Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  5. Harold Pinter’s actual statement was “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember,” quoted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4.

  6. None of the following recent studies of the war and its legacy makes any mention of guerrilla warfare: David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from an Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998); David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  7. Jonathan D. Sarris, “The Lost Cause in Appalachia: (Re)constructing Memories of the Civil War in the Southern Mountains, 1865–1900,” paper delivered at Southern Historical Association annual meeting, November 2004. See also Rod Andrew, “Martial Spirit, Christian Virtue, and the Lost Cause: Military Education at North Georgia College, 1871–1915,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (Fall 1996): 486–505; and Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), chap. 5.

  8. Richard D. Starnes, “ ‘The Stirring Strains of Dixie’: The Civil War and Southern Identity in Haywood County, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 74 (July 1997): 237–59; quotes on 257 and 259.

  9. Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 126.

  10. Morgan, a Kentucky native, was ambushed and killed in September 1864 in Greeneville, Tennessee; Fergeson, who had murdered or mutilated more than a hundred Unionists over the course of the war, was captured at war’s end, tried, and hanged in October 1865. See Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Sean Michael O’Brien, Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999); Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861–1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); and Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Homefront (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

  11. Daniel Ellis, The Thrilling Adventures of Daniel Ellis (New York: Harper & Bros., 1867). For a study of how much of Ellis’s book is authentic and how much of it he actually wrote, see Allen Ellis, “The Lost Adventures of Daniel Ellis,” Journal of East Tennessee History 74 (2002): 58–68. For recent work that puts Ellis in the broader context of guerrilla warfare in Appalachia, see the titles listed in the previous note, plus William R. Trotter, Bushwhackers: The Civil War in North Carolina, vol. 2: The Mountains (Greensboro, N.C.: Piedmont Impressions, 1988); and several essays in Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

  12. For two useful overviews of recent scholarship on guerrilla warfare and on the distinction between these two very different models of irregular conflict in the Civil War South, see Daniel E. Sutherland, “Sideshow No Longer: A Historiographical Review of the Guerrilla War,” Civil War History 46 (March 2000): 5–23; and James A. Ramage, “Recent Historiography of Guerrilla Warfare in the Civil War—A Review Essay,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 103 (Summer 2005): 517–41. See also Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” Journal of Southern History 68 (May 2002): 259–92.

  13. Keith S. Bohannon discovered both memoirs in the Horatio Hennion Papers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and wrote an essay based on their contents: “ ‘They Were Determined to Root Us Out’: Dual Memoirs by a Unionist Couple in Blue Ridge Georgia,” in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 97–120.

  14. On southern women’s roles in shaping the war’s legacy, see Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville Press, 2001); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); and Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

  15. Margaret Walker, “Story of the Life of Margaret Walker during the Civil War,” typescript, William Walker Papers, Special Collections, Hunter Library, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C., reprinted in expanded form in Margaret Walker Freel, Unto the Hills (Andrews, N.C.: privately published, 1976), 154–61; and Mary Middleton Orr, “The Experience of a Soldier’s Wife in the Civil War,” privately held typescript. See Gordon B. McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (January 1992): 37–56; and William A. Strasser, “ ‘A Terrible Calamity Has Befallen Us’: Unionist Women in Civil War East Tennessee,” Journal of East Tennessee History 71 (1999): 66–88.

  16. For vivid accounts by other Appalachian women—Confederates hounded by both Union guerrillas and regular troops—see John N. Fain, ed., Sanctified Trial: The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, A Confederate Woman in East Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); see also Daniel W. Stowell, “ ‘A Family of Women and Children’: The Fains of East Tennessee during Wartime,” in Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South, ed. Catherine Clinton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 155–73; and Cornelia Peake McDonald, A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862, ed. Minrose C. Gwin (New York: Gramercy Books, 2003). McDonald lived in Winchester, Virginia, at the northernmost end of the Shenandoah Valley.

  17. Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case, 1865), 351–52; John Azor Kellogg, Capture and Escape: A Narrative of Army and Prison Life (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Commission, 1908), 165. For a thorough treatment of this genre of wartime accounts, see “ ‘Moving through Deserter Country’: Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War,” chap. 8 in this volume.

  18. Ralph Mann, “Family Group, Family Migration, and the Civil War in the Sandy Basin of Virginia,” Appalachian Journal 19 (Summer 1992): 374–93; and “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles: Sandy Basin, Virginia as a Test Case,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 59–66.

  19. There are now multiple scholarly sources for both of these incidents. On Shelton Laurel, see Philip S. Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); on the Blalocks, see Trotter, Bushwhackers, chap. 14. For accounts of both, see John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: The Civil War in Western North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 117–20, 189–90. Both stories have, in very recent years, inspired fictional accounts as well. Sean O’Leary wrote an original play, Shelton Laurel, first produced at Mars Hill College in August 2005 (see chap. 13 in this volume); the massacre also plays an integral part in Ron Rash’s novel The World Made Straight (2006). Sharon McCrumb’s novel Ghost Riders (2004) is, in part, a fictional rendering of the Keith and Malinda Blalock story.

  20. Charles Frazier, “Cold Mountain Diary: How the Author Found the Inspiration for His Novel among the Secrets Buried in the Backwoods of the Smoky Mountains,” Salon.com (July 9, 1997); see also chap. 14 in this volume, which discusses Cold Mountain.

  21. Wilson seems to have laid out much of this narrative first in the form of letters to his brothers in 1940 and 1941, just after he had retired from his missi
on work in Japan and moved to Durham, North Carolina. Patricia Beaver has obtained copies of four such letters, still owned by Wilson descendants, dated December 15, 1940, and January 7, February 25, and February 27, 1941.

  22. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 45.

  23. For an essay on how young people remember historical or traumatic events, see the work of two Danish psychologists, Dorthe Berntsen and Dorthe K. Thomsen, “Personal Memories for Remote Historical Events: Accuracy and Clarity of Flashbulb Memories Related to World War II,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 134 (May 2005): 242–57. I thank Judkin Browning for alerting me to this work.

  24. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 64.

  25. W. A. Wilson to R. B. Wilson, January 7, 1941, in private hands, though it was reproduced in the student newspaper of Northwest Ashe High School, Mountaineer Heritage, vol. 2, undated, 32–34, under the title “The Wilson-Potter Feud.”

  26. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 45–46.

  27. In his letter to his brother, cited in note 25, Wilson suggests deeper underlying tensions with the Potters, and makes clearer that other Wilson family members—three sons of Lemuel Wilson, Isaac’s brother—served as part of the Home Guard that so harassed the Potters for their resistance to Confederate service, and were responsible for Jack Potter’s death.

  28. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 50.

  29. W. A. Wilson to R.B. Wilson, January 7, 1941. Curiously, one of the most significant discrepancies in Wilson’s letter to his brother and his memoir is that in the former, he states that his father did not die in the field but was carried home and placed on a cot, where he lingered for less than an hour. Here, too, Wilson claims personal recollection of that moment: “I was the youngest of seven children but as I remember, even I could see that he was dying,” he informed R. B.

  30. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 54.

  31. Ibid., 44–45.

  32. Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, 92–94; see also Crawford, “The Dynamics of Mountain Unionism: Federal Volunteers of Ashe County, North Carolina,” in Noe and Wilson, eds., Civil War in Appalachia, 55–77. For another perspective on wavering commitments to the Confederacy in this region, see Gordon B. McKinney, “Layers of Loyalty: Confederate Nationalism and Amnesty Letters from Western North Carolina,” Civil War History 51 (January 2005): 5–22.

  33. Quote from the typescript of the Wilson memoir, p. 33, not included in the published version.

  34. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 54.

  35. I am grateful to Steve Nash, a University of Georgia graduate student working on Reconstruction in western North Carolina, for making a precise count of the names in Wilson’s narrative of the war years, 1–54, and of the body count accrued in those same pages; also to Patricia Beaver, for sharing with me the meticulous family trees she has constructed, which provide a vast and growing genealogical re-creation of the North Fork community.

  36. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 66–67.

  37. Ibid., 69–70.

  38. For background on Will Wilson’s later life and how he came to write his memoir, see the introduction to the published memoir by his granddaughter, Frances Bivens Smith Rector, Appalachian Journal 34 (Fall 2006): 42–44.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier (New York: Putnam, 1887), 232–33, quoted in Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 21.

  41. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 56.

  42. For other examples of such self-celebration among mountain women after the war, see “Talking Heroines,” chap. 9 in this volume. See also McKinney, “Women’s Role in Civil War Western North Carolina,” 37–56; and Mann, “Guerrilla Warfare and Gender Roles.”

  43. “Early Life of William Albert Wilson,” 47.

  44. On the nature of family loyalties, see Mann, “Family Group, Family Migration, and the Civil War”; Jonathan D. Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). On divisions within families in Appalachia and in the border South, see Inscoe and McKinney, “Highland Households Divided: Familial Deceptions, Diversions, and Divisions in Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War,” chap. 6 in this volume; and Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

  45. John Preston Arthur, A History of Watauga County, North Carolina, with Sketches of Prominent Families (Richmond, Va.: Everett Waddey, 1915), 170–71. E. B. Miller of Meat Camp is the man to whom Arthur attributes the story of Mrs. Stout. In Ashe County’s Civil War, 205–6, nn. 40, 41, Martin Crawford relates another version of this story that found its way into a much more recent compilation of Ashe County family histories: Clarice B. Weaver, ed., The Heritage of Ashe County, vol. 2 (West Jefferson, N.C.: privately printed, 1994).

  46. “Wilson-Potter Feud,” Mountaineer Heritage, 2:32–34.

  47. Arthur L. Fletcher, Ashe County: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: Ashe County Research Associates, 1963), 137–40; quote on 138.

  48. Stephen William Foster, The Past Is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 69.

  49. Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, xi. His coverage of Isaac Wilson’s death and its repercussions is on 142–44.

  50. Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review (December 1997): 1372–85; quote on 1376.

  51. Maurice Halbwachs, “Historical Memory and Collective Memory,” in The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 84, quoted in ibid., 1376.

  52. Crane, “Writing the Individual,” 1378, 1381.

  16

  Race and Remembrance in West Virginia

  John Henry for a Postmodernist Age

  Surprisingly, one of the acclaimed novels of 2001 seems to have received very little, if any, attention from Appalachian literary critics or historians. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, John Henry Days was the much-anticipated second novel by Colin Whitehead, who made a considerable literary splash with his debut effort, The Intuitionist, in 1998.1 As its title suggests, John Henry Days is firmly set in West Virginia, which alone should make those of us in Appalachian Studies sit up and take notice. But even more important for those of us seeking to understand the region, its image, and its hold on the rest of the country, it grapples with themes often quite familiar but cast in new and occasionally profound terms.

  In 1996, the U.S. Post Office issued a commemorative series of four stamps focused on American folk heroes—Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Casey at the Bat, and John Henry. Whitehead, Brooklyn born and bred and African American, had long nurtured an interest in John Henry, but it was the stamp that served as the impetus for his novel. “I knew vaguely that I wanted to do a modern update of the John Henry story,” he explains in an online essay. The postal commemoration provided him with “a nice modern hook—a real live contemporary event that I could pin the story to. What kind of monument is a postage stamp? It was so banal that it addressed something about our debased age.”

  To top it off, Whitehead found that the town of Talcott, West Virginia, had been the site of the stamp’s official “unveiling,” an event that became the first in what is now an annual John Henry Days festival. “I hit the motherlode,” he writes. “Now I really had my ingredients together. Except for characters, plot, and sentences, but who cares about that?”2

  Talcott, in the southernmost part of the state, is a mile east of the Big Bend Tunnel of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, which was constructed between 1870 and 1872. It is estimated that nearly a thousand workers, most of them black, worked on the mile-and-a-quarter tunnel over the two-year period of its construction and hundreds may have died under the grueling and dangerous circumstances of the work there.3 It was there,
according to most versions of the legend, that one of those workers, former slave and steel-driver John Henry, took on a contest against a new steam-operated drill that threatened to make him and his fellow workers obsolete. He beat the machine, but then he dropped dead. The novel is for the most part set in Talcott and nearby Hinton (“Talcott’s pretty small,” one character explains, “which is why most of the stuff this weekend is being organized in Hinton”) over the course of that three-day festival in 1996.

  The protagonist, J. Sutter, is a cynical young African American freelance journalist who views the occasion as but one more in a long series of press junkets, in which he joins with other “hacks” like himself for whom bragging rights consist of how many such publicity occasions they’ve attended and how much free food and booze they’ve consumed as a result. Sutter and his fellow “junketeers” spend their days in Talcott reminiscing about other boondoggles they’ve shared, and commiserating over the limited entertainment value Talcott offers, even though its residents have gone all out to make the most of the newfound national attention the U.S. Postal Service has bestowed by commemorating the town’s sole claim to fame: the legendary John Henry.

  The most obvious theme arising from this scenario—the discomfort of an urban black New Yorker who finds himself deep in the West Virginia mountains—plays out only in the novel’s very early stages. In flying toward this latest assignment, Sutter sees it as merely the South, for which he “possesses the standard amount of black Yankee scorn . . . a studied disdain that attempts to make a callus of history. It manifests itself in various guises: sophisticated contempt, a healthy stock of white trash jokes, things of that nature, an instinctual stiffening to the words County Sheriff.” He has, Whitehead writes, “arrived at a different America he does not live in.” Other than a few trips to Atlanta (which after all, is “a chocolate city”) and once covering Mardi Gras, Sutter has conscientiously stayed away from the South, “the forge of his race’s history” (14–15).