Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Of course, such a scenario never became a reality, nor was it ever very likely to. Its significance lies more in the assumptions on which it was based. John Alexander Williams has called Alleghania “the first attempt to define Appalachia systematically.”3 If that is indeed the case, it is perhaps fitting that one of the first region-wide generalizations articulated what would rest on two of the most basic and deep-seated misconceptions about the region—its aversion to slavery and its solid Unionist stance—both of which would take their place among the even more entrenched stereotypes of Appalachian isolation, backwardness, degeneracy, and violence.

  I encountered Alleghania early in the research for my dissertation, a study of slavery and the sectional crisis in western North Carolina, and much later I discovered Gilmore’s version of the same premise. I was intrigued to see these ideas so boldly put forward for a national audience at this critical—indeed, rare—moment when it seemed as if Southern Appalachia could play an integral part in resolving the national crisis at hand. They are among the first and fullest expressions of assumptions made far more broadly and extending through much of the next century and a half—that Southern Appalachia was basically free of slaves and, as a consequence, had no interest in or commitment to the Confederate cause. Yet, as with so many such regional generalizations, a close examination of these issues at local or intraregional levels quickly reveals their flaws. They were myths, but myths with remarkably strong staying power. Taking issue with those two misconceptions is, in effect, the driving force behind the essays collected here.

  The claim that the southern highlands had nothing in common with the rest of the Confederacy and had no vested interest in defending the labor system or racial order that drove most of the rest of the South out of the Union raised another question that chroniclers of the region have wrestled with ever since: how much can Appalachia be considered an integral part of the South? In work that will be referenced more fully later in this volume, James Klotter and others have argued effectively that the illusion of an all-white, all-Anglo-Saxon populace had much to do with Southern Appalachia’s appeal to northern philanthropists, educators, and missionaries in the post-Reconstruction era, after many of them had tired of the biracial complexities that had made rebuilding and reshaping the rest of the South so difficult and unsavory, and that provided an equally refreshing diversion from the problems associated with the ever more foreign and multiethnic makeup of their own cities.

  At the turn of the century, Berea College president William G. Frost referred to the region as “one of the grand divisions of our continent, which we are beginning to name Appalachian America,” in a conscious effort to generate sympathy—even nostalgia—for a region that still embraced what had once been the premodern traditions and values of the nation as a whole, and with no reference to any geographical linkage to the South.4 He too stressed the steadfast loyalty of southern highlanders to the Union when that Union split, as did John C. Campbell, who went so far as to label Southern Appalachia “a northern wedge thrust into the heart of the Confederacy.” Both had specific rationales and not-so-hidden agendas in distancing the highlands from the rest of the South (some of which will be explored in this volume); noting such commonalities with the North served as one, fairly blatant means of doing so.

  Even the terms “southern highlands” and “Southern Appalachia” which came into common usage only in the early twentieth century, served less to link the region with the rest of the South than to distinguish a specific part of the mountain chain that stretches from Georgia and Alabama through New England, and thus carried a very different connotation from the terms “Appalachian South” and “mountain South” that do suggest a subregion within a region.

  Scholars continue to disagree on the geographical—or even geo-cultural—bounds of Southern Appalachia and on the criteria by which those bounds are determined.5 But the region undeniably consists of what Campbell once called “the backyards” of at least five antebellum states (at its most basic: Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia).6 All were slaveholding states, and all but one (Kentucky) joined the Confederacy, though a significant part of highland Virginia remained in the Union and in 1863 became West Virginia, the northernmost of Southern Appalachian states. Those facts alone—whatever the internal sentiment against slavery, secession, or the Civil War—made Southern Appalachia fully a part of the South, and it is upon those facts that much of the more recent scholarship, including my own, has been built.

  John Shelton Reed once observed, “Appalachia serves as the South’s ‘South,’ ” suggesting that the problems of Appalachia—including its relative poverty and marginalization—make its relationship to the broader South parallel to that of the South’s place within the nation as a whole.7 In a more substantive analysis of those issues, Allen Batteau has referred to the “double otherness” of Appalachia—its distinctiveness from the South as well as from the nation. Seeing both racial issues and the Civil War as major impetuses in the creation of these dual distinctions, he notes that they made it possible “to identify Appalachia as southern and anti-progressive on the one hand, and a critique of the South on the other.”8

  Those of us in the field of Appalachian studies have confronted that dual identity head on in a variety of ways. The theme of an early Appalachian Studies Conference and its published proceedings focused on “Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region within a Region,” and both the Appalachian Journal and the Journal of Appalachian Studies have devoted forums or special issues to the question of Appalachia’s southernness.9 Provocative recent studies of Appalachian identity by Batteau, Jerry Williamson, and Jeff Biggers have assessed the region’s significance within both a southern and a national context.10

  Yet this path of inquiry has thus far been a one-way street. Few of those working on the lowland South have felt the need to lift their eyes unto the hills. Sociologist Larry Griffin has probably done more than anyone in juxtaposing Appalachian and southern identity and the different fields of study entailed by each; he has admitted that he and a colleague approached the field of Appalachian studies fearful of how little they knew of the region and how much there was to learn. “What we found,” he wrote in 2002, “was that the literature on Appalachia and its people is both extraordinarily rich and of great, if somewhat surprising, utility to scholars in Southern Studies.”11 It’s hard to think of an Appalachian historian ever saying—or having to say—the same thing about southern history. Anyone who writes about nineteenth-century—or, for that matter, twentieth-century—Appalachia has to be grounded in the broader historical trends and developments taking place elsewhere in the South.

  And yet scholars of the rest of the South can—and usually do—assess the larger region without acknowledging Appalachia. My friend and colleague Jim Cobb recently produced an impressively comprehensive and well-received history of southern identity—without any mention of mountain folks.12 Current textbooks, essay collections, and documentary readers on southern history pay little more than lip service to the mountain South, and it is never mentioned in relation to the antebellum or Civil War years.13

  Certainly no two topics have been more central to southern history (or, one might argue, to southern identity) than race relations and the Confederacy. Both entail complex issues that defy generalization for any part of the larger region. Perhaps as a result, both fields have spawned multiple localized or regional studies that have allowed scholars to examine in more microcosmic scope the dynamics of race (slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and civil rights) and of the war (issues of loyalty and willpower, political and nonpolitical dissent, household hardship and community breakdown, and the traumas of guerrilla warfare). The same has proved true of Appalachian scholarship as well, and yet rarely do these studies overlap or connect with those of the South at large.

  One set of scholars has characterized this approach as “an effort to deconstruct the concept of an essential and universalistic Appalachian past,” and
those of us looking especially at race and war in the region have taken on this challenge with particular gusto.14 Perhaps because those myths still loom so large, my generation of historians discovered and reconstructed slavery’s existence in multiple modes throughout the region that raise new questions about master-slave relationships, the economics of slave labor and slave markets, and the quality of slave life. Others among us have discovered new and somewhat messier realities in terms of both Civil War loyalties and home-front experiences. The regional variants in both cases have continued to contribute to a sense of Appalachian distinctiveness, and yet I think we would acknowledge more fully than was once the case that the differences between the highland and lowland South in regard to these particular topics are more of degree than of kind. As such, there is much of relevance in the Appalachian experience to that of the South as a whole, as Larry Griffin, for one, has discovered.

  Consideration of these issues at ground level also allows us to consider the variables that rendered southern highlanders different in behavior, attitude, and experience not only from their lowland counterparts, but from each other as well. The foibles of human nature as reflected in decisions made, attitudes formed, and actions taken have much to do with the exigencies of kinship, household, and community. Individuals, families, and communities provide the core for many of the essays that follow. Both before and even more so during the Civil War, Appalachians left an extraordinary written record of their experiences, which allow us more fully to re-create and appreciate the human dimension of the conflict as they experienced it in all its complexity and variety, which are so often at odds with the generalizations that have, since Taylor and Gilmore, dominated—and distorted—our understanding of the region. By embracing the particular—whether it be place, person, or situation—I, like many of my colleagues, have sought to shed meaningful light on larger historical realities of the Appalachian experience, even as they defy easy categorization or broad assumptions that were applicable to the whole.

  By the same token, it is important to remember that many of the behaviors and attitudes in evidence here were by no means exclusive to Appalachia. The further back one pulls his lens on the region, the more contradiction and ambiguity his frame has to take in and to account for. Geography was certainly a crucial factor in determining what was—or merely may have been—exceptional about the mountain South, but it was never the only factor, any more than sugar planters in Louisiana, rice planters on Georgia’s Sea Islands, or merchants in Richmond or Baltimore or New Orleans can be defined only by the particular settings or crops that so seemed to distinguish them. Like all of these, southern highlanders were also southerners—sometimes foremost, sometimes more secondarily—and their actions and attitudes were often dictated as much or more by identity with that larger regional entity than by the smaller, more immediate geographical area defined primarily by topography or climate. Nothing brings those dual and overlapping identities into sharper focus in the nineteenth century than do the realities of slavery, race, and Civil War.

  To further complicate matters, Appalachian history rarely comes to us unfiltered. Far more than is true for other regional histories, both its filterers and the filtering process are often as revealing and as significant as what is actually being conveyed; as such, those chronicling the region deserve close scrutiny from those of us making use of their writings. Emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays are multiple voices and perspectives of both insiders and outsiders. While many of those outsiders (such as Taylor and Gilmore) created and perpetuated much of the misinformation and stereotypes about the southern highlands without ever having visited the region, others—from Frederick Law Olmsted to fugitive prisoners of war—actually moved through parts of the mountain South and left us with more credible firsthand, if often fleeting, accounts of life and conditions there. Their observations supplement, enhance, reinforce, and sometimes challenge the written expressions of highlanders themselves—most of them privately, through letters, diaries, journals, or memoirs, though some in more self-conscious form as they wrote for publication or posterity.

  Those contemporary voices, in various configurations, provide the basis for most of the essays in the first two sections of this book, where I have tried to explore, first, the historical reality of particular aspects of slavery and racial attitudes, and second, the social upheavals of the war years as experienced by a populace far from the center of military action for most of the conflict. But I am equally interested in the depiction of antebellum and Civil War Appalachia in hindsight and how such depictions took shape in insiders’ personal or collective memories, in outsiders’ observations and assessments, and ultimately in what novelists, filmmakers, and a playwright have made of it all. The distortions and misconceptions inherent in so much of the historical and literary treatments of the region have been widely chronicled; as Allen Batteau once noted, “In the Appalachian studies industry, an entire shop floor is devoted to the labor-intensive task of debunking stereotypes.”15

  Thus, in the third section of the book, called “Remembrance” in a very loose use of the term, I explore the many ways through which misconceptions about race and war have evolved and have been challenged. Many of these works represent serious efforts to move beyond—or rise above—clichés and stereotypes to provide genuine insights and capture certain realities about Appalachia and its people that only the dramatic license of fiction and film can provide. They too focus on the particular, as both genres demand. Although these authors cast their characters as heroes, heroines, and villains, they also depict individuals and communities struggling within a society and a culture often vividly reconstructed and movingly presented to readers or viewers. Most of the works I consider here—novels, short stories, films, and a play—get at least as much historically right as they get wrong, or so I argue. Unlike critics who have faulted these works for factual inaccuracies, more often than not I see glasses half full rather than half empty in terms of the larger “truths” that emerge.

  The seventeen essays presented here were produced over the past two decades. A few appeared first as journal articles, but most were commissioned or invited pieces for essay collections or for special thematic issues or forums in journals. I have revised most for this volume, some more than others. I have tried to update citations to reflect the vast and valuable scholarship that has appeared since the original publication of some of these pieces. The editors have indulged me in allowing me to retain slight differences in endnote formats, reflecting the stylistic differences in the various journals and books in which they originally appeared.

  As much as possible, I have sought to eliminate any repetitious material. But some stories, quotations, or factual data are so integral to the differing contexts of two or more essays that I have retained them in both places, and beg the reader’s indulgence in the occasional passages that may give a slight sense of déjà vu.

  Notes

  1. James W. Taylor, Alleghania: A Geographical and Statistical Memoir Exhibiting the Strength of the Union and the Weakness of Slavery in the Mountain Districts of the South (St. Paul, Minn.: James Davenport, 1862), v, 15–16, 1–2.

  2. [James R. Gilmore,] “Southern Aid to the North,” The Continental Monthly 1 (March 1862): 142–43. Gilmore cites Taylor’s pamphlet in his article.

  3. John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 11.

  4. William G. Frost, “Educational Pioneering in the Southern Mountains,” in the National Education Association’s Addresses and Proceedings (1901): 556. See chap. 12 in this volume for more on Frost and Campbell’s depictions of the region.

  5. For one of several useful overviews of these debates, see John Alexander Williams, “Counting Yesterday’s People: Using Aggregate Data to Address the Problem of Appalachia’s Boundaries,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 2 (Spring 1996): 3–28.

  6. John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russel
l Sage, 1921), 18–19.

  7. John Shelton Reed, Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy: Native White Social Types (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 42.

  8. Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 37.

  9. Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 3: “Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region within a Region,” ed. John C. Inscoe (1991). Two articles in that issue are still very useful treatments of the subject: John Alexander Williams, “A Regionalism Within Regionalisms: Three Frameworks for Appalachian Studies,” 4–17; and Richard B. Drake, “Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region Within a Section,” 18–27. See also “Forum on Appalachia and the South,” Appalachian Journal 29 (Spring 2004): 296–340; and “Whiteness and Racialization in Appalachia,” special issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies 10 (Spring/Fall 2004).

  10. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia; J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Jeff Biggers, The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America (Emeryville, Calif.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005).

  11. Larry J. Griffin and Ashley B. Thompson, “Appalachia and the South: Collective Memory, Identity, and Representation,” Appalachian Journal 29 (Spring 2002): 296. In addition to this essay (pp. 296–327), see also responses it by Chad Berry, Dwight B. Billings, and John C. Inscoe (pp. 328–40). See Griffin’s equally valuable essay, “Whiteness and Southern Identity in the Mountain and Lowland South,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10 (Spring/Fall 2004): 7–37.