Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  One must wonder, based on the film’s depiction of such pervasive antislavery and antislaveholder sentiment in 1815, why these pioneers’ descendants would so eagerly defend the institution two generations later and secede from the Union in order to do so. To have cast the upright, dignified, patrician Sam Waterston as Singletary, rather than the hulking Larry Drake, would have been both truer to history and more challenging for an audience who here finds much too comfortable a way out of the moral dilemma posed by the plot. We don’t now want to think that our slaveowning ancestors could also have been attractive, high-minded, and morally fastidious. With Larry Drake as Olaf, it is too easy for us to dismiss both him and the institution of slavery. A more attractive man in the role of slave owner and captor would have provided even more subtle dimensions and moral shadings to this otherwise sophisticated treatment of the multiple components of a slaveholding society. (Sam Waterston all too predictably plays the dignified and impeccable Mooney Wright, who appears as the voice of antislavery in the film’s closing scenes.)

  Yet, to Ehle’s credit, the despicable Singletary hardly carries the villainy of the film on his shoulders alone; his nonslaveholding neighbors can claim few moral exemptions of their own, as they reveal their own shades of race hatred. Once recruited for the pursuit of Annalees and her fellow fugitive Sims, Singletary’s henchmen are fully contemptuous of their prey and, even though motivated by promises of material rewards, they are fully committed to seeing the system restored and those rebelling against it punished. The brutal lynching of Sims, once he is caught, evokes no apparent protest or even squeamishness among the many who witness it. They speculate openly as to the fate of Annalees upon her capture, debating casually whether she too will be executed or simply forced to return to her master’s bed, without indicating any discomfort with whichever option he might take.

  To me, the most blatant historical inaccuracy in the film lies in the shocking execution of Sims. In the midst of a bustling crossroads gathering, King detects from afar the fact that Annalees’s male companion has been captured. Hearing cries of “String him up like a hog!” he watches in horror as just that takes place. Hung by his feet from a butcher’s post, Sims refuses to reveal Annalees’s location (which he doesn’t know anyway); in anger, Singletary, with a single stroke of a butcher’s cleaver, slices Sims down the middle, leaving witnesses to gawk at “the two halves of the brute turning just now in opposite directions so that the halves grossly formed the body of a man, then separated and became two men, one of them headless.”17

  Ehle surely included the scene in the film to convey the full sense of the brutality of the slave regime and perhaps the raw force of frontier violence. Yet it doesn’t ring true. Slaves, particularly strong adult males like Sims, were valuable, representing a considerable financial investment for owners. This, of course, is why their capture was deemed so vital and why death as a punishment would have been so wasteful and irrational. Slaves were executed on occasion, but such incidents were relatively rare and usually resulted from court edicts following capital crimes of a far more serious nature than simply running away. Murder or attempts to murder a master or other whites or involvement in a rebellion conspiracy were virtually the only offenses for which courts would sentence a slave to death. Even then, the state compensated owners for such losses. The most severe punishments for runaways and other non-capital offenders—and even then usually applied only to repeat offenders—were brandings, shackles, stocks and pillories, isolation “sweat boxes,” or deportation.18

  Only in the story’s final phase does Ehle present any sense of a communal abolitionist spirit within the region. King brings Annalees to his home in the remote cove settlement of Harristown, and after putting her up for a night in his cabin, he sends her off fortified with food and dressed in his dead wife’s clothing. It is only after her departure that his neighbors gather, and August must finally account for his actions. King had stated earlier that “they don’t allow slaves in the community I live in,” and as its residents confront him, it becomes apparent that they are sympathetic toward his actions but wary of the consequences he soon must face from Singletary. Led by Mooney Wright, they urge King to lie in defending himself, and they offer their help in explaining away the circumstantial evidence linking him with Annalees. When in an informal trial “of a sort” inside his own cabin, King stands firm in declaring the truth before the man whose property he helped escape, his neighbors can only watch as Singletary and his men inflict a costly retribution by burning King’s house to the ground and thus completing his economic ruin.

  I question the extent of that retribution exacted by a slaveholder on one who has abetted his slave’s escape and the passive compliance in such a punishment by all who witnessed it. I have never seen evidence of such extralegal measures in the mountains or elsewhere. Yet by depicting this punishment as an almost ritualistic act, and one that is fully expected and ultimately accepted even by those supportive of King’s good deed, Ehle suggests that it was a common and generally accepted occurrence. (Another oddity in this scene is that it is one of only two in which white women appear, but they maintain their silence. Their marginalization in the film seems to undercut, or seriously distort, the gendered themes and tensions that derive from the relationship between August and Annalees.)

  The antislavery sentiments that bound this community together, however, are somewhat more credible. There were indeed pockets of more remote highland settlement in which a black presence was unknown and unwelcome, though it was often antiblack prejudices more than antislavery sentiments that motivated such bans. As Frederick Law Olmsted noted in traveling through this very region several decades after the time of The Journey of August King, many highlanders found both the presence of blacks and the privileges that ownership of them bequeathed to other whites to be the worst features of a slaveholding society, and they fought to maintain their distance from both.19

  Yet true antislavery activity spurred by humanitarian motives, such as those evident early in the film and embodied in Mooney Wright at the film’s end, also found its place in Southern Appalachia. Sporadic efforts emerged then faded out throughout the antebellum era at Wheeling, Virginia; Berea, Kentucky; and Maryville, Tennessee. Yet it was in the area closest to the Harristown settlement—both geographically and chronologically—in which Appalachian abolitionism most flourished. In the 1810s and 1820s in northeastern Tennessee, just across the state line from Harristown’s probable location, fledgling manumission societies and abolitionist publications emerged. They were usually based in towns and instigated by “New Light” Presbyterians and Quakers from Pennsylvania and Ohio.20 Whereas such circumstances would hardly have penetrated into remote cove settlements like August King’s, it would not have been improbable for a collective resentment to both the system and its beneficiaries to have developed in such communities. Mooney Wright makes it clear that he is acting from a sense of decency that opposes anyone’s enslavement and that he silently applauds Annalees’s triumph over the system. But it is never clear if the same higher ground lies behind the other neighbors’ willingness to stand by August King. The basis for their opposition to Singletary and sympathy for Annalees is left—perhaps fittingly—ambivalent.

  Part of the power of both the film and the novel lies in its early nineteenth-century setting, so early in the development of Appalachian society. These western Carolinians—and August King in particular—are forced to deal with a moral dilemma that has not been fully articulated as such up to that point. This is an escape story set well before the Underground Railroad was in place and in which characters wrestle with the wrongs of slavery well before a full-fledged abolition movement has articulated those evils. It is a relatively spontaneous situation with two opponents—one fighting for her freedom, the other fighting for the recovery of his legally owned property—that force this community of white highlanders to confront the legitimacy of the institution for the first time. They are well aware of the legalities of sla
very. King’s initial reaction to Annalees’s request for help is “You know I can’t do that. It’s against the law.” When King’s complicity in her escape is revealed and he must face Singletary’s retribution, Mooney Wright—in typical Sam Waterston deadpan—states simply the reason such punishment must be accepted: “Laws have been broken, property rights violated.”

  August King seems to have had little reason to question that truth until he makes this fateful journey. As played by Jason Patric, he is a simple farmer, an Everyman whose quiet strength and moral resolve audiences are meant to identify with. Neither he nor his neighbors own slaves, but neither have they taken any stand against a system that allowed “a horse in exchange for a man.” Yet when the opportunity to fight that system presents itself in the form of this beautiful, vulnerable, and irresistible young woman, King rises to the moral challenge, and in his small way he helps to undermine the institution that had so victimized her. Both Ehle and the movie’s casting director have perhaps stacked the deck here as well. Given the obvious charms of Thandie Newton as Annalees, one wonders if King’s moral courage has received a true test. His explanation for his actions suggests his own ambivalence about his motives. “A spell came over me,” he tells Mooney Wright and other neighbors. “I did a hundred things strange, nothing customary.” Would he have driven as hard or risked as much if it were Sims he had first encountered or if Annalees were an old or even middle-aged woman? As it is, his libido never seems far from his conscience. (This point is more obvious in the film than in the book, with the casting of a much younger actor in the title role rather than the middle-aged protagonist Ehle originally created.)

  Yet the power of the story derives in no small part from the sexual tensions that drive it, and it seems unfair to suggest that those dynamics in some way compromise the strong moral fiber that grounds not only the film’s title character but its overall tone as well. It is a film that works on a variety of levels, of which history lessons are only one. But to see so compelling, if relatively unexplored, a part of the Appalachian experience portrayed with as much talent, sensitivity, sophistication, and integrity as is evident in The Journey of August King is reason for celebration, particularly in light of everything else the movies have done to the mountains.

  In an interview just before the film’s release, Borden Mace hoped that its universal theme and dramatic story would make it a commercial success. Alas, that was not meant to be. But Mace, John Ehle, and the many others who collaborated in transferring the novel to film should take great satisfaction in the fact that it did fulfill Mace’s other great hope for it. “It would be great to have an honest depiction of one representative part of Southern Appalachia back on the silver screen,” he said.21 While it may be on a television screen or at the video store rather than at a movie theater that one discovers it, that goal was indeed achieved, and for that, all of us who cherish our region’s rich past and the quest to make it real should be grateful.

  Notes

  1. 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); Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Neither do other works on cinematic depictions of the South find anything to note on blacks as highlanders. See Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); and Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination, rev. ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) is the only other film I know that explores racial tensions in an Appalachian setting, the coalfields of West Virginia in the 1920s; none of the books cited here deals with it.

  2. John Ehle, The Journey of August King (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). This essay appeared as half of a “debate” with Jack Wright over the film’s merits. For his more critical assessment of the film, see “Hollywood Does Antebellum Appalachia and Gets It (Half) Right: The Journey of August King on Film,” Appalachian Journal 24 (Winter 1997): 192–204.

  3. Steve Ward, Interview with Borden Mace, Appalachian Journal 23 (Fall 1995): 51. Much of this interview focuses on the production of The Journey of August King. See also Carol Boggess, interview with John Ehle, Appalachian Journal 31 (Fall 2006): 32–51.

  4. Carter G. Woodson’s seminal essay, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America,” Journal of Negro History 1 (April 1916): 132–50, stood alone on the subject for several decades. More recent treatments of these topics include Richard B. Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 14 (Winter 1986): 25–33; John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4; Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (both, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and several essays in Edward J. Cabbell and William H. Turner, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); and John C. Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).

  5. Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Durwood Dunn, Cade’s Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818–1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); David Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); and Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

  6. See titles listed in note 4, none of which, other than Woodson’s essay, was published before Ehle published his novel.

  7. William H. Turner, “The Demography of Black Appalachia: Past and Present,” in Cabbell and Turner, eds., Blacks in Appalachia, 237–38.

  8. Maggie Lauterer, interview with John Baxter, cited by Patricia D. Beaver in “African-American and Jewish Relations in Early Twentieth Century Asheville, North Carolina,” paper delivered at Appalachian Studies Conference, Unicoi State Park, Georgia, March 1996.

  9. Richard Hinton interview with John Brown and John Kagin in August 1858, reprinted in John Brown, ed. Richard Warch and Jonathan F. Fauton (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 54.

  10. Leon F. Williams, “The Vanishing Appalachian: How to ‘Whiten’ the Problem,” in Cabbell and Turner, eds., Blacks in Appalachia, 201.

  11. See “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia,” chap. 1 in this volume, n. 20.

  12. For Ehle’s explanation on this point, see Steve Ward’s interview with Borden Mace, 66.

  13. Julian Ralph, “Our Appalachian Americans,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 107 (June 1903): 37. The term “Holy Appalachia” comes from Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Region (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 38–39.

  14. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia,” 147.

  15. Samuel Tyndale Wilson, The Southern Mountaineers (New York: J. J. Little and Ives, 1914), 57.

  16. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chap. 3; Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad, chap. 4.

  17. Ehle, Journey of August King, 139.

  18. See, for example, Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); and Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Centu
ry South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For more succinct coverage of these issues, see Whittington B. Johnson, “Punishments,” and Robert E. May, “Violence, Slave” in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, ed. Randall M. Miller and John David Smith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 603–5, 776–79.

  19. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through the Back Country in the Winter of 1853–54 (New York: Mission Brothers, 1860), 237–39. See also “Olmsted in Appalachia,” chap. 3 in this volume.

  20. On abolitionist activity in Southern Appalachia, see Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America”; Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia”; Asa Earl Martin, “The Anti-Slavery Societies of Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (1915): 261–81; Gordon E. Finnie, “The Antislavery Movement in the Upper South before 1840,” Journal of Southern History 35 (1969): 319–42; and Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

  21. Steve Ward’s interview with Borden Mace, 63.

  12

  “A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy”

  Explaining Civil War Loyalties in the Age of Appalachian Discovery, 1900–1921

  The first comprehensive codification of Southern Appalachian life and culture came in the early twentieth century. Most regional commentaries throughout the nineteenth century had been travel narratives, firsthand descriptions of scenic vistas and flora and fauna along with observations of the often quaint customs and folk life of southern highlanders, or local-color writing, which conveyed much of the same in fictional form.1 But by the turn of the century, these impressionistic, localized, and often anecdotal accounts began to give way to more serious and systematic ethnographic assessments of mountain people by missionaries, social workers, and academics. The work of Horace Kephart, William G. Frost, John C. Campbell, Emma Bell Miles, and others quickly became the foundational base for much of the way twentieth-century America came to know and understand the highland South.2 Because of these writers’ scholarly credentials and commitment to the region and its residents, their characterizations of its populace—even while perpetuating already established generalizations, distortions, and stereotypes—gave their work a credibility and endurance that came to be scrutinized and challenged only toward the end of the twentieth century.