Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Yet once he had given due lip service to the pro-Confederate Appalachians (in a mere two sentences), Wilson moved on to his real focus—nearly two pages extolling the Union loyalists of West Virginia, Kentucky, and East Tennessee. He made his case in quantitative terms: “The Federal forces actually recruited from the southern Appalachians were as considerable in number as were the armies of the American Revolution gathered from all the thirteen colonies,” he asserted, “and considerably exceeded the total of both mighty armies that fought at Gettysburg.” He boasted that his own congressional district “claims the distinction of having sent a larger percentage of its population into the Union army than did any other congressional district in the entire country.” He noted that these Appalachian loyalists “cleft the Confederacy with a mighty hostile element that not merely subtracted great armies from the enrollment of the Confederacy, but even necessitated the presence of other armies for the control of so large a disaffected territory.”25

  Wilson stressed as well the risks taken by mountain Unionists and suggested that their contribution to Federal forces may have tipped the conflict’s ultimate resolution. “Their soldiers,” he maintained, “were not conscripted or attracted by bounty, but rather in most cases ran the gauntlet through hostile forces for one, two, or three hundred miles to reach a place where they could enlist under the flag of their country” (a half-truth at best, since it hardly applied to those very areas of Union strength that he had just documented so forcefully). Like both his predecessors and those who followed, he suggested that while it might have been an exaggeration to say that “the loyalty of the Appalachians decided the great contest, that loyalty certainly contributed substantially to the decision.”26

  The two most notable female chroniclers of the highland South during this era made little reference to the war and were less explicit or categorical in their characterizations of Appalachia’s wartime loyalties. Both Emma Bell Miles in The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) and Margaret W. Morley in The Carolina Mountains (1913) wrote only fleetingly about the war, yet they made very different suggestions as to what it meant to their highland subjects.

  Born in Indiana and raised, until the age of ten, in north central Kentucky, Miles spent her adolescence and most of her adult life in and around Chattanooga. Her parents taught school on Walden’s Ridge (now known as Signal Mountain), which overlooked the city yet seemed quite remote from its influences, both economically and culturally. It was the residents of Walden’s Ridge that Miles took as her archetype Appalachians, drawing on their customs, beliefs, and simple lifestyle to generalize about the southern highlanders as a whole. The result was a study that is as much that of a folklorist as an ethnographer. Whereas she exhibited a genuine affection for her subjects and frequently identified herself with them, Miles was often patronizing in extolling the virtues of their isolation, their harmony with the natural world, and their long-held traditions. She downplayed the more degenerate attributes of feuding and moonshine so prevalent at the time, dismissing them with only the slightest of lip service. “Feuds are part of the price we pay for the simplicity and beauty of mountain life—for its hospitality, for its true and far-reaching family ties,” she wrote. She even suggested that they were a mere phase to be withstood: “I do not say the inevitable price, for the lawless fighter, along with illicit whiskey, is bound to disappear; but these ugly features are, under present conditions, the price of the tribal bond.”27

  Miles displayed remarkably little sense of history in her descriptions of southern mountain life. It seems especially odd that someone who spent so much of her life in and around Chattanooga would have no more sense of the Civil War’s impact than Miles demonstrated in her book, given the tangible trappings so evident there—battlefields, monuments, and Confederate veterans’ reunions, all of which made the most of the crucial engagements that played out in and around the city in 1863. And yet Miles devoted a mere two sentences to her highland subjects’ role in the war.

  She opened a chapter on “Neighbors” with the statement that there is no such thing as a community of mountaineers, one of the common misconceptions long perpetuated by outside observers of the region. “They are knit together, man to man, as friends,” she suggests, “but not as a body of men.” There was no core or axis between the family and the State in this remote rural setting that would fit the definition of a community. As a result, she concluded that “Our men are almost incapable of concerted action unless they are needed by the Government.” It was, of course, war and war alone that defined that need in the nineteenth century, and Miles suggested that it was an innate impulse that drew southern highlanders into military service. “It was the living spirit of ’76 that sent the mountaineer into the Civil War—they understood very little of what it was all about.” But unlike most other regional chroniclers, she did not assume that they remained loyal to the Union. “I even venture to say that had the Southerners fought under the Stars and Stripes,” she wrote, “most of our people would have been found on that side, following the flag they knew.”28 In short, she seemed to think that, like southern sheep, they blindly joined the Confederate cause, simply because their fellow southerners or the state of Tennessee did as much.

  The fact that Miles assumed that her subjects were pro-southern in their sympathies and service—even if rather indiscriminately so—was most likely a function of her Chattanooga base. Compared with other parts of heavily Unionist East Tennessee, there was certainly more Confederate support in this crucial railroad center on the state’s southeastern border, but to assume that those in its highland outskirts were equally of one mind is, of course, a gross oversimplification that is indicative of Miles’s generalizations throughout her book.29

  Although The Spirit of the Mountains was the first book-length treatment of Appalachia in this era of discovery, it seems to have enjoyed only limited sales and had relatively little influence compared to the later successes of Kephart and Campbell; it was only with a 1975 reprint edition that scholars have embraced both Miles and her work.30 Similar in tone and sympathies, Margaret Morley’s The Carolina Mountains proved much more popular than The Spirit of the Mountains when it appeared eight years later. It was as much a travel narrative as it was an analysis of mountain life, and more specifically aimed at the many tourists who were finding their way to western North Carolina at the turn of the century, which also contributed to its wide circulation.31 Perhaps for the same reasons, her book is much less valued now and receives far less attention from current scholars.

  Morley was far more of an outsider to the region than was Miles, having discovered the area only in middle age, after a teaching and writing career based in the Midwest and New England. In the early 1890s, she and a companion visited the summer home of prominent actor, William Gillette, in Tryon, North Carolina. She became a regular visitor to this thriving artists’ and writers’ colony at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and she eventually moved there to practice both pursuits. It proved to be a convenient base for exploring both the Smokies and the Blue Ridge; as a result of her travels, she wrote The Carolina Mountains, one of her last and most successful publications. (Most of her earlier output had been children’s books on botany, natural history, and even sex education.)32

  Far more than Miles or any other regional chronicler of the era, Morley was as fully attuned to the cities and the resorts of the highlands as she was to the primitive and picturesque “backcountry” to which most others limited their attention. She seemed enamored of the wealth in the region—perhaps because of her own social standing among New England intelligentsia—and devoted whole chapters to Asheville, Flat Rock, Highlands, and other tourist destinations, even the Biltmore House, with which she was particularly enthralled. Nevertheless, her primary focus remained on the same backward inhabitants. She describes their customs, beliefs, and way of life with the same fascination and interest as do her contemporaries, though occasionally she seemed more bemused than anything else. “We’re powerfu
l poor around here, but we don’t mean no harm by it,” she quoted one “ancient native of the forest who does not think himself poor at all.”33

  Morley demonstrated a far greater sense of the region’s history than did Miles—and yet for her, too, the Civil War was never more than of marginal interest. Her several references to it throughout the book are brief and serve only to illustrate other points about her subjects. Like Miles, she granted the mountaineers very little agency or sense of purpose in terms of their military service in the war. She quoted another elderly highlander, who said that he had been drafted into Confederate service against his will, but claimed no understanding of the circumstances or the issues behind the war or his role in it. “When you asked him about it he knit his brows, ‘studied’ a minute, and then slowly said, ‘Law, which side was I on?’ ” Although he may have been puzzled by “the meaning and the advantages [an odd term] of the War of the Rebellion,” which he characterized simply as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” one should not attribute his disdain for participating as cowardice, Morley insisted. She was quick to remind her readers that when he did understand what the fight was about, as at King’s Mountain, he was more than willing to join the Union cause.34 Once again, the Revolution served as a far safer and less ambiguous touchstone than any reference to the Civil War.

  Both Miles and Morley seemed to see the mountaineer’s ignorance as a reflection of his innocence. He may have fought in the war—as either Confederate or Unionist—but he did so with either little sense of purpose or against his will, and thus he could be absolved of any allegiance that might offend current readers from either section of the country. Both women were quick to extrapolate from an individual to the populace as a whole; in so doing, they not only embraced the values of the current generation, but following Frost’s lead, evoked the patriotic virtues of earlier generations as well.

  Both women seemed to view their subjects as an endangered species in the wake of what Miles called “the oncoming tide of civilization, that drowns as many as it uplifts.” For her, that meant an influx of summer people and the trappings of wealth that could prove so corruptible to the character and the simple lifestyle of the backwoodsmen she championed.35 Morley, first and foremost a tourist at heart, acknowledged that the idea of progress may have scared the Carolina highlanders in its path, but she was optimistic as to its effects. “Let the new order be better than the old,” she proclaimed, and prophesied, rather naively, that “the mountains [will] continue to develop in the direction of sanitation, safety, and ever-increasing beauty.”36 Yet neither scenario for the region’s future relied much on its past, particularly that of the Civil War, which seemed to have been ultimately irrelevant to the circumstances in which the mountain people now found themselves.

  Later in the same year in which Morley’s book was first published, another far more influential and lasting work made its first appearance—Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Generally acknowledged as one of the two “classics” of its time and genre (John C. Campbell’s The Southern Highlander and His Homeland being the other), Kephart undertook his masterwork with a less pronounced agenda than did most of his contemporaries. Also an outsider, with roots in the Northeast and much of his career spent in the Midwest, he was, in Allen Batteau’s description, “an alcoholic-librarian-turned-journalist.” His retreat to the Great Smokies in North Carolina in 1904 represented a retreat from academia and from his drinking problem into a natural world that satisfied what he called his “inborn taste for the wild and romantic” and his yearning “for a strange land and people that had the charm of originality.”37 At forty-two years of age, and nearing a nervous breakdown, he left family and career behind him and moved to North Carolina for therapeutic purposes as much as anything, ultimately settling in a remote settlement on Hazel’s Creek in the heart of the Smokies. He later moved to nearby Bryson City, where he lived until his death in an automobile accident in 1931.38

  Kephart’s first books reflected his recreational interests in the area, Camping and Woodcraft (1906), Camp Cookery (1907), and Sporting Firearms (1907), but gradually he became more enamored of the people and culture in whose midst he found himself. Once an impassioned student of the American frontier, he discovered in the Smokies survivals of that early American history. “In Far Appalachia,” he wrote, “it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago.”39 Despite constant observation and notes made at Hazel Creek and Bryson City, Kephart hesitated to draw broad conclusions on the region based on those areas alone, but after travel throughout the highlands of Tennessee, Georgia, and Kentucky, he concluded that “southern mountaineers everywhere [were] one people.” And whereas he fully acknowledged the socioeconomic variables within the towns, valleys, and highlands throughout the region, he devoted the vast majority of his attention to the same traditional “mountaineers” as did other authors, maintaining that the segment of the populace that most typified them were “the great multitude of little farmers living up the branches and on the steep hillsides, back from the main highways, and generally far from the railroads. These, the real mountaineers, were what interested me; and so I wrote them up.”40

  Some critics have found Kephart’s book a significant step forward in terms of its approach to mountain life—one recent scholar called it “probably the most vigorous and honest book written on the Appalachian South”41—and yet his interest in his subjects lay largely in the more primal aspects of their existence. He devoted multiple chapters to moonshining, bear hunts, and other activities, along with the obligatory chapters on religion, dialect, and living off the land that differ from others of the genre only in the lively, engaging—sometimes sensationalistic—style and in the wide array of literary and historical allusions that he sprinkled throughout the narrative.

  Yet Kephart’s historical perspective is among the book’s weakest and most pejorative components, and one built upon the worst of the stereotypes so rampant at the time. Despite an abiding interest in Daniel Boone and early settlement patterns, he was quick to portray Appalachia as a quagmire for the thousands of poor whites whose migration forced them into a land of no return. Their deterioration began as soon as “the best lands, the river valleys, were claimed by a class of citizens superior to the average mountaineers.” Once pushed back along the creek branches and up along the steep, they quickly became the isolated and ignorant mountaineers with “nothing in [their] environment to arouse ambition. The hard, hopeless life of the mountain farm, sustained only by a meager and ill-cooked diet, begat laziness and shiftless unconcern.” As for why they didn’t take the option of so many other Americans who sought new opportunities farther west, Kephart’s explanation adds insult to injury: “They were so immured in the mountains, so utterly cut off from communication with the outer world, that they did not know anything about the opportunities offered new settlers in far-way lands.”42

  And so they remained until the Civil War, which to Kephart served only as a “thunder-crash” that aroused those highlanders languishing in a “Rip Van Winkle sleep” (an image borrowed from Frost). Not that that was a good thing, given that “throughout that struggle, the mountain region was a nest of bushwhackers and bandits that preyed upon the aged and defenseless who were left at home,” for which it paid a heavy price after the war—“an evil legacy of neighborhood wrongs and private grudges.” And because most mountaineers incurred strong resentment from the rest of their states by remaining loyal to the Union, “after Appomattox, they were cast back into a worse isolation than they had ever known.” That alienation from their states was compounded by new federal tyranny in the form of “a prohibitive excise tax imposed upon their chief merchantable commodity.” So, Kephart concluded, “Inflamed by a multitude of personal wrongs [and] habituated to the shedding of human blood . . . it was inevitable that this fiery and vindictive race should speedily fall into warring am
ong themselves. Old scores were not to be wiped out in a reign of terror. The open combat of bannered war was turned into the secret ferocity of family feuds.”43

  Kephart was thus the first of the twentieth-century writers to see the war as a significant turning point in the course of Appalachian development, and to acknowledge the internal warfare highlanders endured—even if, ironically, it returned them to the same primitive and unchecked impulses that had characterized them before the war. Given the degenerate state to which the war had reduced (or merely returned?) these backwoodsmen, any progress—or civilization—imposed on the region, whether it be timber or mineral enterprises, could be nothing but uplifting for them. Kephart insisted that “this economic revolution,” bringing with it “good schools, newspapers, a finer and more liberal social life,” should be celebrated as a vast improvement in Appalachians’ lives, whether or not they wanted it or recognized it as something better than their current way of life.44

  Far different in both tone and purpose was John C. Campbell’s posthumous treatise on the region that appeared in 1921, two years after Campbell’s death—and perhaps not coincidentally, a year before a new and expanded edition of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. Campbell was a Midwesterner—Indiana born—who spent most of his early career as a teacher in the southernmost Appalachians, most notably at Piedmont College in the north Georgia mountains. A research grant from the newly established Russell Sage Foundation in New York led Campbell to mount an extensive and systematic study of Southern Appalachia’s social and economic conditions. Based in Asheville from 1909 on, he was secretary of the foundation’s Southern Highland Division. His book was the culmination of his research and increasing activism. He organized the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, and worked closely with his wife, Olive Dame Campbell, who in her own right was a major force as both scholar and activist in pursuing and promoting the music, crafts, and folk life of the region for more than thirty years after John’s death in 1919. The first major task she undertook as a widow, however, was the completion of his book, which was published by Russell Sage.45