These two offhand remarks with which Will concludes this story are no doubt indicative of how he absorbed many of his stories—through repeated recitations by his mother and grandparents and through enhanced or corroborated retellings over the years by other local residents, whose powers of recalling what they had seen or done seem as sharp and as vivid as those of his family. Although Wilson rarely acknowledges the sources of his information, he does so just enough to make it apparent that his narrative is an amalgamation of many minds, memories, and perspectives accumulated and filtered over nearly the full range of his long life. Perhaps most impressive is that for the vast majority of that life, the forty-two years he spent as a missionary in Japan, and then nearly twenty years in retirement in Durham, North Carolina, Wilson spent very little time in the North Fork community. Thus he accumulated his vast store of anecdotes mostly from oral sources within the community either before he left home in the 1880s or on sporadic visits back—in 1901–1902, 1909, and 1939—when on furlough from Japan. He apparently committed the stories to paper only during those retirement years.38
Integral to this internalized and civilian-driven conflict were the women caught up in it as both participants and chroniclers. Caroline Wilson was certainly a key player in many of the incidents her son relates and the most important source of much of that information. She lived until 1911, and there is no evidence that she ever wrote down her version of these events; rather, it is obvious that she told them to her children many times over the years, and that Will absorbed them, and in such vivid detail that he could reproduce them on paper nearly eighty years later. He introduces a number of incidents in his narrative with the phrases “The story was often related to me” or “As I often heard it told”; most of the time he is referring to his mother. Occasionally he is more specific about the circumstances under which he absorbed her stories. For example, Will states that after Tom Stewart protected the family from looters or worse late in the war, whenever Stewart passed their house, his mother would insist that he and his brothers and sisters stop so that they could thank him again for his good deed. Of another incident involving Landrine Eggers, he notes that “I passed the place many times before Eggers died, sometimes with my mother and listened to the story firsthand.”39
So too were other wives and mothers vital parts of this localized, home-grown conflict. But they were not merely the targets of harassment by bushwhackers and renegades or victims of their threats and intimidation. As Wilson’s account makes abundantly clear, they were far more proactive than that. Throughout his narrative, women act as messengers, informants, protectors, collaborators, accomplices, and co-conspirators, and even on occasion as combatants. Hardly a page in the narrative does not include the name of at least one woman—and often several women are mentioned. Given their high level of involvement, it should come as no surprise that the women of this community, like those in so many other guerrilla-torn areas, also shouldered much of the burden of remembering and retelling the stories of what they suffered and what they endured in the postwar era and beyond.
Caroline Wilson’s constant recitation of wartime events to her children brings to mind an observation of other western Carolina women displaced by the brutality of this mountain war. A Federal soldier who served at a refugee camp for Unionist civilians in Alabama at the war’s end recalled the Appalachian women who had sought safe haven there. “I heard them repeat over and over to their children the names of men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle,” he wrote. “These women, who have been driven from their homes by the most savage warfare our country has been cursed with . . . impressed me as living wholly to revenge their wrongs.”40
In Caroline Wilson’s case, at least, such vendettas were not the primary motives behind the constant telling and retelling of these stories to her children. Despite the strength of her Confederate loyalties throughout the war (her son writes that she “never forgave anyone who turned his back on the Confederacy”),41 she actively sought and fully embraced reconciliatory efforts with most neighbors and acquaintances at war’s end. And yet, for her and many mountain women like her, the war was their “felt history,” to quote Robert Penn Warren again; who they were and who they became, as individuals, as families, and as parts of a community were all inexorably altered by what happened in the North Fork between 1861 and 1865. Even if they failed to hold grudges or continued wartime vendettas into the postwar era, these women nevertheless felt compelled to keep alive, through their children, stories of what they had endured. In part, they were testifying as to their own strength and courage in confronting this enemy and taking pride in their resolve to stand firm in the wake of the many dangers and threats they faced. (This seems especially true of Frankie Greer, Caroline’s mother.)42 But these stories no doubt also served to shape the values and identities of their children through recounting those actions and behaviors of their own—courage, fortitude, loyalty, endurance—those same qualities in which they took such self-satisfaction.
Equally as prominent as the centrality of women are the dense and overlapping kinship networks that pervade Will Wilson’s narrative. He calls nearly three hundred individuals by name; like many of his sources, he was no doubt constantly attuned to the identity of his characters by the families they belong to and their relationship to others in the narrative. More often than not, he introduces an individual to the reader by laying out his or her genealogy. Very early in the memoir, for example, Will explains the plot to entrap his father and murder him. He states that the wife of Andy Potter had sent a message to Isaac asking him to come see her before he returned to his command. Will then proceeds to tell us that Mrs. Potter’s mother was Elisabeth Heath, who was the sister of Hiram Wilson, Isaac’s father, which made her Isaac’s first cousin.43 That relationship makes it evident that blood ties were not necessarily to be trusted, since she was an integral part of the plan by Andy and other Potters to lure her cousin into a situation in which he would be ambushed and killed.
Many historians have written about the key role played by family and kinship in determining loyalties and identity in Appalachia’s inner civil war, but the sheer complexity and overlapping layers of family connections in the North Fork make such patterns less detectable there. It’s very clear, though, that husband and wife, Isaac and Caroline (like her parents, Jesse and Frankie Greer), were of one mind in their commitment to the southern cause. This was not always the case in a region with divided households, with even husband and wife giving allegiance to different sides.44
Finally, it is worth noting that Wilson’s is not the only account we have of his father’s murder. Not surprisingly, the incident long remained a major part of the oral history of the war in both Ashe and Watauga counties. In 1915, John Preston Arthur referred to it briefly, along with many other local atrocities, in his history of Watauga County. In it, he names most of the names that Will does in his account, and he devotes as many words to the retribution exacted from Tom Stout as he does to the shooting of Isaac. Given that macabre elements are often those most remembered and transmitted through oral tradition, it is perhaps not surprising that Arthur quotes a local man who claimed that on April 10, 1865, while near the “little cavity” of Rich Mountain, he heard someone sobbing, and following the sound, encountered Mrs. Tom Stout, sitting at the base of a tree with the bones of her husband in her apron, “crying as if her heart would break.”45
Will Wilson’s own account of his father’s death and the circumstances surrounding it were widely circulated within the county at some point in the 1940s, when as part of a senior journalism class project at Northwestern Ashe High School in Warrenton, the full text of his letter to his brother Robert, “R.B.,” was published in its student newspaper, Mountaineer Heritage, under the title “The Wilson–Potter Feud.” The only statement made by way of introduction was “The Wilson–Potter feud is more widely known in and around Ashe County than the Hatfields and McCoy
s,” which suggests that, for many of those reading this version of events and even those students involved in reproducing it for circulation, the story was still a vital part of the local oral tradition in that part of the county. The students provide no context or editorializing about the narrative, but state simply at its conclusion, “May the Wilson–Potter feud forever rest in peace.”46
Despite the presumably widespread dissemination of the student paper, it somehow seems to have escaped the notice of the county historian, Arthur Fletcher, who would publish the first full history of Ashe in 1963. Oddly, he makes no mention of the Wilson murder, and his coverage of any guerrilla warfare in the county is fleeting. Fletcher begins his brief section on the war years in the county by blithely stating, “Practically every household in Ashe County today has its cherished memories of father, grandfather, great-grandfather or other ancestor, who answered the call for arms and fought bravely for the Confederacy.” As with many such nuts-and-bolts accounts of local historians, Fletcher focuses his attention primarily on how many Ashe residents enlisted and in what companies and regiments they served, much more so than he does on anything that happened within the county itself.47 His version of the war parallels that of that first generation of postwar historians in Haywood County and north Georgia, cited earlier, whose selectivity “wrote out” most of the internalized war that so consumed the North Fork corner of Ashe County.
Even more surprising is Stephen William Foster’s anthropological analysis of Ashe County residents, published in 1988, in which he focuses specifically on their kinship and genealogical awareness, their collective self-image, and their historical consciousness. And yet, other than a single reference, the Civil War plays no part in his largely theory-driven study. He quotes from one family’s oral history, in which one ancestor was identified as “a captain in the Home Guard during the Civil War and helped hang a bunch of bushwhackers. After which he went West in a hurry.” Foster himself makes no comment on this passage, and he apparently found no one else who ever referred to the war or found no reason to cite such references if they were made.48
On the other hand, probably no county in what was once the Confederate South has as sophisticated, as comprehensive, and as insightful a history of its Civil War era as does Ashe County, thanks to the work of British historian Martin Crawford, whose book, Ashe County’s Civil War, appeared in 2001. For Crawford, an inherent interest in the social history of the war itself, and not an interest in the county per se, drove his study. This particular locale merely served as the conduit through which he, like Foster, asked very large questions of a very small place; in Crawford’s case, he began a study “preoccupied with internal relationships and dynamics” that evolved into one that “equally insists on the centrality of the external experience to an American community’s life and identity.” He ultimately argues that “the experiences of Ashe County men and women were shaped as much by their membership in the wider American society, by its values, its institutions, and its shared crises, as by local factors,” which he by no means short-changes. A dogged detective, Crawford made full use of both Will Wilson’s 1941 letter and his later memoir to recount in full the events they chronicle.49
Will Wilson’s memoir apparently serves much the same purpose. It is, at one level, a remarkably rich factual description of the “shared crises” of North Fork residents during the Civil War’s final and most destructive year; and yet it also serves as an intriguing exercise in the multiple ways in which memory—public and private, individual and collective, firsthand and secondhand—all function as part of an effort to create a communal sense of history and historical consciousness.
In a recent essay on “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” historian Susan A. Crane grapples with theoretical questions such as “who has history and/or memory, who represents it, who experiences it, and how is it perpetuated?” She distinguishes between “collective memory” and “historical memory” as that between lived experiences common to a group and the preservation of that lived experience by descendants of those in that group. “Collective memory,” states Crane, “exists and is perpetuated in specific groups . . . who maintain a living relation to [it]; and it is only within such groups that any individual can remember and express personal memories.”50
Such seems to be the case for Will Wilson and his written record of the Civil War. Only through the collective memories of his elders in the North Fork, those who maintained a living relation to the war, was he able to place himself within that experience and express any personal memories of it. At the same time, the sheer distance between those experiences—his own and others—and his committing them to paper renders them “historical memory,” to use Crane’s term.
Yet another characterization of Will Wilson’s role in the perpetuation of memory can be drawn from theorization of an early twentieth-century French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, who noted in 1922: “The totality of past events can be put together in a single record only by separating them from the memory of the groups who preserved them and by severing the bonds that held them close to the psychological life of the social milieus where they occurred, while retaining the group’s chronological and spatial outline of them.”51 Is that, indeed, the function served by the “single record” Wilson produced? Just how much was he separated from the group memories or the “psychological life of the social milieu” about which he wrote? On the one hand, his chronicle is extremely personal and emotionally linked to the events he describes; yet on the other, given that he was no more than a toddler when these events took place, that his historical record of them was produced much later, in the 1930s and 1940s, and that he had not lived among those he wrote about for more than half a century at the time, he does seem to have achieved the distance that Halbwachs claimed was essential for historical memory, as opposed to collective memory.
In essence, Wilson’s age allowed him to maintain a foothold in each camp, to bridge the gap, in effect, between lived experience and its preservation, between collective memory and historical memory. But Wilson’s is by no means the only individual memory at play here, for, as Crane reminds us, “Individuals provide interpretations for other individuals, and these are dealt with as information to be assimilated, remembered, and archived,” and “individual experience is never remembered without reference to a shared context.”52
Perhaps this dynamic serves as the most apt characterization of Will Wilson’s memoir: it is a carefully constructed product of an accumulation of individual memories, including his own. But in the latter stages of his life, when he seems to have made a conscious decision to write a narrative of the Civil War in the North Fork community, Wilson became a historian: he conducted oral interviews with members of the community, made notes of what they told him, and consulted written records, from household inventories to land deeds, thus supplementing, much enhancing, and perhaps further authenticating the primary basis of his narrative—those early memories of his own and those so deeply instilled in him by others.
Finally, the multiple versions of those stories to which Wilson had access over a nearly eighty-year period testify to the communal nature of guerrilla warfare itself. The residents of the North Fork community inflicted it upon each other, endured it together, and long remembered afterward what was done to them and by whom and what they themselves did and who they did it to. The very fact that almost every aspect of Wilson’s story involved not just himself or his family but other families, neighbors, and acquaintances is, in effect, what makes guerrilla warfare a unique manifestation of this or any war. As a result, it is likely that from the beginning, distinctions between personal and collective memories were both reinforced but blurred in ways that would not have been true for those who experienced this war in more conventional ways. In repeating those stories over the years, Wilson’s family, friends, and neighbors were integral to his own understanding and remembrance of the North Fork’s Civil War, and thanks to that one small boy in that wartime co
mmunity—so much a part of that lived experience but ultimately removed from it—his community’s story became his own, as he “assimilated, remembered, and archived” it in a way that few others have.
Notes
1. Wilson’s memoir is reproduced, along with background information on the circumstances under which it was written, in Neighbor to Neighbor: A Memoir of Family, Community, and Civil War in an Appalachian Community, ed. Sandra L. Ballard and Leila E. Weinstein (Boone, N.C.: Center for Appalachian Studies, 2007); it appeared previously in Appalachian Journal 34 (Fall 2006): 42–72. All quoted material in this chapter will reference this version of the memoir. Equally valuable is Patricia D. Beaver’s introductory essay in the same issue, “The Civil War on the North Fork of the New River: The Cultural Politics of Elevation and Sustaining Community,” 98–116.
2. There is evidence that suggests that at various stages of his life, he was also called Billy and Will, and later, during and after his career as a missionary, as “Jay-pan Billy.”
3. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 3–4; quote on 1.
4. On the “Lost Cause,” see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and David Goldfield, “Whose Southern History Is It Anyway?” chap. 1 in Southern Histories: Public, Personal, and Sacred (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 4–22.
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