It would be another generation or more before the stereotypical image of the southern mountaineer in all his ignorance, isolation, and crudity emerged, so Olmsted could hardly be accused of giving in to such preconceived notions. Yet by limiting the bulk of his treatment to those he met who did fit that image, he certainly had much to do with laying the groundwork from which those stereotypes grew.
He made much of the ignorance of his mountain hosts, for example, particularly their misconceptions regarding slavery and the sectional crisis in which it was already embroiled. He recorded a conversation with the Tennessee “squire” regarding Irish laborers in New York. His slaveholding host assumed that they were imported from Ireland and purchased just as black labor from Africa had been. He was amazed to learn not only that New York had no slaves, but also that blacks there were free (236–37).
Slaves could become victims of their owners’ ignorance, as was the case of a white couple with whom Olmsted spent a night. They thought that Virginia was a cotton-growing state to their south and had sold their three slaves south, largely because of the slaves’ desire to be reunited with their mother in Virginia (240). He cited other instances in which highlanders thought coffee was grown in New York (262), confused the locations and proximity of Charleston, Texas, and New York (249–50), wondered if the Mexican War was over yet (266), and speculated about the nature of the “new country [of] Nebrasky,” which one old woman “reckoned must be a powerful fine country, they’d taken so much trouble to get possession of it” (235).
But in recording mountaineers’ vague and often highly distorted ideas about geography and politics, neither Olmsted’s purpose nor his tone was as derogatory or as demeaning as those of later chroniclers of mountain life. His purpose was to demonstrate that mountain residents’ statements regarding slavery and slaveholders were rarely thought out and were usually based on little beyond their own limited experience with blacks. Likewise, his descriptions of their crude living conditions and bleak lifestyles served a specific function in regard to his more general theories about slavery’s impact on southern society. But there was an inherent contradiction in Olmsted’s use of the southern highlands in substantiating his arguments. Olmsted blamed the deprivations of mountain life on the presence of slavery elsewhere and portrayed the highlanders as tragic, and perhaps innocent, victims of the institution. Yet, at the same time, a basic theme remained: mountain residents, free from so many of the shackles imposed upon those southerners with investments in or mere proximity to the system, were happier and better people than those less fortunate lowlanders.
Yet despite discrepancies, inconsistencies, and major omissions in his description and interpretation of racial and sectional attitudes among southern highlanders, the seventy or so pages that Olmsted devoted to the region in his Journey in the Back Country remain invaluable as a record of the most extended and substantive foray into an area neglected not only by contemporary travelers but also by historians of slavery and the antebellum era ever since. Much of the strength of Olmsted’s overall commentary on the South lay in his determination to understand it at the grassroots level. The mere fact that he gave voice to the southern highlanders, one of the most inscrutable and misrepresented groups of antebellum Americans, is a remarkable indication of the extent to which he succeeded.
Notes
1. The fullest treatments of Olmsted’s careers are Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); John Emerson Todd, Frederick Law Olmsted (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982); and Broadus Mitchell, Frederick Law Olmsted: A Critic of the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924). The Mitchell book provides the best account of Olmsted’s antebellum southern travels and writings, along with Charles E. Beveridge, introduction to The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 2: Slavery and the South, 1852–1857 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 1–39.
2. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856); Olmsted, A Journey through Texas: or, a Saddle Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1857); and Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853–54 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860). A condensed version of these three books was published in two volumes as The Cotton Kingdom (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861). On the circumstances that led to Olmsted’s southern assignment and the subsequent publication of his work, see Beveridge, introduction, Papers of Olmsted, 9–35; and Mitchell, Olmsted, 47–53.
3. Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 176; Olmsted, Back Country, 103–4. See also Mitchell, Olmsted, 88–89.
4. Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 146–48; Olmsted, “The South,” nos. 7 and 47, New York Daily Times, 17 March 1853, and 26 January 1854, in Beveridge, Papers of Olmsted, 2:103–10, 247–54; see also introduction, 13–15.
5. Beveridge, Papers of Olmsted, 2:252.
6. Todd, Frederick Law Olmsted, 57–58; Mitchell, Olmsted, chap. 2.
7. For Olmsted’s schedule and route, see Beveridge, Papers of Olmsted, 2:309 (map) and 481–82 (itinerary).
8. The ten counties that can be identified along Olmsted’s highland route are Hamilton, Polk, and Johnson counties in Tennessee; Cherokee, Macon, Haywood, Buncombe, Yancey, and Watauga counties in North Carolina; and Washington County in Virginia. County population figures are derived from Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, 1853), table 1 for Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, 256–57, 307–8, 573–74. For a discussion of the demographics of slavery in North Carolina’s mountain counties, see John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), chap. 3.
9. Olmsted, Back Country, 227. Subsequent quotations of material from Back Country are designated by page numbers within the text. Note the contrast in Olmsted’s tone and interest regarding the treatment of slaves just six months earlier in “The South,” no. 47, 24 Jan. 1854, in Beveridge, Papers of Olmsted, 2:247–52.
10. Carter G. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America,” Journal of Negro History 1 (April 1916): 140, 149; John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1929; rept., Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 95; and Loyal Jones, “Appalachian Values,” in Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia, ed. Robert J. Higgs (New York: Unger, 1975), 512.
11. Julian Ralph, “Our Appalachian Americans,” Harper’s (June 1903): 37; and James W. Taylor, Alleghania: A Geographical and Statistical Memoir (St. Paul, Minn.: James Davenport, 1862), 1.
12. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1941), 219.
13. Muriel E. Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 60.
14. Among the best discussions of antislavery sentiment in East Tennessee and its political repercussions are Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (1899; rept., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Library Press, 1971); Mary Emily Robertson Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York: Vantage, 1961); Vernon M. Queener, “East Tennessee Sentiment and the Secession Movement, November 1860–June 1861,” East Tennessee Historical Society Proceedings 20 (1948): 64; E. Merton Coulter, William C. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Appalachians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937); and Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birds-eye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
15. Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Region (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 38.
16. For other evidence from Olmsted on the priority of property rights among mountaineers, see Back Country, 240.
17. Samuel T. Wilson, The Southern Mountaineers (New York: Little and Ives, 1914), 57. See also Campbell, Southern Highlanders, 94; an
d Edward J. Phifer, “Saga of a Burke County Family,” North Carolina Historical Review 39 (Spring 1962): 145.
18. Ralph, “Our Appalachian Americans,” 36.
19. Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961), 379.
20. See note 8.
21. Olmsted did not have the letters of introduction during his backcountry trip that he had for much of the plantation South, where he utilized his own and his brother’s various Yale acquaintances. For a fuller treatment of large slaveholders in the highlands and their relations with their slaves, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chaps. 3 and 4.
4
Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists
The Slave Trade in Western North Carolina, 1861–1865
On October 7, 1861, Colonel George Bower, the largest slaveholder in Ashe County, North Carolina, drowned. He was swept downstream when his two-horse carriage overturned as he attempted to ford the swollen Yadkin River at the start of a trip to Raleigh from his mountain home in the state’s northwesternmost county. Two days later, Calvin Cowles, his friend and fellow slaveholder from nearby Wilkes-boro, reported the tragedy in a letter to W. W. Holden in Raleigh. Cowles stated that Bower had been accompanied by a slave, who had urged him not to attempt the crossing given the force of the current. “The Carriage capsized and all went downstream,” Cowles wrote, “except the Negro who fortunately escaped to tell the story. The alarm being given, 20 or 30 people went immediately through a drenching rain,” where they searched in vain for the elderly colonel’s body. In his account of the incident in the North Carolina Standard a week later, editor Holden shifted words just enough to imply a somewhat different scenario: that the “negro boy who was driving him made his escape.”1 While Holden may well have meant simply that he escaped his master’s watery death, soon thereafter and ever since, the standard version of the incident has been that, as Ashe County’s one history states, Bower drowned “while pursuing a runaway slave.”2
It is tempting to speculate on whether or not Holden intentionally altered Cowles’s version of the tragedy and on just how and why the slave became the cause of Bower’s death rather than his attempted savior in the community’s collective memory of the incident. Perhaps in hindsight the ominous implications of that latter version proved too fitting to resist: that less than six months into the war, a powerful slaveholder had already fallen victim to his human property, with Bower’s death an extreme portent perhaps of the fate of his counterparts throughout the South. Its implications are significant in the Carolina mountains alone, where the Bower drowning was part of a rather striking statistic: he was the first of four of the region’s forty largest slaveholders who died violent deaths at or near their homes over the course of the war. Those losses were compounded by such numerous battlefield casualties among the sons of that elite that Zebulon Vance commented just after the war that in western North Carolina, “many old families are almost extinct in the male line.”3
Yet if the war took an unusually heavy toll on the mountains’ slaveholders, the institution itself suffered remarkably little in that particular region. Because of its insulation from any major military incursion until the war’s waning months, the home-front experience in the Carolina highlands differed markedly from that elsewhere in the South, and even from that in other areas of Appalachia. Among the more striking and unexplored aspects of that experience is the continued stability and profitability of slavery for most of the war’s duration. Despite a vast literature documenting the wide range of emancipation experiences among bondsmen and women throughout the Confederacy and border state South, little attention has been given to the impact of the war on the economics of slavery in those areas not in the path of liberating armies. Nor has the war’s effect on the value of slave property or the dynamics of a slave trade been examined except as black labor was engaged directly in the Confederate war effort.4
The institution of slavery in the southern highlands exhibited a number of traits that distinguished it from plantation slavery elsewhere in the American South. Slaveholders made up only 10 percent of North Carolina’s mountain population in 1860, and only 10 percent of the total were slaves. The limitations imposed on the region’s agriculture by climate and terrain would have neither justified nor supported even this small labor force. Consequently, perhaps the most distinctive variation in the institution’s highland manifestation was that its slaveholders were, as Frederick Law Olmsted accurately observed in 1854, “chiefly professional men, shop-keepers, and men in office who are also land owners, and give only divided attention to farming.” As such, they utilized their slaves in various nonagricultural pursuits, from employment in their mercantile and hostelry operations to hiring them out for mining or construction projects. The flexibility inherent in slavery’s adaptation to a highland economy kept it both viable and profitable for its beneficiaries, so much so that the number of mountain residents investing in slaves increased steadily over the course of the 1840s and 1850s.5
Given the growing value of their investments, it seems curious that mountain masters exhibited so little concern for the security of their black property holdings until late in the Confederacy’s waning existence. The immediate prewar years had witnessed new fears across North Carolina of insurrectionary or subversive activity among its slave population, and a major thrust of the rhetoric during the secession crisis had been warnings of the effect of war on slavery’s stability and indeed survival. A Raleigh newspaper editor expressed the concerns of many mountain residents as well when he noted in February 1861 that if armed conflict was to come, “the negroes will know, too, that the war is waged on their account,” and they will “become restless and difficult to manage.”6
Western Carolinians on both sides of the secession debate relied on racial fear tactics to make their case, outlining scenarios of upheaval aimed at slaveholding and nonslaveholding highlanders as well. Disunionist spokesmen W. W. Avery and Marcus Erwin printed a circular warning of the “terrible calamity of having three hundred thousand idle, vagabond free negroes turned loose on you with all the privileges of white men” if Republican coercion went unchallenged. Along the same lines but arguing in support of the Union, Asheville resident William Vance Brown pointed out that in case of war, slaves would suddenly become detrimental to southerners in that the North “can do awful damage & destruction by & through our slaves. Once arouse them to insurrection & they will carry murder, Rape & arson into the midst of our firesides.”7
Yet despite such alarmism, there were few signs that mountain whites took seriously or even remembered such predictions once the war was under way. A significant factor in their lack of worry was the degree to which the institution’s profitability continued to soar—or was perceived to soar—for most of the war’s duration. While slavery had never been as demographically significant or economically central to southern highland society as it was elsewhere in the South, the latter antebellum years had proved very healthy ones for the slave trade in western North Carolina. Despite their relatively small numbers in the mountain counties, slave purchases during the 1850s resulted in a growth rate of the slave populace far exceeding that of the state as a whole.8
There is no indication that the vitality of this intraregional slave trade diminished as a result of secession and the war. Highland slaveholders were quick to finesse the new labor shortages the war imposed locally by hiring out their own slaves and serving as agents in renting or selling the slaves of others. The widespread practice of long-and short-term hirings of slaves had long been integral to the institution’s viability in the southern highlands, and that flexibility allowed the region to adapt more effectively to wartime labor shortages than was true in other parts of the Confederacy.9
The Carolina highlands were on the receiving end of the considerable population mobility within the war-torn Confederacy, particularly the massive movements toward the interior by slaveholders and their slaves from vulnerable
coastal regions stretching from tidewater Virginia through low country Georgia. Refugees, both black and white, poured into various North Carolina communities to avoid the disruptions and threats posed by the movement of armies elsewhere. Governor Zebulon Vance, himself a mountain native, viewed this shift with some alarm, complaining to Jefferson Davis in October 1862 that “thousands are flying from our Eastern Counties with their slaves to the centre & West to devour the very short crops and increase the prospect of starvation.”10
Whereas many of those in flight found the western part of the state the most desirable area of retreat due to its relative stability and its distance from any major theater of war, highlanders themselves seemed to view the influx in a more positive light than did Vance, perhaps because of the caliber of those seeking refuge in their midst. Charlestonians and other South Carolina planters with summer homes in Flat Rock and Hendersonville often retreated there with much of their slave force—among them Confederate treasury secretary Christopher Memminger, Senator Thomas J. Semmes of New Orleans, Mary Chesnut, and assorted Middletons, Rhetts, and Lowndeses.11 Late in 1863, the Confederacy’s “fighting bishop,” General Leonidas Polk, moved his family to Asheville for the duration of the war, after the fall of Nashville and then New Orleans, both of which his wife had called home, and the destruction of his daughter’s Mississippi plantation. “Always thoughtful and provident,” according to his daughter, Polk arranged for “some twenty excellent negro men & their families” to be brought up to join the family, while Mrs. Polk had other slaves of her own brought to Asheville from New Orleans.12
Even more common were efforts by lowland slaveholders to send their human property out of the reach of Union liberators or Confederate impressment officials. On the one hand, the demands for slave labor in constructing coastal fortifications made them ready targets of the latter. On the other, state officials were convinced that occupying Federal forces in the eastern part of the state were actively encouraging slaves to escape, prompting Governor Vance to issue a policy statement informing easterners that “it is the duty of all slaveowners immediately to remove their slaves able to bear arms.” Vance’s order was in response to more general instructions issued from the Confederate administration in Richmond in March 1863 that planters in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida were to withdraw their slaves into the interior “since they were liable to be lost at any moment.” For South Carolinians in particular, western North Carolina was a viable site for such interior transfers.13
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 11