Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  In hindsight, it seems rather remarkable that most of these women remained so oblivious to such attacks and other upheavals. In 1862, soon after moving to the French Broad Valley of Buncombe County from her family’s Mississippi plantation, Katherine Polk Gale commented on her new home: “Peace & plenty ruled everywhere. The country was so shut in from the world, it seemed almost impossible for the desolations of war to reach the happy homes along the route.” Much of her account of the war years in Asheville dwells on the hospitality she enjoyed and the friendships she made among “the many charming, cultivated people” there. “Though we knew in Asheville, the war was going on relentlessly,” she wrote, “there was nothing in our surroundings to suggest it, as we were so far removed from everything connected with it.”8

  A number of these women, situated as they were in county seats or in the broad valleys along the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, expressed similar degrees of complacency in terms of their own comfort and safety for much of the war’s duration. Most were part of close kinship or neighborhood networks that provided both social interaction with other women of their own class and a mutual support system that allowed them to weather both material and emotional burdens the war imposed. Emma L. Rankin in McDowell County spoke for many of her peers when she wrote, “Up to the winter of ’64–’65 our experience of the trials of the war was confined to the anxiety about friends in the army, and the privations which were lightly esteemed and cheerfully borne, hoping always for a joyful end. True we were far from blockade goods, but what cared we. . . . We had thought it highly improbable that a blue-coat would ever be seen in our secluded region.”9. As late as February 1865, Ella Harper, Rankin’s sister-in-law in Lenoir, acknowledged to her husband their good fortune in being “exempt from the severe forms of trial incident to this dreadful war.”10

  Such impressions could hardly have differed more from those of far less privileged and far more vulnerable women elsewhere in the region. As Katherine Gale was enjoying a pleasant social life in Asheville, women in adjacent Madison County were being whipped and hanged by their fingers by Union troops seeking information about their husbands’ whereabouts. The guerrilla warfare that wracked the more remote parts of both the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains made many women both active agents and likely targets of the ruthless violence and deliberate cruelties it spawned.11. For other poor women, crop failure, the disruption of access to market goods, and the destruction or theft of livestock, foodstuffs, or other property vital to their welfare meant that starvation posed the greatest challenge they faced during the war years. Much of that desperation comes through in the letters of such women, often barely literate, to Governor Zebulon Vance, himself a native of the region, and thus assumed by many in the mountains to be a sympathetic resource for alleviating their problems.12

  There is little evidence that the elite women felt much sympathy for their more beleaguered neighbors’ suffering. Class distinctions were never far from the surface in their commentary on those from whom they so distanced themselves. Mary Bell, of Franklin, North Carolina, for instance, expressed her disdain for less fortunate men and women who faced a Union raid in the northwestern part of her own county. “It was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of,” she wrote to her husband, Alfred. “I think evry man in Macon Co., except those that were too old to get away skidadled.” She was no more sympathetic toward the frightened women left behind, as she described the two or three days in which they had had to endure the prospect of “fine times during yankee holadays.” In a somewhat scornful tone, she detailed a variety of mishaps other women encountered in their efforts to hide their valuables and livestock and to safeguard their homes, much of which comes across as little more than slapstick in her irreverent retelling of various incidents.13

  In Wilkes County, Lizzie Lenoir, a member of one of that area’s oldest and most prominent families, conveyed nothing but contempt for women who raided granaries in nearby Jonesville in January 1865. This was the last of several “bread riots” instigated by groups of women throughout the Confederacy, who were driven to mob action by food shortages and their frustration at local officials’ failure to respond in any equitable way. Like most others, this effort failed, much to Lenoir’s satisfaction. Somewhat bemusedly, she informed her aunt of a “band of women, armed with axes” who converged in wagons on a granary and demanded its ground corn. “There was only one man in the place,” she wrote, “and he (Leonidas like) stood in the door of the house and bid defiance to the crowd. You know women generally want to carry their point, and it was with great difficulty that our hero could withstand them. They were happily thrown into confusion by an old drunk man coming up with a huge brush in his hand, striking their horses with it, causing them to run away with their wagons, and some of them in it.” She concluded smugly, “They didn’t get any of the corn.”14

  Neither of these women showed any sympathy, much less empathy, for the desperate plight of the wives and mothers driven to such drastic measures. Only with Stoneman’s Raid three months later did the region’s female elite face the same sort of trauma themselves. Their complacency came to an abrupt end thanks to a New York general and the six thousand cavalrymen he led in wreaking havoc on their towns, villages, and valleys in April 1865. Major General George Stoneman, a West Point graduate, headed up the district of East Tennessee early in 1865 when General Ulysses S. Grant ordered him to lead a cavalry raid into the interior of South Carolina, “visiting a portion of the state which will not be reached by Sherman’s forces,” including Columbia. His orders were to destroy railroads and other military resources, and then to move to Salisbury, North Carolina, the site of a major Confederate prison, on his way back to East Tennessee, and liberate its Union prisoners. Grant also saw Stoneman’s mission as a diversionary tactic, drawing away from Sherman’s path at least some of the Confederate forces that would otherwise challenge his march northward.15

  Owing to a series of delays, Sherman had already taken Columbia and had moved on into North Carolina by the time Stoneman was ready to move. His mission was thus scaled back to a raid on the Salisbury prison, with the destruction of property and military resources a secondary goal as his troops moved through the North Carolina mountains, thus preventing either General Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia or General Joseph E. Johnston’s around Raleigh from making a westward retreat through North Carolina.

  On March 28, Stoneman crossed the state line into North Carolina with his six thousand horsemen, nearly all the available cavalrymen then in East Tennessee. While most of these troops were units from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky, a sizable number of “home Yankees” were along as well, many of them Carolina highlanders recruited into Union service. They first attacked and ransacked the small town of Boone, whose residents the approaching raiders caught fully by surprise. From there they moved east out of the mountains and through foothill communities until they reached their ultimate destination of Salisbury on April 12, where they destroyed vast supply depots, public buildings, cotton mills and tanneries, a foundry, and the prison—although Confederate authorities had moved its few remaining occupants to Charlotte a month before. From Salisbury, Stoneman’s forces split: two brigades, under Brigadier General Alvan C. Gillem, headed directly west again, attacking similar targets in several towns as they moved toward Asheville, like Salisbury a community that Union forces targeted because of its role as a center of Confederate activity. Colonel William Palmer led a third brigade south toward Lincolnton and Charlotte before turning west toward Asheville. Stoneman himself, having achieved the primary goal of the raid in Salisbury’s destruction, returned to Tennessee, taking with him nearly a thousand prisoners, mostly home guardsmen and Confederate veterans who had returned home, either injured or ill.

  The destruction of Boone set a pattern of disruption and property damage that the Union forces continued to inflict on other towns along their route—though with significant variations. The degree of damage done depended in pa
rt on how local citizens responded to the raid. Thus Winston and Salem, then two separate towns, escaped harm when the mayor and a contingent of leading citizens greeted the invading force on the outskirts of town waving white handkerchiefs. At the other extreme, Morganton citizens sought to ambush Stoneman’s men as they moved west from Salisbury—and paid a heavy price for their resistance. In reaction to such local aggression, the most intense home defense they had faced on this mission, the Federal troops were allowed to engage in wholesale plundering of the nearly deserted town and harassment of the few remaining residents—mainly women—on a scale not yet authorized. Likewise, Asheville, simply by its well-recognized role as the region’s center of Confederate activity, faced the final and most brutal attack by Stoneman’s men. The unexpectedness of an incursion on this scale caught many, if not most, residents there off guard. Part of their shock came from the fact that this attack came two days after an armistice had been reached by General Gillem and the Confederate commander, General James G. Martin, on April 26.

  One of the more striking aspects of the encounters between these Union forces and the elite women whose homes and property they threatened was the willingness of many of the women to play the role of “talking heroines,” that is, to personally confront either Stoneman himself or another of his officers either as supplicants or in defiance. Emma Rankin of Lenoir, who tutored Colonel Logan Carson’s children at his Pleasant Gardens farm in nearby McDowell County, was quick to challenge “an impudent lieutenant” who asked her where the horses had been hidden. When he refused to believe her reply that the slaves had hidden them, noting that he was from Kentucky and knew as much about blacks as she did, “I told him that if he was a Kentuckian he ought to be ashamed of being in that band of marauders.” After more of his insolence, Rankin wrote, he left in search of the horses, assuring her that they would find the horses, that “Yankees never fail in search.”16

  Rankin, like others, also reported kindnesses from individual soldiers. When a Union cavalryman strayed from his passing company and galloped up to the door and asked to see Miss Rankin, she said, “If his Satanic majesty had called for me, I could scarcely have been more astonished.” He told her that he had guarded her father’s house in Lenoir from the vandals that often followed in their wake and was delivering to her a letter from her father, as he had promised to do. He assured her that “Lenoir was not injured by us at all,” though she claimed she knew that they had “eaten up the meager supplies which the village afforded, if nothing more.”17

  The detail with which these women recounted such exchanges suggests that they took real satisfaction in their own boldness in confronting the enemy invaders. In Lenoir, one of the towns taken early by Stoneman’s raiders, General Gillem confronted Callie Hagler and “impertinently” said to her: “I know you are a rebel from the way you move—Ain’t you a Rebel?” She replied by asking him if he had ever heard the story of the tailor’s wife and the scissors. When he said he had, she said, “Then I am a rebel as high as I can reach” and wrote that her answer seemed to amuse him. Yet on another occasion soon afterward, Gillem was not so amused. Hagler recalled, “While denouncing the cruelties of the Confederates to their prisoners, he became very angry at [me] for venturing to suggest that the Federal authorities might have saved them all the alleged suffering by exchanging and taking them North where provisions were plenty.”18

  That such women could actually debate such issues with the enemy invading their towns and homes suggests a certain affinity, based on mutual class consciousness, between Union officers and local elites who sensed each other as socioeconomic equals. Many of these women recognized and appreciated the distinction between well-bred Union officers and the more uncouth soldiers under their command. Mary Taylor Brown, who lived on the outskirts of Asheville, defended her socializing with General Gillem and other Union officers. “When I come in contact with a gentleman,” she wrote, “I respect him as a gentleman, no matter if he does not agree in sentiment with me. I think some of the people of Asheville make themselves appear very ridiculous in their scornful manners toward the Federals.”19

  Such respect was often mutual. Colonel Palmer, one of Stoneman’s commanders, confirmed his own sensitivity to such bonds. He later wrote of the leading citizens of Wilkes County’s Happy Valley community, saying that he respected their leadership and the extent to which their neighbors looked up to them. He singled out one of those for particular praise, describing him as “one of the finest specimens of a country gentlemen that I have ever met. . . . Although he was a rebel, [he] belonged to the Free-Masonry of Gentlemen, and before I knew it I found myself regretting every bushel of corn that we fed, and sympathizing for every one of his fence rails that we were compelled to burn. . . . He was a man of fine feelings, had always been generous and kind to his poor neighbors, who were chiefly loyal, and was spoken of in the highest terms.” Palmer concluded, “We frequently meet such gentlemen in our marches, and always make it a point to leave them as far as possible unmolested so that they may remain to teach nobility by example to the communities in which they live.”20

  Those residents fortunate enough to have been the beneficiaries of this partiality toward “country-gentlemen” were, of course, relieved to be spared, and some seemed a little smug in taking credit for the exemptions they were well aware that many in the region had not enjoyed. After seeing that her town escaped any severe repercussions from yet a second visit from the invading Yankees, Laura Norwood declared, “I was proud of the way Lenoir acted—all stuck together and the Yankees said they liked us better than any people they had met.” Lest that observation imply any undue consorting with the enemy, Norwood added with equal pride that they claimed “it was the d—est little rebel town they ever saw.”21

  But such appreciation for southern noblesse oblige and class hierarchy did not extend to the rank and file of Stoneman’s troops, and it certainly did not save all of the western Carolina elite from the pillaging and harassment. Nor were all officers as sympathetic as some were. “Much depended on the personal character and disposition of the commanding officer of these detachments,” Cornelia Spencer wrote. “If he happened to be a gentleman, the people were spared as much as possible; if he were simply a brute dressed in a little brief authority, every needless injury was inflicted, accompanied with true underbred insolence and malice.”22 The term “underbred” suggests the extent to which class distinctions underlie these judgments, just as insolent and malicious behavior marked men as common and unschooled in the deference they should have shown their social superiors, even if they were southerners.

  Gillem and his men were among those most resented for their ruthless disregard for women in particular. Callie Hagler of Lenoir, mentioned earlier, paid dearly for confronting him. She had “naturally supposed that his presence would protect her person and property” and that of her daughter and her niece, who lived nearby. But according to a local informant, “On the contrary, his proximity seemed to give license to great pillage and outrage, for they suffered more than any one else in the village.” The home of Hagler’s daughter was “pillaged from top to bottom,” as soldiers broke open barrels of sorghum and poured it over a large supply of wheat and over the floors of the house. They destroyed furniture and crockery, and “what was not broken was defiled in a manner so disgusting as to be unfit for use.” When Hagler went to Gillem and asked him to control his men, he turned his back on her, stating simply, “Well, there are bad men in all crowds.”23

  Verena Chapman, the wife of a Presbyterian minister in Hendersonville, had an equally negative experience with Gillem’s contingent. When she wrote a year later to Cornelia Spencer, her anger at the treatment inflicted on her and others in the area was still palpable—largely because they were victimized after the armistice had been signed. “Not supposing for a moment that even these faithless, dishonourable, Constitution-breaking vandals would be utterly regardless of the law of nations,” Mrs. Chapman vented, “as to proceed in
the face of a known truce to overrun and destroy the region through which they were passing.” Nothing in their treatment toward highland residents had changed as a result of this truce. “All the way from Rutherfordton,” she claimed, “they had swept the country of negroes, horses, and carriages, clothing, and supplies of every kind.” (The very items she listed suggest that it was not the poor whose violation she resented.) Not only did such theft continue as they moved from Hendersonville to Asheville, but when “some delicate high-bred ladies followed them to their encampment to endeavour to regain their horses and carriages, they were treated by the yankee officers with great indignity and disrespect.”24

  This effrontery earned the Federal troops her long-sustained contempt. As late as May 1866, Chapman continued to defy the efforts of her reverend husband to moderate her resentment and see some redeeming features in the reunited nation brought about by the war’s end. “Please tell me,” she implored Cornelia Spencer, “if it wouldn’t be just as sinful to ‘pray’ for these ‘enemies’ as for the Devil?” Over the past year, she confided, she had never dared to pray the passage of the Lord’s Prayer that reads, “Forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me.” “I know that I am wicked—and those wretches have made me so,” she concluded, “but I cannot be a hypocrite.”25

  Even during the war itself, few other mountain women expressed bitterness this intense over the Yankee invaders, even when they were victims of their vandalism. In fact, for many, such treatment by Stoneman’s troops proved less troublesome, and certainly less frightening, than the actions of the so-called rear guard, those roving bands of bushwhackers, deserters, and other local malcontents whose aggressions were unleashed by the Union troops’ presence. In the wake of Stoneman’s march, such groups were emboldened to take action of their own. As soon as the Federals left Lenoir, Joseph Norwood described his relief at how little damage the troops had inflicted on the town but wrote of a still-gnawing worry: “We have been under constant apprehension about tory—or robber raids, and I have been serving on guard at town every third night. . . . We are in danger constantly.” Indeed, local raiders did attack the vulnerable town, ransacking houses and threatening the women who were forced to watch the plunder. According to one account, “The ladies were firm in resisting their demands and they left without doing much mischief.”26