Campbell’s characterization of the region was both more sophisticated and more balanced than most of those that preceded it. An odd but often effective mix of social science data and literary descriptions (perhaps a function of Olive’s input), the book recognized and readily acknowledged both the region’s geographical variables and how they shaped a far more diverse socioeconomic structure among Southern Appalachians. Historian John Alexander Williams has even suggested that had Campbell lived longer, and been able to expand upon these ideas—indeed these realities—the scholarly stranglehold on the stereotypes and misconceptions of the region might have been broken a full half-century sooner than they were.46
Nevertheless, Campbell was not immune from many of the same generalizations and clichés already in circulation. He took on the war in a chapter of his book dealing with individualism. He opened the chapter by challenging both the notion that Appalachia “was thrust like a Northern wedge into the heart of the Confederacy,” and the rationale behind that claim. He noted up front that “speakers who have sought to raise money in the North for mountain work have been wont to dwell upon the part played by the Highlander in the Civil War.” The impression left by these claims is that “the Highlander is in reality a Northerner in a Southern environment. The impression is far from the real truth.”47 Yet Campbell was not willing to cast his stock highlander as fully southern either, hence his emphasis on his independence. “Heredity and environment have conspired to make him an extreme individualist,” Campbell claimed. “His dominant trait is independence raised to the fourth power.”48
In explaining the wartime loyalties and the reasons behind them, however, Campbell fell back on the same tenuous connections as his predecessors had propounded, which has little to do with any independence of thought or spirit. “They held, withal, a deep though distant attachment to the Federal Government, for which they had fought in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and that of Mexico.” He did acknowledge the same general division as that laid out by Samuel Wilson: that West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and East Tennessee “stood firm for the Union,” whereas western North Carolina and Virginia “showed a larger Confederate element.”49
Campbell admitted that the war provoked “the bitterest of feeling” among mountaineers, especially those from Tennessee and Kentucky, where “the roughness of the country led to a sort of border guerrilla warfare,” and even provided anecdotal evidence of the harassment suffered by mountain women and children at the hands of bushwhackers and “rebel raiders.” And yet he assured his readers that there were no lingering aftereffects from such atrocities, which he based on firsthand yet fairly impressionistic evidence. He noted that in the “little community at the southern end of the mountains” where he first taught—Joppa, Alabama—many veterans gathered, some Union and more Confederate. “At [a local] hearth sat often a man who had stood with the ‘Rock of Chickamauga,’ and another who had starved with Pemberton at Vicksburg or taken his tender farewell of Lee at Appomattox,” and yet, Campbell claimed, “there was no bitterness or rancor between them.” He told of another highland community where a Blue and Gray Camp was organized, due to the number of sympathizers from both sides. On Southern Memorial Day, veterans of both sides gathered at the school hall “to listen to declamations on patriotism by the school boys . . . while above them on one side hung the picture of Lee between the Stars and Stripes, and on the other, framed in Southern garlands, the picture of Grant.”50
So what are we to make of these various treatments of the war’s impact on Southern Appalachia or Southern Appalachians’ impact on the war, given the agendas of their authors and the audiences they hoped to reach? Shannon Wilson has noted of certain higher-education administrators raising funds for their colleges in the region in the 1870s and 1880s: “The memory of the war experience was manipulated artfully to project a way of seeing and perhaps a means of thinking about Appalachia in a defined and particular manner.”51 Much the same could be said about those chronicling the region in the early twentieth century, although both how and why they “artfully manipulated” the war’s legacy differed in several telling respects.
At one level, it is obvious that these authors still sought to woo northern philanthropists and organizations by depicting Appalachians as deserving and worthy recipients of their largesse. Certainly an easy means of winning that sympathy and support was to stress their wartime loyalty to the Union; thus it is no surprise that every writer but one made that loyalty integral to their coverage of the war. (Only Emma Bell Miles assumed a Confederate majority among her mountaineers, but even she held them blameless in that decision, asserting that they had little understanding of what they were doing or why.)
Of the rest, there was considerable variation in terms of the extent, the significance, and the rationale behind the Unionism they claimed was so predominant among southern highlanders. Only Wilson and Campbell took seriously the fact that some areas of Appalachia were more supportive of the Confederacy, but both minimized that reality, offering no explanation why some mountaineers would cast their lots with the South. Most followed the lead of Frost and Fox by linking Unionism to a deep-seated patriotism that mountain people had demonstrated from the American Revolution through even the Spanish American War, and falling back on the same few examples to demonstrate that point. On the other hand, some attributed that loyalty to less worthy motives: either to ignorance or apathy of the world beyond their own, and hence to a lack of ability to make a reasoned commitment to either cause. Even Frost quoted a “fine old Southern lady . . . in a border city,” who, explaining mountain Unionism, told him: “If those mountain folks had been educated they would have gone with their states!” Frost’s response: “Probably she was right.”52
Curiously, the presence of slavery or the lack thereof played little part in the explanations offered. Only John Campbell even raised the issue directly, and said only: “The doctrine of States’ Rights, separated from its slavery bias, was but an abstraction to them.” In effect, he was suggesting, as others had, that the issues that drove the sectional crisis—whether slavery or something else—were irrelevant to mountain people.53
Others focused more on the effects than on the causes of Appalachian loyalties. Several suggested that the manpower the region provided to the Federal war effort and denied to the Confederacy was significant; indeed, it may even have tipped the scales in favor of the North and its ultimate victory. Both John Fox and Samuel Wilson pushed that claim, and insisted that such a commitment by highlanders entailed far more risk and sacrifice than joining Confederate forces would have been. Campbell’s description of the region’s role as “a northern wedge thrust into the heart of the Confederacy” vividly makes the same point.
On the other hand, it is equally striking that the coverage of the Civil War in all these works was so fleeting. One could hardly have written comprehensively about any other part of the South at the turn of the century and not made the war’s impact a central part of a characterization of the region. And yet most of the book-length works examined here devoted no more than a page or two to the war, while the essays or journals included a paragraph or two at best. Such minimal attention, in part, reflects an ahistorical approach. In seeking to explain the origins of mountain people and what made them what they became, most of these writers fell back on the platitudes and misconceptions about patriotism, individualism, sacrifice, and other unspecific but value-laden terminology. Yet it may also have been that these writers felt that only by downplaying Appalachia’s role in or impact on this most central event of the nation’s history could they make a convincing case for the isolation or insulation of its inhabitants. If they were to remain the simple, backward “contemporary ancestors” that would make them so palatable to potential benefactors, the less said the better about the complexities of guerrilla warfare, divided loyalties, and home-front atrocities—not to mention the political wranglings of influential leaders such as Andrew Johnson, Zebulon Vance, and Joseph E. Brown, w
hich would paint a far different and much messier portrait of southern highland agendas and agency.
Also curious is how little firsthand information about the war these chroniclers derived from the many local residents that they came to know and certainly relied on for much material on so many other topics. The fact that the only direct quote from Carolina highlanders that Morley could muster was the question “Law, which side was I on?” says a great deal about what she chose to overlook or not pursue in terms of local memories or sentiments, as was true for most of her fellow authors as well. John C. Campbell drew on firsthand observation only to stress the highlanders’ reconciliatory spirit after the war’s end, though one is sure that he must have heard just as many or more reminiscences about the waging of the war itself, none of which appears in his book.
By the same token, the fact that Campbell was based in Asheville, a center of Confederate enlistment, mobilization, and even manufacturing; that Emma Bell Miles was in Chattanooga, another center of Confederate activity and military action; and that Mrs. D. L. Pierson seemed so oblivious to the Shelton Laurel massacre in her portrait of Madison County, North Carolina—all suggest intentional silences in the face of a very different reality that would not have jibed with the sympathetic and simplistic portraits each sought to present.
In short, by the turn of the twentieth century, the particulars of how the war was actually fought in the mountain South, and why, entailed far more inconvenient truths—which did not lend themselves to the image of mountain people these writers worked so hard to create and convey. To sell the remoteness and “otherness” of highland life required that the Civil War—so central a trauma and turning point to the rest of the South—be granted only a marginal place in explaining Appalachia, where people were so set in their ways that even an upheaval of that nature had little lasting effect on their lives. And if their loyalties couldn’t be linked to an innate—or even blind—patriotism or long-standing sense of duty to the federal government, then it could be explained as something far less flattering, but even more useful: the assumption that they simply didn’t understand what the war was about, and were therefore innocent pawns drawn into the conflict—on whichever side—without even the option of making that decision themselves.
The easiest way to make that case was to minimize the war, its impact, and its relevance to Appalachia. Despite ample private and communal memories of the region’s residents still very much alive during the 1900s and 1910s, these writers created a version of their war experiences all their own, and one that became firmly embedded in popular perceptions for far too much of the century to follow.
Notes
1. W. K. McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Kevin E. O’Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth, eds., Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia, 1840–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); and Katherine E. Ledford, “A Landscape and a People Set Apart: Narratives of Exploration and Travel in Early Appalachia,” in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine E. Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 47–66.
2. Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Cratis Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961); and Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), chaps. 4 and 5.
3. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 87–90, though most of Shapiro’s discussion of this issue focuses on East Tennesseans. Kenneth Noe has noted that of thirty-nine works considered by Shapiro published between 1865 and 1883, only nine made any reference to the Civil War. Kenneth W. Noe, “Toward the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1865–1883,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 6 (1994): 68.
4. Ibid., 67–74. The article appeared in an expanded version as “Deadened Color and Colder Horror: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia,” in Billings et al., eds., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, 67–84.
5. Shannon H. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sons and Daughters: Berea College, Lincoln Memorial University, and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1866–1910,” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 242–64.
6. James C. Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1987): 42–62; and Nina Silber, “What Does America Need so Much as Americans? Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870–1900,” in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 244–58.
7. Shapiro extends his treatment of Appalachia and its chroniclers to 1920, but he has nothing to say about the Civil War in his coverage of 1900–1920.
8. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 116–17, 132–33. With the exceptions of John Fox and Margaret Morley, all the writers discussed in this chapter at least claimed that their observations and conclusions applied to all parts of Southern Appalachia.
9. William G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (March 1899), reprinted in McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images, 91–106. (Subsequent references to the essay are to the version appearing in the McNeil volume.)
10. The best biographical data on Frost are found in his memoir, For the Mountains: An Autobiography (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1937), and in two histories of Berea College: Elisabeth S. Peck, Berea’s First 125 Years, 1855–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 68–74; and Shannon H. Wilson, Berea College: An Illustrated History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 78–81, 90–111.
11. McNeil, Appalachian Imagery, 91; Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 74. Both Shapiro and Batteau offer insightful analyses of Frost’s essay: Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, chap. 8, and Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 74–80.
12. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 99.
13. Ibid., 105–6.
14. On the strength of British loyalists of the southern backcountry, see Robert S. Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987); Carole Watterson Troxler, The Loyalist Experience in North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Division of Archives and History, 1976); and Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
15. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 99. John C. Campbell wryly noted, “Few discourses on mountain questions are complete without this reference [to King’s Mountain]. The audiences for whom such addresses are given . . . would feel cheated without it. They look for it as expectantly as the Bostonian does for the closing phrase in the Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, ‘God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.’ ” John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), 8.
16. Mrs. D. L. Pierson, “The Mountaineers of Madison County, N.C.,” Missionary Review of the World (November 1897): 823.
17. See “Unionists in the Attic,” chap. 13 in this volume, for a more detailed account of the Shelton Laurel massacre and how it was remembered locally.
18. Pierson, “Mountaineers of Madison County,” 828. The Battle of Alamance was the final showdown between the Regulators and North Carolina’s royal governor, William Tryon. Both it and the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence took place in North Carolina’s backcountry, but far east of the mountains.
19. On Fox’s life and Appalachian writing, see Darlene Wilson, “The Felicitous Convergence of Mythmaking and Capital Accumulation: John Fox Jr. and the Formation of An (other) Almost-White American Underclass,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 1 (Fall 1995): 17–29; Wilson, “A Jud
icious Combination of Incident and Psychology: John Fox Jr. and the Southern Mountaineer Motif,” in Billings, ed., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, 98–118; and Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 64–74. On the significance of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come in particular, see Silber, “What Does America Need So Much as Americans?” 254–56.
20. John Fox Jr., Bluegrass and Rhododendron: Outdoors in Old Kentucky (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1901), 6. Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett took Confederate command of northwestern Virginia in June 1861, having been informed beforehand that “there is great disaffection in this and adjoining counties and opposition to the lawful action of the State authorities is certainly contemplated.” Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), series I, vol. 2, 843. He was killed in a battle against General George McClellan’s forces at Laurel Hill, in what would become West Virginia, on July 11, 1861.
21. Fox, Bluegrass and Rhododendron, 6–7.
22. Biographical data on Wilson are slim; this information comes from his own description of his early life in Samuel Tyndale Wilson, A Century of Maryville College, 1819–1919: A Story of Altruism (Maryville, Tenn.: Directors of Maryville College, 1919), 159.
23. Samuel Tyndale Wilson, The Southern Mountaineers (New York: Presbyterian Home Missions, 1906), preface, 27–31.
24. Ibid., 33.
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