Again, perhaps the most striking aspect of Wilson’s account is that it was written by a man who was born only after the war was well under way. (He must have been conceived at about the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in early March 1861.) Wilson states up front that “I, who as a child witnessed many cruel and tragic deeds, have undertaken to narrate what I saw as well as what I learned from others.” It soon becomes obvious that it is the latter—what he learned from others—that makes up most of his narrative of the war years.21
A close analysis of the most central and traumatic of those deeds—the murder of his father, Isaac Wilson, on June 17, 1864—demonstrates how Will, many decades later, relied on the memories of other participants and witnesses to reconstruct so complete an account of that tragedy. Curiously, he begins that particular story—understandably, the first told in his memoir—by stating that he was four years old at the time.22 Having been born December 20, 1861, Will was in actuality a mere two and a half. Although nothing else in his narrative ever suggests that he relied on his own recollection of his father’s death (only the funeral a day later seems to have made a lasting impression on his young mind), it seems obvious, at least by implication, that he wanted to present himself, probably more than was actually the case, as a conscious participant in that central event of his young life and those surrounding it.23
Wilson provides only vague information about his family background or the events leading up to his father’s death. Well into his narrative he states that his father “had engaged in wagoning to Salisbury” for several years prior to the war’s outbreak, an explanation of the considerable material goods the family owned and feared losing to bushwhacking thievery.24 In a letter to his older brother, Robert, in 1941 (a letter that in many respects seems to be the initial basis for this memoir, which he composed later that decade), he adds only fleeting bits of background. Oddly, he does not repeat or elaborate on these facts in the otherwise much fuller memoir. He informs his brother that their great-grandparents have moved from Lexington, North Carolina, to a farm on Forge Creek in Johnson County, Tennessee, just over the state line from Ashe County, though he does not say when they moved, or at what point his own father moved back across the line into North Carolina. He also refers to tensions between the Potter family and the Wilsons, dating from the marriage of his father’s first cousin to Andy Potter, a union much opposed by her parents and grandparents.25
Will has nothing specific to say about Isaac’s Confederate enlistment in 1861, giving no specific date for that momentous event; even more striking, he makes no reference to the company or regiment his father joined. (We know from other sources that he served in Company E of the 37th North Carolina Regiment.) In fact, he has nothing to say about his father’s wartime service or even where he fought, prior to the summer of 1864, when he returned home for that fateful furlough. Nor does he have anything to say about the war itself, in the North Fork or elsewhere, prior to 1864, a rather glaring omission given the exceptional level of detail with which he describes the sequence of events once Isaac returned home.
Will gives a full account of Isaac’s activity during his furlough. One can attribute many of the specific details to a strong sense of hindsight in others; incidents in the days and hours before Isaac’s murder took on added significance and heightened remembrance for those who shared his final moments. Caroline Wilson, Isaac’s wife and Will’s mother, is obviously the primary source of information here. Not only does she become a prominent figure in Will’s telling of those events, but the narrative takes her point of view at crucial points. What she told her husband about not visiting acquaintances whom she suspected of malevolent motives and her growing concern over his safety at home situate us as readers within her point of view and keep us there through the murder itself. We know that she spent a restless night beforehand and that she was increasingly uneasy about Isaac’s decision to plow a cornfield before he departed. We know exactly what Isaac did that morning before he left the house—the chores he performed, the timing of his departure, and which ones of their eight children accompanied him and why. We know of the suspicious activity of other men moving along the road in front of the house, of Caroline’s sending the younger children to see who else might be in the vicinity, and—based on their report—of her decision to go find Isaac and warn him yet again to leave immediately. Finally, we know exactly where she was as she heard the three shots that downed her husband, and we know that because she was walking past an almost empty barn at that moment, “the shots seemed to her to have a distinct echo.”26
Once those shots were fired and Isaac fell dead in his field, Will draws on other voices and perspectives to reconstruct the sequence of events—from Polly Jones, Caroline’s sister, and from Caroline’s grandfather, Jesse Greer, both of whom were on the scene at the time or just afterward. Most astonishing of all is that Will quickly shifts the narrative to the point of view of his father’s killers, as he recounts their plans for the assassination and how they carried it out. Their version of events came from boasts the Potter family made throughout the community—obviously to sympathetic neighbors—only days after their crime. That “full account of the plot and the dastardly deed,” as Will calls it, must have been circulated widely and perhaps often, for he is able to re-create the movements of the Potters and Tom Stout, whom he calls “rabid Union men,” on that fateful morning in as much detail as he is the movements of his own father. Women re-emerge as important catalysts and chroniclers as well, both in spreading word of the murder within the community at the time, and in adding details that would have been otherwise unavailable to Will later. Through their accounts, particularly that of Polly Jones, who repeated what she had learned from Liz Stout and Peggy Potter (the wife and sister-in-law, respectively, of two of Isaac’s killers), these women’s complicity in the plot becomes apparent.
The Potters spread the word of their involvement in Wilson’s death with bravado, and they also explained their reasons for targeting him. The fact that it resulted from a case of mistaken identity only adds to the tragedy. As part of a conscription roundup for Confederate service, another Isaac Wilson (distinguished from his second cousin as “Big Ike”) had had a confrontation with Jack Potter that resulted in the latter’s death.27 With little or no remorse for having shot the wrong Isaac Wilson, the Potters proceeded to seek out “Big Ike,” attacking him in his own home, where they left him for dead, though he survived. While the culprits themselves obviously told this story in a form that eventually reached Will Wilson’s ears, this is the first element of his narrative for which he credits other, more direct sources from his own adulthood: he uses personal interviews in 1939 with two of Big Ike’s relatives, who sheltered him in their home after he was shot, and letters from the 1880s from other relatives involved in the incident.
There follows an extended and equally detailed description of the retribution sought for Isaac’s murder by the Wilson and Greer families. Will’s source of information for these events is not as obvious as the sources of his earlier material. Wilburn Greer, Caroline’s brother, played the most prominent part in the pursuit of the Potters and other conspirators and may well have provided his nephew Will with such details as the route the pursuers took, the names of those questioned along that route, those who provided information, their ultimate apprehension, and finally the execution of one of Wilson’s killers, a man named Silvers Arnold. Significantly, the one name Will chooses not to divulge in his narrative is that of the individual who “fired the fatal shot,” although he is quick to note that Arnold’s executioner “wore the uniform of a Confederate soldier.”28 Thus justice, in Will’s mind, had been appropriately served.
One of Will’s most unusual passages is his extended description of his father’s funeral. It is the first event that Will actually claims to remember himself even though he was just a toddler. “As a child,” he writes, “I was actually deeply impressed by what seemed to be a vast crowd of people but other incidents were inde
libly impressed on my mind.” The building of his father’s coffin, the decisions made regarding the burial site and the funeral itself, and who performed what parts of the service are all details that most likely came from either Will’s mother or his grandfather. Will knows—and records—who provided the cherry planks for the coffin, and who shaved his father before he was placed in it. In his letter to his brother, Will claims that he himself remembered “many of the things that took place while the corpse was being laid out.”29
But Will credits yet another source much more explicitly. In 1889, in Franklin, North Carolina, he encountered a Methodist minister, Mr. Cooper, who told him he had officiated at his father’s funeral and “related many incidents my child mind had failed to register.” Cooper’s contribution to the story seems to be rather trivial. He confirmed an odd incident that Will himself recalled, in which an unruly dog attacked an overwrought woman, who was rescued by a slave woman. Incidentally, this is the only reference to a slave or slavery in Wilson’s narrative, yet as brief as it is, his explanation of who she was and why she was present suggests the sort of disruption and displacement that characterized the rapidly deteriorating “peculiar institution” during the war’s latter months in western North Carolina and in many other parts of the South. (Also typical of Wilson’s all-inclusive narrative style, he provides nearly as much background on the dog, Turk—who else he bit and how he met his end—as he does on the slave, Letty.) Such details, recalled a quarter of a century later, attest to the quirkiness of memory of both young and old, with the odd blend of significant and insignificant in terms of what the human mind chooses to retain and recall.
Perhaps the most significant fact that Will relates about his father’s funeral is that one of his murderers, Tom Stout, was present. Stout was under arrest at the time and seems to have been forced to attend his victim’s burial simply because his captors attended. Just afterward, they escorted him far from that scene to carry out what seems to have been a well-laid plan—his hanging. This execution is yet another event that Will is able to recount in remarkably precise terms: he tells us who participated, the site of the execution and the route taken to get there, how Stout’s body was disposed of, and how his family was told where they could find it.
The events surrounding his father’s death and its immediate repercussions make up merely the first few pages of what becomes an extended chronicle of other such atrocities that North Fork residents continued to inflict upon each other over the remaining ten months of the war. Will Wilson notes that his father’s murder was a turning point of sorts and served to escalate the violent recrimination that characterized the area’s internalized conflict. It brought new attention to the North Fork community from both Confederate conscription officers and Home Guard units who more actively sought out dissenters and forced confrontations that often resulted in killings by both sides. “From this time,” Wilson notes, “animosities sprang up and the words ‘Yankee’ and ‘Rebels’ signified the opposing camps and untold suffering and violence were ushered in.”30
The rest of his narrative of the war years—a total of about forty pages of the eighty-six-page transcript of Will’s memoir—are very much like that of the early section on the circumstances surrounding Isaac’s death. Will defines bushwhackers as “men who profess to be neutral and refuse to join either side, openly, but as individuals or small bands, using ambush tactics, attack, kill or plunder the homes of those unable to defend themselves.”31 That description is fitting for much of the ruthless activity of bushwhackers in many parts of the mountains, yet curiously it is at odds with the actual circumstances in the North Fork community. Far from any claims of neutrality, Will clearly identifies the men who engaged in this guerrilla war, either individually or in small bands, as either Confederate or Unionist. It is their loyalties to—or assumed affiliation with—one side or the other that ignites the antagonisms that in turn spur the many ambushes, murders, and executions that occupy so much of the narrative. Martin Crawford has noted of the North Fork that no part of the county was less supportive of secession or contributed fewer enlistees to Confederate service.32 The intensity of that anti-Confederate sentiment, combined with much resented efforts at conscription and, by 1864, a general war weariness, created the volatile situation in the area that Wilson describes so vividly. Only in the conflict’s final days does Wilson note any blurring of ideological lines. He states that by this point the people of the North Fork township were “so split up among themselves sometimes as not to be able to know who inclined to the ‘Union’ or who was a ‘Rebel.’ ”33
Just as a confrontation over conscription resulted in Unionist Jack Potter’s death, which in turn set off the chain of events that resulted in six other deaths, including that of Confederate Lieutenant Isaac Wilson, similar situations led to remarkably similar outcomes. Will tells the story of yet another Unionist, Tom Osborn, who ambushed and murdered a distant relative, Alex Osburn, just as the latter was preparing to join a Confederate company. Friends of Alex’s then sought out and hanged Tom to avenge Alex’s death. Will Wilson acknowledges the parallels to his father’s death and its aftermath, saying, “The Osborn family and our own even then were intimate but the similarity of the tragedies that had visited our homes bound us more closely.”34
That cycle played out repeatedly, and Will provides the same painstaking treatment of numerous atrocities, supplying names, places, and anecdotal details that often serve as the only distinguishing features of this continuous wave of North Fork violence. In re-creating the course of this localized war, he in effect embraces a cast of characters that comprised much of the local populace. A total of 284 different names appear in the wartime section of his narrative alone (not including Turk, the dog). He not only tells us who was killed (a total of nineteen people) but also identifies the family members of these men, how they were related to other families in the community, and—most significant—who was involved in their killings. We know by name most of those who made up the various groups that served as law enforcement, Home Guardsmen, search parties, executioners, and looting mobs. Nothing brings home the localized nature of guerrilla warfare as experienced in Southern Appalachia more than the fact that both sides knew each other so well.35 Few if any of the men who were casualties of this North Fork conflict could not have recognized and named their attackers and killers. Only with Stoneman’s Raid of April 1865, the largest incursion of Union forces to move through western North Carolina, does Will describe a wartime event involving nameless enemies. (He states that only later did local residents come to know that these troops were from Stoneman’s Brigade.)
But for all the attention to the community dynamics at play in this turbulent warfare that erupted on the North Fork, Will never loses for long his focus on his own family—particularly the plight of his mother and his grandparents who, on several occasions, are victimized by bushwhackers and who, at other times, aid and abet friends and neighbors also under attack. Thus, even when his own family forms the centerpiece of his narrative, their experiences are integrally linked to those of the community at large.
The hardships of home-front life also emerge as a significant theme of Wilson’s narrative, and he gives equal attention, also in great detail, to the material aspects of the war’s latter months. He carefully chronicles shortages of clothing and food, as well as transactions in property, farm equipment, and livestock that were bought, sold, and negotiated among multiple families, much of which was a function of wartime deaths or the displacement of families forced out of this increasingly destabilized society. As both the theft and destruction of property became more prevalent, the defense of one’s home and the protection of one’s goods became a more constant concern. Will recounts quite specifically, both for his own family and for others, what items were hidden and where, what was stolen and by whom. In one of many striking instances, he records the way that a neighbor, Tom Stewart, managed to prevent a robbery of the Wilsons’ home by first pretending to be part
of the mob who broke into the house and then holding the other robbers at gunpoint and forcing them to leave, an act that made Stewart, as Will recalls it, both “an idol and a hero” to Caroline Wilson.36
Of course, very little of this memoir could be re-created from the memory of an under-three-year-old. As with Isaac Wilson’s death, Will must have drawn on the individual and collective memories of adult witnesses and participants to reconstruct the many events that occurred in its wake. His mother remained a major source of the information; so too did his maternal grandparents, Jesse and Frankie Greer, who spent much of the war’s remaining months living with their widowed daughter and her eight children. Yet many others contributed to the rich oral tradition on which Wilson built his narrative. Both in relating other incidents not involving his family and—more often—reinforcing or elaborating on events in which they were involved, Wilson takes full advantage of the memories of neighbors and acquaintances that he encountered in adulthood.
To cite one example of the multiple sources at his disposal: After a lengthy account of a shoot-out waged in protection of an elderly man named Landrine Eggers and the circumstances surrounding it, Wilson states, “I passed the place many times before Eggers died, sometimes with my mother and listened to the story firsthand.” In the next paragraph, he notes that in 1909, as he and several men were surveying land, one said, “Tell Will Wilson about going over to Landrine Eggers’ place after the body,” a reference to the unclaimed body of a young man accidentally shot by Eggers’s daughter. His companion, who had obviously been a participant in that gruesome series of events, complied. Wilson concludes that “as told by him, it harmonized with what I heard from others.”37
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