Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South
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7. On Hollywood depictions of the Civil War, see Brian S. Wills, Gone with the Glory: The History of the Civil War in Cinema (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2006); David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr., eds., Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007); and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
8. See particularly Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Roles in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 37–56; Ralph Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles: Sandy Basin, Virginia, as Test Case,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 59–66; and John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 8.
9. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193.
10. J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains & What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 225.
11. Ibid., 233.
12. On the women of Shelton Laurel, see Paludan, Victims, 96–97; James O. Hall, “The Shelton Laurel Massacre: Murder in the North Carolina Mountains,” Blue & Gray (February 1991): 20–26; and chap. 13 in this volume, “Unionists in the Attic,” which discusses a dramatized treatment of that massacre and its repercussions. On other such incidents, see Muriel Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 64; Margaret Walker Freel, Unto the Hills (Andrew, N.C.: privately printed, 1976), 139–40; and Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 194–96.
13. Wilma Dykeman, The Tall Woman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), 30–31.
14. For a very different interpretation of the abuse of women in the film, see Anna Creadick’s comments in “A Roundtable Discussion of Cold Mountain, the Film,” Appalachian Journal 31 (Spring/Summer 2004): 330–31, 347–48.
15. Quote from anonymous “Voice from Cherokee County,” North Carolina Standard (Raleigh), August 19, 1863, quoted in Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 187.
16. Mary Bell to Alfred Bell, May 22, 1862, Alfred Bell Papers, Duke University Library. For a full account of the wartime travails of Mary Bell, see “Coping in Confederate Appalachia,” chap. 7 in this volume.
15
Guerrilla War and Remembrance
Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War
On June 17, 1864, Isaac Wilson, a forty-two-year-old farmer and Confederate lieutenant from the North Fork community of Ashe County, North Carolina, decided to spend the last morning of his furlough plowing his cornfield. Soon after leaving his wife and eight children to undertake that task, he was shot from a distance and killed by a group of Unionists who also happened to be his neighbors. While by no means the first such incident to take place in this tension-filled area only a few miles from the Tennessee border, Wilson’s murder reverberated in especially potent ways, and it intensified the level of local violence that would continue through much of the war’s remaining ten months. The story is well known locally and has been retold in numerous accounts of the war in Ashe County and western North Carolina. Yet the most thorough and moving account of the incident is in a memoir produced in the 1940s by Isaac’s third son.1
William Albert Wilson’s memoir is extraordinary for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he was only two and a half years old when his father was killed. Although he is rarely explicit about how much of his narrative comes from his own memory and how much comes from the memories of others, it is obvious that most of this remarkably vivid and detailed account of Isaac’s death and the final months of the war and its aftermath in Ashe County’s North Fork community is built from stories told to him—perhaps repeatedly and over many years—by family and local acquaintances.
The value of this document then lies not only in its meticulous re-creation of the guerrilla warfare that proved so destructive to this Appalachian community, and by implication, to so many other highland communities like it. Equally intriguing is the way in which Will (as he seems to have been called)2 Wilson constructed his memoir. The nature and number of sources on which he drew to tell this story in itself tells us as much about the legacy of the war as it does about the nature both of memory, individual and collective, and of oral history in shaping that legacy.
Within the vast and growing scholarship on memory and its relationship to history, the Civil War looms large. “The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history,” Robert Penn Warren wrote at the beginning of the war’s centennial in 1961. It is “our only felt history . . . an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience.”3 For many white southerners who lived through the war, that “felt history” was determined not only by individual recollections of their own experiences over the course of the conflict and its aftermath, but also (and perhaps even more) by the collective memories that emerged at various levels—from households, neighborhoods, and communities, to states and throughout the region as a whole. What Warren refers to as “national imagination” was, for southern whites, an impressive feat of carefully constructed public memory meant for mass consumption and consensus.
In the decades after the war’s end, largely elite groups of men and women throughout the former Confederacy shaped a very selective, subjective and politically useful version of the war for public memory. Codified and labeled early on as the “Lost Cause,” this version of the war in the national—or regional—imagination was a series of rationales for why the South seceded from the Union and why it lost the war, with neither immoral aims nor internal failings of either Confederate leadership or citizenry playing any part. The Lost Cause served instead to honor and even ennoble the military effort made by the Confederacy and the men who fought on its behalf. The fervor with which these beliefs were embraced and promoted made it almost a religion, and the commitment to these beliefs was manifested in a vast array of monuments and memorials, ceremonies and parades, veterans’ organizations and reunions, battlefield preservation and museums, political rhetoric, regimental histories and hagiographic biographies, children’s literature, and even the censorship of textbooks.4
Within this shared belief system, there was no room for any mention of divided loyalties, for internal dissent, or for guerrilla warfare. Such ambivalence or complexity in southern wartime behavior would have seriously undermined the basic, clear-cut interpretation of regional solidarity to the Cause in which white southerners so wanted, indeed needed, to believe. For most of them, the Civil War era became, to paraphrase British playwright Harold Pinter, a past that they remembered, imagined they remembered, convinced themselves that they remembered, or pretended to remember.5 And because of its absence in the legacy shaped by the post–Civil War generation itself, recent scholarship on memory and the Civil War has also neglected the much messier reality that characterized the war in many parts of the more marginalized South.6
Even within those areas of Southern Appalachia so consumed by the traumas of guerrilla warfare, that less sanctioned warfare was largely “written out” of the public memory that shaped how communities chose to recall and derive meaning from it. Historian Jonathan Sarris has written about the blatant attempts by pro-Confederates in the north Georgia mountains to expunge from communal memory any sense of divisiveness in that region and to create instead a public myth of southern solidarity throughout the conflict and fully embrace the Lost Cause ideology. In so doing, they not only excised the activities of Unionists and other dissenters who created internalized strife in Dahlonega and other mountain communities from official and unofficial accounts o
f their war, but they also chose to forget their own brutal and lawless repression of those who defied them.7
Richard Starnes found much the same historical amnesia among North Carolina’s highlanders. In a study of the war’s historical legacy in Haywood County, he found that from Confederate veterans’ groups to county historians, from the 1870s until well into the twentieth century, the consensus of opinion was, as W. W. Stringfield declared, “no people were more zealous for the South than Western North Carolinians.” In all four published histories of the county and of Waynesville, its seat, Starnes noted, “unpleasant topics such as desertion, internal dissent, and outright disloyalty were replaced by images of Confederate solidarity, bravery in battle, and devotion to duty.”8
The messiness of guerrilla warfare was embarrassing and counterproductive to the New South aims of postwar elites in the mountains; thus the local establishment “erased” it from public memory, preferring a cleaner and less ambivalent version of what had happened. Part of the ease in doing so lay in the fact that Unionist activity—and harassment—was often hidden from view within and beyond the communities of which those Unionists were a part. As historian Martin Crawford has noted in his study of the war in Ashe County itself, “By its very nature, Southern Unionism failed to generate the large-scale public commitment and ritual participation associated with community involvement in the Civil War. . . . Here there were no formalized enlistment procedures, no exhortatory speeches, no ceremonial presentations of company flags, and as a consequence, one might infer, precious little sustaining identification with the local or wider state community.”9
Because this was so often the case, memories of that other reality were left to individuals and families, who preserved in far more private ways the painful legacy of the internal strife they experienced. A number of men and women recounted on paper those experiences as either participants or victims in this inner civil war. Their personal narratives—in the form of correspondence, diaries, letters, memoirs, or family histories—have provided historians with testimony that informs our understanding of this inner war as it played out especially in more remote areas.
Individual partisans occasionally earned enough notoriety during the war to have their stories published at war’s end, either by themselves or others. Confederate renegades such as Champ Ferguson and John Hunt Morgan earned considerable attention for their ruthless harassment of Unionists in the Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia mountains, though neither survived to provide firsthand narratives of their experiences.10 Daniel Ellis, a Unionist guerrilla from East Tennessee, did survive and sought to establish his own celebrity with the publication—by Harper Bros. of New York, no less—of his Thrilling Adventures in 1867. A native of Carter County, Tennessee (almost adjacent to Ashe County, North Carolina), Ellis was a wagon maker who found himself caught up in the bridge burnings by East Tennessee loyalists early in the war, and soon he became a civilian river pilot, guiding hundreds of endangered Unionists from Confederate-occupied Tennessee to safety in Kentucky. He also engaged in bushwhacking attacks on Confederate residents and soldiers in and around Carter County and provided full—perhaps much exaggerated—accounts of his exploits in his book.11
But the guerrilla warfare that took place in Ashe County and most other parts of western North Carolina was not like the sustained irregular campaigns targeting both troops and civilians mounted by partisans such as Morgan, Ferguson, and Ellis. It consisted instead of localized acts of violence sporadically waged by neighbors against neighbors, and families against families, attacks that grew especially intense during the latter part of the war.12 Accounts of those home-front experiences, many of them written by victims rather than by the perpetrators of those attacks, have been discovered only recently, after having been long stashed away in archives or among privately held family papers.
Among the most unusual of such memoirs are those of Horatio and Margaret Hennion. As an outspoken Unionist in the north Georgia mountains, Hennion was a constant target of Confederate persecution, and as is so often the case in a guerrilla war, the terrorist tactics were often equally aimed at his wife and children. Both husband and wife recalled those experiences separately in dictated statements to a daughter—Horatio in 1892 and Margaret in 1900. Together they confirm harrowing conditions that both suffered, and yet their separate voices reveal distinct, gender-linked perspectives on the same events. Horatio seemed to rally to the challenges he faced in outwitting and harassing his Confederate antagonists, and he tells of his exploits with considerable self-satisfaction. Margaret, on the other hand, while always supportive of her husband, never took any joy or pride in enduring these burdens, which apparently left her more emotionally and physically drained than Horatio.13
Just as southern women were on the forefront of efforts to commemorate the Confederacy and impose the values of the Lost Cause on a new generation of southern youth, so too were many Appalachian women intent on chronicling the hardships they had faced when caught up in the guerrilla warfare in their region.14 Margaret Hennion was by no means alone in leaving vivid testimony of harrowing experiences endured in remote pockets of the Blue Ridge or Smoky Mountains. North Carolinians Margaret Walker of Cherokee County and Mary Orr of Transylvania County also penned lengthy narratives of their ordeals. Walker was forced to watch as Unionist bushwhackers abducted and then murdered her husband, the reputed head of the Home Guard, though she was never able to find or bury his corpse. Orr and her mother were harassed by local Confederates because their husbands had defected to Union companies in East Tennessee, and they were forced to become roaming refugees themselves for the last few months of the war.15 Though probably not meant for public consumption, these women’s stories found their way into the hands of descendants or local historians who preserved them—and, in Walker’s case, published them—thus allowing historians to incorporate them into the vast mosaic they are constructing of the turbulent Appalachian home front.16
Fugitive prisoners of war, along with other transients who moved through Southern Appalachia, often left vivid accounts of their observations of the inner Civil War into which they were inadvertently drawn either as targets or as collaborators. Junius Browne of Connecticut, for instance, was shocked at the brutality of the irregular warfare he encountered in the Carolina highlands as he fled from a Salisbury prison toward the safety of Union-occupied East Tennessee. “It is not difficult to conceive,” he wrote, “how a few months of such an experience would transform a man from an enduring saint to an aggressive demon.” Others were more partisan in their sympathies, acknowledging only the abuse suffered by the compatriots they encountered in the mountains. A Wisconsin officer, John Azor Kellogg, also a prison escapee, commented that those he saw “were compelled to defend themselves against the North American savages in a war persecuted without regard to the laws governing civilized nations.”17
In many cases, local histories of guerrilla warfare remained part of nothing more than a strong oral tradition, with stories passed by family members from one generation to another. Only when someone committed those distant memories, often blurred or distorted through generations of retelling, to the written page did they become available to others elsewhere. One of the most unusual of such efforts was undertaken by a local historian, Elihu J. Sutherland in the Sandy Basin of southwestern Virginia, a community very much like Ashe County’s North Fork. In the 1920s and beyond, he conducted oral interviews with more than a hundred fellow residents in an attempt to construct family histories and, through them, a “folk history” of the community, with the Civil War a central focus of the interviewees’ own memories or those of their parents and grandparents. More recently, historian Ralph Mann has used that exceptional collection of remembrances to reveal a great deal about the nature of Appalachia’s guerrilla warfare and the ways in which it shaped and was shaped by kinship networks, gender roles, and community dynamics.18
Some of the more familiar wartime incidents in western North Carolina, from the Shelt
on Laurel massacre in Madison County to exploits of the infamous Keith and Malinda Blalock in and around Grandfather Mountain, have come to us as much through local lore as through official records.19 Certainly the best-known product of that family-shared oral legacy is Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. In stumbling over an obscure grave in the Smoky Mountains, Frazier found that it held two bodies—those of a local fiddler and a retarded adolescent. Both were civilians murdered by Captain Robert Teague’s notorious Home Guardsmen, who terrorized deserters and others of questionable loyalties in Haywood and surrounding counties. That discovery led Frazier’s father to tell him of an ancestor of their own, Inman, who was also a victim of Teague’s gang. A Confederate soldier wounded in battle, Inman escaped from an Illinois prison and trekked home on foot, only to be confronted and killed by local Home Guardsmen within a few miles of his destination. From these basic facts, transmitted purely from memory by family members and area residents, Frazier constructed his best-selling saga of the war in these mountains.20
All of these accounts lead us back to William Albert Wilson and his version of this mountain war. If Charles Frazier chose to tell the tragic consequences of the brutal, internalized conflict on his ancestors in fictional form, Wilson chose a somewhat more conventional means of doing so. Yet his narrative of the war as experienced on the farms, households, and crossroads that made up the North Fork community of Ashe County is distinctive because it is far more than simply a memoir: it is the reconstruction not of an individual’s experience, and not of a family’s, as is true of most other such firsthand chronicles. It is rather a comprehensive record of a full community’s wartime ordeal, one in which his family played an integral part. His testimonial ranks among the most meticulous and comprehensive we have of the many households, neighborhoods, and kinship networks for an Appalachian, even a southern, populace. What emerges from his narrative is a full-blown portrait of this most divided area of Ashe County, a community wracked by violence and destruction inflicted both from within and without, and of the multiple forces that drove an otherwise peaceful people to such extremes of hatred, cruelty, and vindictiveness.