The very depth and credibility of those narratives, in effect, diminished their polemical value during an era in which less ambivalent and multilayered messages were in vogue. Yet their very rich and often powerful portraits of Appalachians—along with the sheer volume of material they contain—have encouraged recent historians of the war and of the region to utilize the narratives in challenging the very mythology that was created at the same time when they, too, were being produced and read.
Notes
1. Three of the most comprehensive treatments of the nineteenth-century literature on Appalachia make no mention of the Civil War fugitive narratives. They are Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); and Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).
2. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962), ix; Louis P. Masur, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books”: Selections from Writers during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), iv. For other treatments of the Civil War as conveyed in memoir and autobiography, see Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1973); and Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 6. On the high literacy rate of Civil War soldiers, see James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 1, 4–6.
3. William B. Hesseltine, “The Propaganda Literature of Confederate Prisons,” Journal of Southern History 1 (Feb. 1935): 56. In the bibliography of Hesseltine’s earlier Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1930), 261–80, he lists 212 such works—148 books, 55 articles, and 9 nineteenth-century accounts of others’ experiences.
4. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 165–67; see also Hesseltine, “The Underground Railroad from Confederate Prisons to East Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 2 (1930): 55–69.
5. James W. Savage, “The Loyal Element of North Carolina during the War,” a pamphlet (Omaha, Neb.: privately published, 1886), 4. For other accounts of this network, see William Burson, A Race for Liberty; or, My Capture, My Imprisonment, and My Escape (Wellsville, Ohio: W. G. Foster, 1867), 80; Hesseltine, “Underground Railroad”; Paul A. Whelan, “Unconventional Warfare in East Tennessee, 1861–1865” (master’s thesis, University of Tennessee, 1963), chap. 5; and Arnold Ritt, “The Escape of Federal Prisoners through East Tennessee, 1861–1865” (master’s thesis, University of Tennessee, 1965).
6. Ella Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War (New York: Century, 1928), 200–201.
7. Savage, Loyal Element of North Carolina, 4. Savage cites a Captain Hock of the 12th New York Cavalry as the source of this information.
8. Philip N. Racine, ed., “Unspoiled Heart”: The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 236–37, 246–47.
9. J. Madison Drake, Fast and Loose in Dixie (New York: the author, 1880), 177, 117–18.
10. Ibid., 178.
11. John Azor Kellogg, Capture and Escape: A Narrative of Army and Prison Life, Original Papers, no. 2 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Commission, 1908), 165.
12. Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case, 1865), 351–52.
13. Albert D. Richardson, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (Hartford, Conn.: American, 1865), 458.
14. Ibid., 470, 473.
15. Ibid., 451.
16. Kellogg, Capture and Escape, 165–66. Emphasis in original.
17. Ibid., 459.
18. Drake, Fast and Loose in Dixie, 160.
19. A. O. Abbott, Prison Life in the South: At Richmond, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Goldsborough, and Andersonville during the Years 1864 and 1865 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1865), 236.
20. For a fuller account of such transactions, see chap. 4 in this volume, “Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists.”
21. James M. Fales, The Prison Life of James M. Fales, ed. George N. Bliss (Providence, R.I.: N. Bangs, Williams, 1882), 55–56.
22. Kellogg, Capture and Escape, 147, 149.
23. William H. Newlin, An Account of the Escape of Six Federal Soldiers from Prison at Danville, Va.: Their Travels by Night through the Enemy’s Country to the Union Pickets at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in the Winter of 1863–64, rev. ed. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Western Methodist Book Concern, 1886), 54, 56.
24. Racine, ed., “Unspoiled Heart,” 237–39.
25. Richardson, Secret Service, 444–45.
26. Browne, Four Years in Secessia, 368.
27. See Charles O. Hunt, “Our Escape from Camp Sorghum,” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Portland, Me.: Thurston Press, 1898), 1:96.
28. Burson, Race for Liberty, 79–82.
29. Michael Egan, The Flying Gray-Haired Yank; or, The Adventures of a Volunteer (Marietta, Ohio: Edgewood, 1888), 279–82. See also W. H. Parkins, How I Escaped, ed. Archibald C. Gunter (New York: Home, 1889), 118, for an account of a similar incident.
30. Alonzo Cooper, In and Out of Rebel Prisons (Oswego, N.Y.: R. J. Oliphant, 1889), 188–97.
31. Ibid., 197–98.
32. Richardson, Secret Service, 444–45.
33. Kellogg, Capture and Escape, 148.
34. James R. Gilmore, Adrift in Dixie; or, A Yankee Officer among the Rebels (New York: Carleton, 1866), 11–12. (Edmund Kirke’s name appears on the title page of the book and the author’s name does not. The author is identified by two different names elsewhere—as Gilmore in the copyright citation, and as Henry L. Estabrooks in Kirke’s introduction.)
35. Rose, Victorian America, 242–44.
36. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), discusses factors contributing to beneficent impulses of northern whites toward southern blacks after the war. Interestingly, Silber includes analyses of northern attitudes toward both blacks and mountaineers in a single chapter (chap. 5, “Of Minstrels and Mountaineers: The Whitewashed Road to Reunion,” 124–58), but within the chapter makes no attempt at linking the two.
37. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193.
38. W. H. Shelton, “A Hard Road to Travel Out of Dixie,” Century Magazine 40 (Oct. 1890): 937.
39. Hunt, “Our Escape from Camp Sorghum,” 113.
40. Charles G. Davis, “Army Life and Prison Experiences of Major Charles G. Davis,” undated typescript, in Special Collections, University of Tennessee Library, Knoxville, quoted in Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Mountain Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 137–38.
41. Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier (New York: Putnam, 1889), 232–33, quoted in Philip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 23.
42. Drake, Fast and Loose in Dixie, 148–50.
43. Ibid., 152.
44. Parkins, How I Escaped, 116–17. Parkins calls this book a novel, but it varies only slightly from his autobiographical narrative, “Between Two Flags; or, The Story of the War by a Refugee,” and his 1885 typescript in the William H. Parkins Papers, Atlanta History Center.
45. Browne, Four Years in Secessia, 421–23. Daniel Ellis identifies this “nameless heroine” as Melvina Stephens, the daughter of a “good Union man” at Kelly’s Gap, Tennessee. See Daniel Ellis, Thrilling
Adventures of Daniel Ellis, the Great Union Guide of East Tennessee for a Period of Nearly Four Years during the Great Southern Rebellion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1867), 357–58.
46. J. V. Hadley, Seven Months a Prisoner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 180–81.
47. For a more extended version of these sisters’ story, and for a discussion of other outspoken women whose loyalties often contradicted those of their husbands or parents, see chap. 6 in this volume, “Highland Households Divided.”
48. Drew Gilpin Faust, “On the Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1200–1228, quotation on 1206–7. For treatments of similar demands and the responses to them by Confederate women in Appalachia, see Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 37–56; Ralph Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles: Sandy Basin, Virginia, as a Test Case,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 59–68; and chap. 7 in this volume, “Coping in Confederate Appalachia.”
49. Kenneth W. Noe, “ ‘Appalachia’s’ Civil War Genesis: Southwest Virginia as Depicted by Northern and European Writers, 1825–1865,” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 102; and Noe, “Exterminating Savages: The Union Army and Mountain Guerrillas in Southern West Virginia, 1861–1862,” in Noe and Wilson, eds., Civil War in Appalachia, 104–30.
50. Quoted in Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolina Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 55–56. James McPherson, What They Fought For, 58–67, documents considerably more variety in Union soldiers’ attitudes toward southern blacks, noting that sentiment opposing emancipation was based on “a mixture of racism, conservatism and partisan politics,” while support for emancipation among northern troops was the result more of pragmatic than of altruistic motives.
51. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 6. For other treatments of Union soldiers’ interactions with southern women, see George C. Rabie, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), chap. 8; Nina Silber, “Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 283–305; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991), 86–87; and Glatthaar, March to the Sea, 71–76.
52. Mitchell, Vacant Chair, 98, using this quotation, notes a correlation among virtue, prettiness, and a pro-Union stance in Federal perceptions of southern women. Quotation from Albertus A. Dunham and Charles LaForrest Dunah, Through the South with a Union Soldier, ed. Arthur H. DeRosier Jr. (Johnson City, Tenn.: East Tennessee State University Research Council, 1969), 48.
53. Hesseltine, “Propaganda Literature of Confederate Prisons,” 64–65.
54. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 1.
55. This term was coined by Will Wallace Harvey in “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” Lippincott’s Magazine 12 (October 1873): 429–38.
56. Batteau applies this term to Berea College President William G. Frost, a “latter-day abolitionist” whose turn-of-the-century chronicles of mountain life made him one of the era’s most influential image makers. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 74–78.
57. James C. Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 832–49; Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 42 (August 1910): 566. See also Silber, Romance of Reunion, 143–52.
58. William G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (March 1899): 314.
59. Among the proponents of the myth of Unionist Appalachia were Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 311–19; Julian Ralph, Dixie; or, Southern Scenes and Sketches (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896); and Samuel T. Wilson, The Southern Mountaineers (New York: J. J. Little and Ives, 1914). Scholarly analyses of these and other works include Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 87–90; Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 77–79; Klotter, “Black South and White Appalachia”; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 143–52; Kenneth W. Noe, “Toward the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1865–1883,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 6 (1994): 73–80; and chap. 12 in this volume, “A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy.”
60. Quotation from Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 314.
9
“Talking Heroines”
Elite Mountain Women as Chroniclers of Stoneman’s Raid, April 1865
By the fall of 1865, Cornelia Phillips Spencer was already at work on a book that would be published the following year entitled The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina. The Chapel Hill widow took on this task at the suggestion of David Lowery Swain, former governor of the state and longtime president of the University of North Carolina. She originally conceived of—and contracted for—her narrative as a series of articles in The Watchman, a new journal established by a UNC professor at war’s end to promote sectional reconciliation. The “unexpected favor” with which readers received the series led Spencer to expand her narrative and reissue it in book form.1.
While she acknowledged in her opening pages that it would be long before the “history of the late war can be soberly and impartially written,” Spencer said she recognized that future historians would need to have evidence from private sources in order to do so, noting that “history has no more invaluable and irrefragable witnesses for the truth than are to be found in the journals, memoranda, and private correspondence of the prominent and influential men who either acted in, or were compelled to remain quiet observers of the events of their day.”2
In this statement, Spencer revealed both class and gendered biases common to her era and long afterward as to who made history and whose perspectives were worthwhile in capturing and preserving it—“prominent and influential men.” She was diligent in her attempts to obtain from such sources their own memories, correspondence, and other records in order to construct her account of the conflict’s waning days in her home state. Her own prominence in the university town—a professor’s daughter and close friend and confidante of Swain—gave her entrée to a number of connections who provided her with considerable materials, including former governors Zebulon B. Vance and William A. Graham and state Supreme Court justice Thomas Ruffin. Not surprisingly, Spencer did not seem to have actively sought such input from women around the state, though their voices occasionally made their way into her narrative.
A major part of Spencer’s book—three full chapters—chronicles General George Stoneman’s raid through western North Carolina in April 1865, a mission one later historian described as “a knife thrust into the virtually undefended back of the South.”3. As in the rest of her book, the female perspective on that traumatic culmination of the war in the southern highlands appears only fleetingly. Yet what has made this raid so striking to historians is the unusual number—and fullness—of accounts written by women who lived along Stoneman’s route and experienced encounters with his troops. Like an outspoken woman in Winchester, Virginia, who verbally challenged disruptive Union troops and was called by an admiring neighbor “one of the talking heroines,” a number of these Appalachian women in North Carolina also confronted the enemy at their doorsteps and demonstrated real courage and resolve in doing so.4. But the trait shared by all of them was the impulse to record their experiences in vivid and often heartfelt terms.
Several of these accounts are extended diary or journal entries; some are long, descriptive letters written in the moment or just afterward; and others are memoirs, which may or may not have been meant for publication, composed well after the fact. Of those pres
erved and accessible to us today, these narratives, taken together, provide fresh insights into the ways the elite women of the Carolina highlands experienced this incursion that so threatened their homes and their families and how they chose to convey their observations, feelings, and actions in written form.5. In “talking” with a pen about what they had endured, these women not only provide us with alternative perspectives on the war’s latter days than those provided by the “prominent and influential” men on whom Cornelia Spencer depended for her book; they also reveal much about class and racial tensions, for which Stoneman’s Raid proved a catalyst, and about the considerable void that separated the region’s elite from their less fortunate neighbors and fellow highlanders.6
The women who left such vivid written records of their encounters with Stoneman were (with one exception) natives of western North Carolina and were fully part of the local elites that dominated the county seats or their rural environs. Their families had been among the first to settle in these towns and fertile valleys. While not plantation mistresses, they probably had more in common with such women of the lowland South than they did with most women in their own region, those situated on more isolated highland homesteads in more remote parts of the mountains, those far more vulnerable to the fierce guerrilla warfare and bushwhacker harassment that had plagued those outlying areas for much of the war’s duration.
Most of those “talking heroines” were members of slaveholding families who owned between four and forty-two slaves in 1860.7. Their husbands and/or fathers held extensive farmlands but were just as likely to be lawyers or merchants, or engaged in other business or professional endeavors. Whereas these women endured some wartime tribulations—the absence of husbands and other men in Confederate service, shortages of various foodstuffs and household goods—they had been relatively insulated from the violence and abuse of enemy armies or mobs. Perhaps because they remained out of harm’s way until the war’s final month, these women remained committed to the Confederate cause and portrayed themselves in their narratives as true southerners.
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