Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  It is here that Thomas Clingman emerges as a key figure. His first efforts as a politician were in championing western interests in the state legislature in the early 1840s. He then went on to Congress and in the 1850s became an even more outspoken champion of slavery and southern rights. As such, he embraced the dual themes that dominated late antebellum politics for his constituents. In two very different spheres of sectional tension, as westerners within the state and as southerners within the nation, they were made increasingly aware of themselves, with Clingman’s guidance, as an abused minority whose rights and interests were threatened by government power on two fronts, federal and state, controlled respectively by northerners and easterners whose interests conflicted with their own. Thus he could exhort them in 1849 to tell the eastern-dominated legislature in Raleigh: “if they want white slaves they must look for them elsewhere than in the Western reserve,” and a year later, warn congressmen from the North that “if you intend to degrade and utterly ruin the South, then we will resist. We do not love you, people of the North, well enough to become your slaves.”38

  Clingman was among the first to recognize the striking parallels between the wrongs, or perceived wrongs, inflicted on his constituents from powers in both Raleigh and Washington, and throughout his congressional career he made the most of the emotional and political potential of those dual threats. Nourished by his constant harangues on behalf of their interests, western Carolinians’ consciousness of themselves as oppressed westerners was easily translated into an equally strong consciousness of themselves as oppressed southerners, and the two roles continued to reinforce and complement each other throughout the 1850s.39

  There was no such blatantly pro-southern, secessionist voice comparable to Thomas Clingman’s in East Tennessee. By the same token, Unionism never enjoyed nearly as full-bodied or consistent a hearing in western North Carolina as Andrew Johnson, Parson Brownlow, and others provided in East Tennessee. This is not to say that these individuals and their differences alone determined the course their constituents and/or readers took when faced with the ominous choices before them as the nation split in two. Rather, the key to their success as popular and influential spokesmen for their fellow mountaineers lay in their ability to recognize, verbalize, and ultimately exploit preexisting insecurities, prejudices, sources of pride, and self-perceptions, which they in turn translated into appropriate and effective ideological rhetoric for the crisis at hand. A number of recent studies stress the significance of community pressures in bringing about conformity on this vital issue.40 It was indeed a major factor on both sides of the North Carolina–Tennessee border, and one that had much to do with the influence these spokesmen were able to exert in consolidating and mobilizing those they led.

  These two regional underdogs of Southern Appalachia had much in common, but their inhabitants’ sense of who they were, where they were from, where they were headed, and how they fit into larger wholes were quite different. It was those distinctions and the way in which they were spotlighted and exploited by their respective leaders that provide much—though by no means all—of the answer as to why the courses of North Carolina and Tennessee highlanders diverged so sharply in their attitudes toward secession in the spring of 1861.

  Notes

  1. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860; Population and Slave Schedules for Tennessee and North Carolina. For a broader overview of the racial demographics of Appalachia, see William H. Turner, “The Demography of Black Appalachia: Past and Present,” Blacks in Appalachia, ed. Edward J. Cabbell and William H. Turner (Lexington, 1985).

  2. Computed from W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 648–68; and R.D.W. Connor, ed., A Manual for North Carolina (Raleigh, 1913). See also Marguerite Bartlett Hamer, “The Presidential Campaign of 1860 in Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 3 (January 1931): 3–22 (hereafter cited as ETHSP).

  3. Zebulon B. Vance to William Dickson, December 11, 1860, The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, Vol. I: 1843–1862, ed. Frontis W. Johnston, (Raleigh, 1963), 72.

  4. As the most prominent Whig leaders in the region, Nelson and Brownlow were longtime political adversaries of Johnson until their Unionist commitments made them strong allies during the secession crisis. Thomas B. Alexander, “Strange Bedfellows: The Interlocking Careers of T.A.R. Nelson, Andrew Johnson, and W.G. Parson Brownlow,” ETHSP 24 (1952): 68–91; and Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (1899; rept., Freeport, N.Y., 1971), 189–90; Other treatments of the three men’s relationship include Steve Humphrey, “That D—d Brownlow”: Being a Malicious Description of Fighting Parson William Gannaway Brownlow (Boone, N.C., 1978), 206–7; Royal F. Conklin, “The Public Speaking Career of William Gannaway (Parson) Brownlow” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1967), 128–37; and Thomas B. Alexander, Thomas A. R. Nelson of East Tennessee (Nashville, 1956), 76–83.

  5. Nashville Banner, February 22, 1861, cited in Vernon M. Queener, “East Tennessee Sentiment and the Secession Movement, November 1860–June 1861,” ETHSP 20 (1948): 64–65; and Mary Emily Robertson Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York, 1961), appendix C, 288. For more recent analyses of the secession crisis in East Tennessee, see Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill, 1997), chap. 2; W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville, 1999), chap. 2; and Robert Tracy McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town [Knoxville] in the American Civil War (New York, 2006), chap. 3.

  6. Knoxville Whig, February 16, 1861. Emphasis in original.

  7. Computed from Connor, North Carolina Manual, 1013–15; and Mark Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983), table 31, 276–78. See also John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville, 1989), 243–47, table 9.2, and map 7, 242; and Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989), 144–52.

  8. Clarke M. Avery of Burke County was the only secessionist candidate elected. The most thorough and accurate compilation of the February election results is found in Kruman, Parties and Politics, table 31, 276–78. See also J. Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1939). In Sitterson’s analysis of those results, he lists three secessionist delegates elected from the west, but for Jackson and Haywood counties, T. D. Bryson and William Hicks, respectively, were more cautiously Unionist than openly secessionist. Raleigh Register, February 23, March 6, 9, 1861.

  9. Sitterson, Secession in North Carolina, 219; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 231–37. Of the ten delegates whose views at this time are know, all were conditional rather than unconditional Unionists. Only the views of the delegates of Ashe, Alleghany, Wilkes, and Watauga counties cannot be ascertained, though Sitterson labels them unconditional Unionists.

  10. See Kruman, Parties and Politics, 211–13; Sitterson, Secession Movement in North Carolina, 195; and William T. Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of Confederate North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 61 (January 1984): 59–92.

  11. Charles Manly to David L. Swain, April 22, 1861, David Lowry Swain Papers, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh.

  12. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 248–55; Sitterson, Secession Movement in North Carolina, 210–14.

  13. Knoxville Whig, April 27, 1861; E. Merton Coulter, William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Appalachians (Chapel Hill, 1937), 149–51; and Alexander, Thomas A. R. Nelson, 82.

  14. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 196.

  15. Knoxville Whig, June 8, 1861; D. K. Young et al. to W. B. Campbell, June 3, 1861, cited in Alexander, Thomas A. R. Nelson, 82. For a more nuanced analysis of the long-term strength of East Tennessee Unionism, see Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Prudent Silenc
e and Strict Neutrality: The Parameters of Unionism in Parson Brownlow’s Knoxville, 1860–1863,” in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer (Athens, Ga., 2001), 73–96.

  16. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 199–200.

  17. Ibid.

  18. “Proceedings of the East Tennessee Convention, Greeneville, June 17, 1861,” cited in J. Reuben Sheeler, “The Development of Unionism in East Tennessee, Journal of Negro History 29 (April 1944): 182–84. The best accounts of that meeting are found in Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, chap. 11; Campbell, Attitude of Tennesseans, 207–10; Thomas W. Humes, The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee (Knoxville, 1888), 102–19; and Fisher, War at Every Door, 37–40.

  19. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, chap. 11; Fisher, War at Every Door, 38–42.

  20. William W. Malet, An Errand in the South in the Summer of 1822 (London, 1863), 236; and “Picturesque America: On the French Broad River, North Carolina,” Appleton’s Journal (December 7, 1870): 737. For similar descriptions of western North Carolina, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chap. 1; and various entries in Kevin E. O’Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth, eds., Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia, 1840–1900 (Knoxville, 2004).

  21. Elisha Mitchell to his wife, Maria, July 20, 1828, Elisha Mitchell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC–Chapel Hill; Thomas L. Clingman, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Hon. Thomas L. Clingman (Raleigh, 1877), 113–15.

  22. See Wilma Dykeman, The French Broad (New York, 1955), 137–51; John C. Inscoe, “Diversity and Vitality in Antebellum Mountain Society: The Towns of Western North Carolina,” in Sam Gray, ed., The Many Faces of Appalachia (Boone, N.C., 1984).

  23. Malet, Errand to the South, 248.

  24. William Holland Thomas to his wife, January 1 and June 17, 1861, William Holland Thomas Papers, Duke University.

  25. Samuel C. Williams, ed., “Journal of Events of David Anderson Deaderick,” ETHSP 8 (1936): 130.

  26. Queener, “East Tennessee Sentiment,” 72; Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 76.

  27. Williams, “Journal of David Deaderick,” 130.

  28. Quoted in Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 158. In addition to Crofts, other assessments of Johnson’s Unionist views include Ralph W. Haskins, “Andrew Johnson and the Preservation of the Union,” ETHSP 33 (1961): 43–59; and introduction, Leroy P. Graf and Ralph W. Haskins, eds., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, Vol. 4: 1860–1861 (Knoxville, 1976), xix–xxxiv.

  29. Knoxville Whig, January 26, 1861.

  30. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 180–81.

  31. Discussion of antebellum mountain attitudes toward slavery and race include Carter G. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America,” Journal of Negro History 1 (April 1916); Richard Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 14 (Winter 1986): 583–601; and several other essays in Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race; and “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia,” chap. 1 in this volume. On abolitionist sentiment in East Tennessee, see Asa Earl Martin, “The Anti-Slavery Societies of Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (1915): 261–81; and Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville, 1997).

  32. Vernon M. Queener, “William G. Brownlow as an Editor,” ETHSP 4 (1932): 80; and McKenzie, “Prudent Silence and Strict Neutrality,” 81–82. The best account of the Philadelphia debate is found in Coulter, William G. Brownlow, 97–109. The intensity of Brownlow’s commitment to slavery, though, varied according to the local, regional, or national base of the audience to whom he spoke or for whom he wrote.

  33. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 196–97.

  34. On sectionally divisive issues within the state, see Thomas P. Abernathy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (1932; rept., Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1967); and Paul H. Bergeron, Antebellum Politics in Tennessee (Lexington, Ky., 1982).

  35. William B. Hesseltine, ed., Dr. J.G.M. Ramsey: Autobiography and Letters (1954; rept., Knoxville, 2002), 17–18; Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Wealth and Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee in 1860,” Appalachian Journal 21 (1994): 260–79.

  36. Jonesborough Whig, December 8, 1841, quoted in McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels, 18.

  37. On East–West sectional rivalry in North Carolina, see Thomas E. Jeffrey, “Internal Improvements and Political Parties in Antebellum North Carolina, 1836–1860,” North Carolina Historical Review 55 (April 1978); Kruman, Parties and Politics; Guion G. Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1937); and Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chaps. 6 and 7.

  38. Thomas L. Clingman, “Address to the Freemen of the First Congressional District of North Carolina on the Recent Senatorial Election, December 18, 1848” (Washington, D.C., 1849), 15; Clingman, “In Defense of the South against the Aggressive Movement of the North, Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 22, 1850,” in Speeches and Writings, 252. The latter speech was made within the context of the growing sectional controversy of California’s entry into the Union as a free state.

  39. For an expanded treatment of these ideas, see John C. Inscoe, “Thomas Clingman, Mountain Whiggery, and the Southern Cause,” Civil War History 33 (March 1987). For other treatments of Clingman’s views on secession and southern rights, see Thomas E. Jeffrey, “ ‘Thunder from the Mountains’: Thomas Lanier Clingman and the End of Whig Supremacy in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 56 (October 1979); Marc W. Kruman, “Thomas L. Clingman and the Whig Party: A Reconsideration,” North Carolina Historical Review 61 (January 1987). See also Jeffrey, Thomas L. Clingman: Fireeater from the Carolina Mountains (Athens, Ga., 1999), chaps. 5 and 6.

  40. See, for example, Croft, Reluctant Confederates, chap. 1; Robert C. Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849–1881 (Knoxville, 1987); Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville, Va., 2001); Ralph Mann, “Mountain, Land, and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s,” Journal of Southern History 50 (August 1992): 411–34; and Jonathan D. Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville, Va., 2005).

  6

  Highland Households Divided

  Familial Deceptions, Diversions, and Divisions in Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War

  co-authored by Gordon B. McKinney

  Late in 1863 Madison Drake, a Union captain from Wisconsin, escaped from a Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, and made his way with a group of fellow fugitives into the state’s mountains toward the safety of Union-occupied East Tennessee. In a published account of that journey, he described an encounter he and his party had in Caldwell County, on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge. As they approached a small mountain homestead seeking food and directions, Captain Drake and his companions encountered a “vixen” of a woman who immediately recognized them as Yankee fugitives and gave them an impassioned tongue-lashing. Spewing her hatred of them and threatening to turn them in to local authorities, she assured them that they would hang from the same tree on which an earlier Northern fugitive had met his demise, and that she would gladly help carry out the execution.

  Yet all hope of aid from this household was not lost, for the crippled husband of this “vixen” sat on the stoop and listened passively “while his spouse was declaiming against us so virulently.” When she concluded her tirade, he winked at the men and, hobbling off the stoop, motioned for them to follow him. At a safe distance from the house, this “happy or unhappy husband,” as Drake called him, married only six weeks, confided that he sympathized with their cause. He informed them that he had served in the Confederate army until he had been wounded and discharged. Two of his br
others, also Confederates, had been captured in battle, had “taken the oath,” and were doing good business in the North. He was determined to do likewise and saw Drake and his companions as a means for his own escape. He “resolved to befriend” the fugitives and proposed guiding them across the mountains to Union lines if they would return with other forces and take him prisoner, thus allowing him to escape both impending conscription and his shrewish bride. Their conference was cut short by his wife’s appearance, which sent the fugitives scurrying on their way, abandoning the “kind-hearted but unfortunate” husband to her supervision.1

  Drake’s story reveals three basic features of wartime loyalties in the mountain South: first, that it often took a very fluid form, the crippled husband having changed sides at least once since the war’s outbreak; second, that the divisions between Union and Confederate loyalties were often localized, splitting not only communities and neighborhoods, but even families and households; and finally, that such divisions, and the tensions they generated, often meant some level of deception among family or household members.

  If this particular scenario, of a husband concealing his sentiments from his wife, seems an extreme one, it was not unique. It is one of several documented accounts of Appalachian households in which family members—husbands and wives or parents and children—were divided in their loyalties to the northern or southern cause, and in which at least one party felt the need to keep his or her feelings concealed from those with whom they lived. This was part of a phenomenon Michael Fellman, in his study of the Civil War in Missouri, termed “survival lying.” Individuals and families who lived in areas sharply divided and wracked by guerrilla warfare were often forced to practice extensive deception and role playing to protect themselves and their households. “Loyalty was not the safest and most common presentation of self during this guerrilla war,” Fellman noted. “Prevarication was. Frankness and directness led to destruction more often than did reticence and withdrawal.”2