Her tirade serves as one of the few explicit declarations of mountain Unionists’ opposition to the Confederate cause. “For a few niggers,” she charged the soldiers, “you’ve driven this country to war, and force men into the army to fight for you who don’t want to go, and you’ve got the whole country in such a plight that there’s nothing going on but huntin’ and killin’ . . . all the time.”46 Pleased with the girl’s response and impressed with her courage in confronting what she thought were enemy sol
diers, Hadley and his companions revealed their true allegiances to her and her sisters, and received aid and shelter from them.47
Drew Gilpin Faust has noted the number of southern women who expressed a yearning to be men during the course of the Civil War. While none of the women encountered and quoted here ever articulated a wish for what Faust calls “a magical personal deliverance from gender restraints,” many demonstrated to the Union fugitives whom they aided just how capable they were of crossing the lines of traditional gender roles to meet the new demands the war imposed on them.48 Of equal significance, though, is the degree to which the fugitives admired and celebrated the manly virtues and masculine role-playing—the practical and ideological independence, the assertiveness, and even the militancy—of the Union women whom they encountered, particularly when these women were serving the fugitives’ interests and needs so well.
How, then, are we to assess the value of this “subgenre” of Civil War literature as a commentary on Southern Appalachian society? In contrast to most depictions of mountaineers during the nineteenth century, these accounts present appraisals of their subjects that are far more positive than most. Northern fugitive soldiers brought fewer preconceptions and prejudices concerning southern mountain life into the region. Their intent at the time was neither to observe, nor comment upon, nor improve what they found. In the midst of a war in which their lives were very much at stake, the escaped prisoners characterized mountaineers in terms of their behaviors and attitudes, noting the extent to which both served to alleviate their own predicaments. Their status as hunted men was crucial to their powers of observation and criteria for assessment.
Other Union soldiers who moved through Appalachia had far different reactions to the highlanders with whom they had to interact. Southwestern Virginia was inundated with Federal troops intermittently throughout the war, with major incursions into the region in late 1861 and early 1864. Kenneth Noe has analyzed the letters, diaries, and regimental histories produced by those soldiers and finds their characterizations of the highland populace they observed “by far some of most degrading depictions of mountain people ever penned.” They dismissed their subjects in much harsher terms than did those who moved through the same area before the war. Typical of the former commentaries is that of Rutherford B. Hayes, who served in the area with the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry in 1861 and 1862. “What a good-for-nothing people the mass of these western Virginians are!” he wrote, going on to refer to them as “unenterprising, lazy, narrow, listless and ignorant, members of a helpless and harmless race.”49
Nor were Union troops as tolerant or as generous as the fugitives toward the blacks or white women with whom they came in contact in moving through the Confederacy. In his study of the behavior and attitudes of Sherman’s troops, Joseph Glatthaar found that, while attitudes toward the many slaves and former slaves with whom the troops came in contact varied greatly, they harbored a great deal of resentment toward blacks and often mistreated them. An Ohio captain confirmed that “the silly prejudice of color is as deeply rooted among northern as among southern men. Very many of our soldiers have as yet no idea of treating this oppressed race with justice.”50
In his book on Federal soldiers’ experiences and perceptions of the war, Reid Mitchell, in a chapter entitled “She-Devils,” noted the extent to which northern troops condemned southern women for their savagery, their treachery, and the “irrational zeal” with which they supported the rebellion and drove their men to do likewise. Such contempt for these women, whom many Federals saw as the most determined and even dangerous of Rebels, cast them as little more than prostitutes or “loose women” devoid of the virtues characteristic of northern womanhood.51
In all such cases, both in and outside Appalachia, invading or occupying forces were fully secure and in control of their situations. No doubt, they rarely were intimate with, or particularly dependent upon, those into whose communities they had intruded. One wonders whether Hayes and his comrades would have been so contemptuous of those remote Virginia highlanders had they been forced to move through the same territory as escaped prisoners. By the same token, one wonders how differently the men of Sherman’s army of liberation would have reacted toward slaves and slavery had they, as prisoners on the run in enemy territory, found the aid of those slaves vital to their survival. Ironically, too, the qualities that Union troops found so contemptible in Confederate “she-devils”—their toughness and stubborn resolve—were the very ones that the fugitives, grateful to their female allies, celebrated in their descriptions of those women. The physical allure of these highland heroines seems to have been directly correlated with their ideological correctness. An Illinois private’s observation from East Tennessee—“There is some good looking girls down heare, union girls that is”—is a blatant example of the interplay of sexual and political biases conveyed with only slightly more subtlety in many of the fugitive narratives.52
Dependence and gratitude tend to breed tolerance and open-mindedness. No other travelers through Southern Appalachia ever were so dependent upon the highlanders they met or had as much reason for gratitude toward them as did these escaped prisoners of war. The aid they received, the kindnesses bestowed upon them, and the collusion with those of like loyalties assured the safe passage, and even saved the lives, of many Union fugitives; hence they were predisposed to portray those responsible in a generous light. As a result, mountain Unionists appear as men of intelligence, courage, and steady resolve; their wives as both “angels of mercy” and strong, determined, and capable fighters; and mountain slaves as intelligent, cunning, defiant, and patriotic allies.
But such impressions, if they registered at all, proved fleeting in the national mindset. William Hesseltine, in assessing the propagandistic purposes of the prison narratives, maintained that their authors wrote of the atrocities they endured in southern prisons in order to assure the South’s punishment during Reconstruction, and to keep alive public resentment of Rebel cruelties. “No group in America furnished more gore for the bloody shirt,” Hesseltine claimed, “than ex–prisoners of war.”53 Such motives may also have inspired the neoabolitionist tone of several of the narratives.
The prison passages of these works, along with others, served as effective antisouthern propaganda; curiously, though, the post-prison sections dealt with here had little or no influence in shaping more positive perceptions of the one group of southerners they consistently portrayed in a favorable light—those in Appalachia during this very period in which a national consciousness of the region was emerging—but in very different terms. The literary and socially conscious “discovery”—or, as Allen Batteau terms it, the “invention”—of Appalachia by northerners in the late nineteenth century served “to provide American society with colorful characters for its fiction, perfect innocents for its philanthropy, and an undeveloped wilderness in which to prove its pioneering blood.”54 It took demeaning and distorted imagery to do so. By the 1870s and 1880s, just as many of the fugitive narratives were being published, other accounts were also emerging, portraying Appalachia as “a strange land and peculiar people.”55 In such accounts, southern mountaineers emerged as depraved and semi-barbaric people, notable for their moonshining, feuding, and inbreeding, as well as for their poverty and ignorance.
At the same time, a more uplifting aspect of Appalachian mythmaking also was under way: the creation of “Holy Appalachia.”56 Much of the appeal to those discovering the region in the latter half of the nineteenth century was its apparent ethnic purity, its whiteness. Historian James Klotter has reasoned that rampant racism and other barriers thwarted philanthropic impulses toward southern freedmen during Reconstruction. Those impulses then were transferred to another group of southerners perceived as equally needy and perhaps more deserving—the mountaineers who were, in the words of a turn-of-the-century ethnographer, the “purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States.”57
Other northerners, intent upon sectional reconciliation wit
h the South, found its highlanders’ wartime loyalty—that “union column thrust deep into the heart of the Confederacy”—vital to its mission of bringing the country together. They were quick to exploit a corollary of Appalachia’s image as a solid bastion of Unionism by suggesting that this lack of support for the Confederacy was due to highlanders’ opposition to slavery. According to one lofty assertion, Appalachians “cherish liberty as a priceless heritage. They would never hold slaves and we may almost say they will never be enslaved.”58
The fugitive prison narratives could not be used to buttress such views of the highland South. Their depiction of regular and constant contact between slaves and free blacks throughout the mountains clashed with the image of Appalachia as both a slaveless region and a racially pure populace. By the same token, those who championed Appalachians’ unwavering commitment to the Union would have found these narratives questionable sources of validation. While mountain Unionists emerge as the heroes and heroines of the fugitive accounts, they also make quite apparent their minority status within their region; their heroism stems from the fact that they were forced to cope within an ideologically hostile environment.
In short, there seems to have been little place in the rapidly evolving imagery of postbellum Appalachia for the more complex and nuanced narratives of the Civil War fugitives. Not only did these accounts undermine the stereotypes of a primitive, violent, and depraved people; they also showed a populace more diverse in terms of race, political ideology, and socioeconomic circumstances than the dictates of regional stereotyping and image making could bear. While these narratives contradict—and might have provided useful correctives for—much of the simplistic condescension with which the region was being perceived after the war, there is no evidence that they were ever put to such use.59 One can speculate that, upon close scrutiny, such sources proved less useful because their complexities, contradictions, and variables would have diluted the simplicity of the myth that, when the war came, “Appalachian America clave to the old flag.”60
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