Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  In Morganton, where the Federal troops, then under Gillem’s command, were allowed to engage in their most wholesale plundering yet, it was women from the nearby South Mountains who moved down to the Burke County seat to add to the chaos. According to a local source, they “swarmed our streets proclaiming their ‘jubilee’ and rejoicing that the Yankees had arrived. . . . Thus these dishonest traitorous hordes, of our own beautiful mountain clime, conspired and leagued with the Yankees, urging them on in the work of plunder, and wholesale theft which was carried on during Monday, Tuesday, and a part of Wednesday.”27

  Among the most vividly described of such attacks was that inflicted on Robert C. Pearson’s home in the western part of Burke County. Pearson, a prominent banker and railroad official, was not home at the time, but a member of his household left an account that clearly revealed her class and cultural biases. In language far more derogatory than any used to describe Stoneman’s men, she called the vandals, both men and women, “lazy and disloyal elements that inhabit our ‘South Mountains’ around the town of Morganton, that class of people . . . an ignorant, illiterate, uncultivated set, untrue in every respect, false to their God and traitors to their country.” She went on to describe their actions: “When the ‘rear guard,’ the nine robbers, entered the house to plunder and pilfer, their women followed in, to reap their share of the spoils. . . . The mountain women were laden with everything they could carry, such as clothing, bedding, even dishes, and such.” With contemptuous amusement, she described the reaction of an “old hag” when the mob discovered a wine cellar of sorts and distributed bottles of champagne among themselves. The sound of the cork popping from the first bottle they opened led to a panic. The old woman fled, declaring “it was pizen, put there to kill them for nobody had ever seen liquor pop that way.”28

  In light of these flagrant attacks by the poor in their midst, elite women often assumed the Yankee invaders to be the lesser threat and even approached officers with whom they sensed some rapport, asking for protection from either further abuse from those under their command, or from the even more unruly native rabble. Ella Harper noted in her diary on April 15, “At sunset the Yanks rushed in on us. We obtained a guard about our house after they came in, and fared better than some others.”29

  At Pleasant Gardens, Emma Rankin called on a “young lieutenant . . . who looked more like a gentleman than any of them I had seen . . . and asked him if he could not stay and guard us while a negro regiment that was just coming in sight was passing. He politely acceded to my request, and orderd a big black negro in an officer’s uniform, who was just going into the back door, back to the lines.” She concluded that story declaring: “Oh! How horrid those negroes looked in that blue uniform; and how the air was filled with oaths! But that was characteristic of their white comrades also.” Lieutenant Davis warned her that “stragglers who followed the raid, and belonged to no command, were the worst, and . . . we would probably be more annoyed than we had been before.” He regretted that he could stay no longer to protect her and the Carsons, but he said that she should tell the stragglers that he, the officer of the day, had just left and “threaten them with him.” They were indeed soon beset by “a half dozen men dashing up the creek, whooping and yelling and cursing, and as drunk as they could be,” who tormented the family for several hours and demanded all jewelry and watches in the house before eventually moving on.30

  The most dramatic instance of the class-based differences between the threat posed by local rowdies and Yankee invaders was recorded by Mary Taylor Brown in an extraordinary letter she wrote to her stepson in Australia. Brown, who lived with her husband, W. Vance Brown, on the road between Hendersonville and Asheville, vividly recounted her terror when faced with the local marauders unleashed by the approach of Stoneman’s raiders on Sunday night, April 23:

  Squads of armed ruffians were coming in and plundering and cursing all night long while I was the only one to encounter them in the house and Pa was the only one to contend with them at the stables, barn, corn crib and smoke house, where they robbed us of every thing but a little hay and few pieces of bacon. . . . My soul stood trembling within me lest some demon would lay violent hands upon my person and I might be deprived the use of the firearm I had concealed to use in self defense. . . . But, thank God my prayers were heard and I escaped untouched, tho’ a thousand curses were hurled into my face and I was called a thousand times “a damned lying rebel.”31

  If the trauma Mary Brown endured on Sunday night was not untypical of what many western North Carolina women faced at the time, the events of the following day certainly were.

  It was on that Monday, and at a site not far from the Brown farm, that General Gillem met James G. Martin, his Confederate counterpart based in Asheville and a West Point classmate, and reached a truce. Vance Brown invited Gillem and several of his staff to stay with him and Mary, which resulted in an extraordinary scene of sectional reconciliation. “Little indeed was the sum of all we had to offer for the repasts of our invited guests,” Mary Brown wrote, “but the best of our little we gave as unto friends, tho’ there were all our foes.” Following dinner, “The officers and men enjoyed their pipes and laughed and talked in gay good humor, feeling quite at home among such friendly rebels. . . . Maria [her stepdaughter] played and sang some of her Rebel airs and the gentlemen sang some of their Union songs. Genl. Gillem had his band come up and play some beautiful old Union pieces.” In a rather understated assessment of the evening, Mrs. Brown concluded that “Monday night quite a different scene was presented from the one on Sunday.”32

  That gathering must have seemed to those involved a very intimate expression of the war’s end. But it was not to be. Mississippi refugee Katherine Polk Gale, who lived in Asheville, picked up where Mary Brown’s narrative ended to describe an even more curious turn of events over the next few days. On Tuesday, April 25, Gillem’s troops marched through Asheville in an orderly and nonthreatening manner, and local residents breathed a sigh of relief, having heard of how differently they moved through other towns along their route. On Wednesday morning, Gale recalled, “We all felt very secure” as the troops continued to move on westward toward Tennessee, “having strictly regarded the rights of property.” But she quickly added, “That was in the morning of an ever memorable day.”33

  Late that afternoon, the Union forces took Asheville residents completely by surprise when they turned back on the city in an undisciplined spree of looting and ransacking. Katherine Gale was on a quiet walk with friends, during which they were “discussing the affairs of the day & congratulating ourselves on its peaceful termination,” when suddenly they heard galloping horses and clanking sabers. They “turned to see the meaning of it all; a troop of Yankee Cavalry in hot pursuit of three women. Pistols were fired in quick succession.” Thus began two harrowing days during which Katherine and other women were chased through the streets, harassed by various groups of “ruffians,” had their houses searched and looted, and in many cases, witnessed their men (in Katherine’s case, her uncle) arrested and carried away by “these wretches.”34 Not even Fayetteville, destroyed by Sherman’s troops two months earlier, had “suffered more severely by pillage,” according to Cornelia Spencer in her narrative. “The Tenth and Eleventh Michigan regiments certainly won for themselves in Asheville a reputaton that should damn them to everlasting fame.”35

  Another Asheville resident, Sarah Bailey Cain, left a harrowing account of a gang of “villainous looking men” who rushed into her parents’ home, ransacked it, beat her father and then fired shots at him when he attempted to keep them from stealing, and carried her brother, a Confederate officer, away under arrest, along with all jewelry and much bacon. (“Watches,” she wrote, “seemed to be their favorite loot,” and she related several instances of physical force against acquaintances, both women and men, in order to get them.) On Friday, April 28, as the prisoners—more than thirty local men and officers, including General Martin—were to be led off t
o Tennessee, Sarah went with her father, a prominent judge, to the town’s center to bid farewell to her brother, one of the prisoners. “We passed through an immense crowd of a few citizens, a great many privates, and insolent negroes in U.S. uniforms,” she wrote. “One of these negroes called out to my father, ‘How do you like this, old man?’ ” As a result of that incident alone, she stated, “I have loathed the uniform ever since.” In moving quickly to find her brother, Sarah walked under a U.S. flag that the troops had suspended from the Eagle Hotel out over the street. She was later reprimanded by other women who had walked around the square to avoid passing under what they still viewed as an enemy’s emblem.36

  The ransacking of Asheville marked the end of Stoneman’s Raid. That it concluded on such an unexpectedly hostile and destructive note, particularly given that news of the war’s end elsewhere had already reached the region, cast a pall over many residents and compelled the area’s elite women to describe it so emotionally on paper. The fullest accounts we have of the highs and lows of those turbulent few days all come from women who witnessed or experienced them firsthand. For some, like Verena Chapman and Sarah Bailey Cain, their bitterness was still very much in evidence well after the war’s end. For others, such resentment waned more quickly, but not without similar expressions of defiance.

  As dreaded as the incursion of Union troops was, for some of the more affluent women whose homes they violated there was another enemy more dreaded—those in whose midst they lived. The threats they posed suggest the complexities of the region’s divided loyalties and the extent to which class identity shaped both the security and insecurities of the more affluent western Carolinians and their sustained commitment toward the Confederacy in its waning days. In this part of Appalachia, such divisions were not as clearly determined by class—wealthy Confederates and poor Unionists—as the stories here may indicate. Yet they do depict the additional tensions and pressures that both class and gender brought to bear on home-front hardships in the southern highlands and on the war’s legacy for the region.

  That written legacy in itself suggests another distinction that pervades much of this historical record—that, as elsewhere, it was largely shaped by the region’s literate elite. But why did women, in particular, feel so compelled to tell their stories? Whether recorded in journals, letters, or memoirs, these were for the most part sustained narratives of considerable length in which these women recorded not only the many incidents of their own experiences and those of their neighbors and other acquaintances, but also their feelings then and later. Some were matter-of-fact accounts, rather objective in tone; others reflected the writers’ lingering, passionate resentment of the Union invaders and made their emotional responses integral in shaping their memories into narrative form.

  Most of the women cited here were already writing regularly—in letters, diaries, or journals—about their wartime experiences. So it was not Stoneman’s Raid alone that inspired them to put pen to paper. Yet the raid was, for most of these women—indeed, for most residents of western North Carolina—the most traumatic and memorable event in a war that, until its final month, had kept major armies and military incursion at bay. Had they not been in the path of Stoneman and his troops, their wartime experience and how they interpreted it afterward would have been far different, and perhaps far less pronounced.

  Whereas some did so more consciously than others, these women used their narratives—particularly in describing this traumatic incursion they faced at war’s end—to articulate for themselves and for others their own roles in the conflict and those of other women, and to rationalize their efforts, their sacrifices, and the ultimate failure of the cause and the nation for which both were made. Only a few weeks after the war’s traumatic conclusion in Buncombe County, Mary Taylor Brown wrote: “I will boldly say, I am a Southern woman! and have battled for her rights. . . . To defend the South, love prompted me to action and an undying confidence that she was right carried me onward through fire and blood.” Yet, she concluded, “Now that in God’s providence slavery is abolished and the state again brought into union and under the same government, I cordially respond from my heart, All is well!”37

  By the same token, Katherine Polk Gale philosophized not only about the meaning of the war’s end for herself and other women, but about the role they would play in coping with defeat as well. “The consciousness of having tried to preserve home & fireside, therefore having done that which they conceived to be right, sustained the sorrow-stricken hearts throughout the whole Southland,” she wrote. “The women will again do their part in bearing bravely whatever the future has in store for them and will prove themselves to be worthy mothers, wives & daughters of the brave soldiers who have so manfully borne the horrors of the four years war.”38

  The luxury of privilege allowed these women to see and to commemorate themselves and their peers in such ennobling terms. These “talking heroines” saw themselves as vital to the defense of their households and region and took great pride afterward in having performed their roles well. As much as any other factor, that self-satisfaction probably drove their impulse to write at such length about their experiences. It probably never occurred to them that poorer mountain women—that “ignorant, illiterate, uncultivated set” for whom they had shown such disdain—might have interpreted the conflict, its impact, and their roles in it in very different terms.

  Notes

  1. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (New York: Watchman Publishing Co., 1866), preface. For the circumstances surrounding the book’s authorship and publication, see Phillips Russell, The Woman Who Rang the Bell: The Story of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), chap. 9; and Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 49–52.

  2. Spencer, Last Ninety Days of the War, 14–15.

  3. Ina W. Van Noppen, Stoneman’s Last Raid (Raleigh: North Carolina State Archives, 1961), 112. This is the fullest scholarly account of the raid in recent times. It appeared first as a series of articles in the North Carolina Historical Review (4 issues, 1961); and subsequently, like Cornelia Spencer’s narrative, in book form.

  4. Quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 200.

  5. It is probably coincidental that the fullest account of Stoneman’s Raid, besides Mrs. Spencer’s narrative, is also by a woman, Ina W. Van Noppen, cited in note 3.

  6. There are a variety of other themes, in addition to class, that the writings of these women could also support, on which I do not focus in this essay. They all discuss the loss of their slaves with various degrees of anger, disdain, and relief. Several of them note the violation of domestic space and the invasion of privacy by Stoneman’s men, a theme Lisa Tendrich Frank has found central in her study of Southern women’s reactions to Sherman’s troops. See her paper “ ‘I Am a Southern Woman’: Patriotic Femininity in the Invaded South, 1864–1865,” delivered at Southern Historical Association meeting, Baltimore, November 2002. And one could use these writings to examine the psychological means by which these women rationalized Confederate defeat, as Jean V. Berlin has done in “Did Confederate Women Lose the War?” in The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)—or to explore the gender ideologies of both southern women and Union troops as reflected in their encounters, as Jacqueline Glass Campbell does in When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

  7. For a list of major slaveholders and their holdings in the region in 1860, see John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), appendix 1, 265–66.

&n
bsp; 8. Katherine Polk Gale, “Recollections of Life in the Southern Confederacy, 1861–1865,” typescript, in Leonidas Polk Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as SHC), 14, 17.

  9. Miss E. L. Rankin, “Stoneman’s Raid,” an 1885 essay reprinted in a pamphlet titled In Memoriam: Emma Lydia Rankin, privately published on the occasion of her death in 1908, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 18–19, 20.

  10. Ella Harper to George W. F. Harper, February 2, 1865, George W. F. Harper Papers, SHC, quoted in David H. McGee, “ ‘Home and Friends’: Kinship, Community, and Elite Women in Caldwell County, North Carolina, during the Civil War,” North Carolina Historical Review 74 (October 1997): 386. McGee’s article focuses on the mutual support system these women developed over the course of the war.