Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Curiously, the Civil War played relatively little part in this particular body of work on Southern Appalachia. Only four or five decades removed from the conflict—and at a time when an obsession with “the late unpleasantness” manifested itself in the ideological and ceremonial trappings of the Lost Cause throughout much of the rest of the former Confederacy—the war’s legacy became increasingly simplistic, vague, and detached from historical context in the master-works of this age of Appalachian discovery. And yet, even given the minimalist treatment that so many of these writers accorded the war, almost all of them draw upon the issue of southern highlanders’ wartime loyalties as one means of gauging or explaining the character and ways of life of their subjects—sometimes in positive ways, sometimes negative.

  Henry Shapiro was the first modern scholar to seriously consider how the war’s legacy was carefully shaped by Appalachians seeking to portray themselves and their region in a beneficial light. In his seminal Appalachia on Our Mind (1978), Shapiro suggested that there had been a concerted effort in the immediate postwar years to downplay or avoid any reference to the war in the outpouring of writings on the southern highlands that appeared in the popular press. Only from about the mid-1880s on did regionalists come to acknowledge highlanders’ role in the war, and then only as Unionists, whose loyalty became a valuable means of winning favor for southern mountaineers as integral parts of the nation at large.3

  More recent scholars have offered other perspectives on treatments of wartime Appalachia during the 1870s and 1880s. In perhaps the most pointed treatment of the “myth” of Unionist Appalachia, Kenneth Noe has examined how and why “the southern mountains’ slaves and Johnny Rebs [were] swept under the nation’s intellectual rug.” Looking at popular fiction produced in the first two postwar decades, Noe demonstrated that the war was not as ignored as Shapiro and others had claimed and that the assumption of a solidly Unionist Appalachians was yet firmly in place, as indicated by portrayals of loyalist individuals and families as beleaguered minorities in Confederate-dominated parts of the region.4 Shannon Wilson has explored more self-conscious efforts by educators within Appalachia to cast the region as a bulwark of patriotism and loyalty to the Union cause, and even to embrace Abraham Lincoln himself as a product and reflection of highland character and virtues.5 James Klotter and Nina Silber have explored the perceived “whiteness” of Southern Appalachians after the war as explanations for its attraction to northern social workers and philanthropists, but only Silber made wartime loyalties a significant part of her analysis.6

  Yet none of these scholars pushed their examination of these issues past the turn of the century to examine how the far more influential writings of that era incorporated the Civil War into their portraits of the region and its people.7 Whereas the trends detected in late nineteenth-century accounts of the war are very much in evidence in the outpouring of writing in the early twentieth century, significant variables emerged in that work as well that reflect newly evolved agendas and perspectives by this next generation of Appalachian chroniclers.

  Several traits distinguish this new era of scholarship from the travel writing and local-color fiction of previous decades. By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Shapiro has noted, “the ‘old-fashioned’ quality of mountain life seemed to demand explanation, both as an abstract problem and as an aspect of the American dialogue on the nature of American civilization.” This in turn led to a redefinition of Appalachia as a discrete region of the nation and its residents as a distinct population, and also an assumption of a social and cultural coherence and homogeneity throughout this vast geographical entity that embraced parts of at least seven different states. From these new perceptions emerged a different stage of Appalachian portraiture that was far more systematic in its attempts to embrace the region as a whole.8

  Just as they claimed to portray the region as a whole, these writers were also far more inclusive of the regional experience they chose to document. Adopting an emerging ethnographic approach taking shape among academics at the turn of the twentieth century, they devoted chapters or sections of their books to a vast range of topics such as religion, language, folkways, kinship, community, and work, as well as moonshine, humor, and other “quaint” attributes of Southern Appalachian life. Several worked from the assumption that southern highlanders had little sense of their own history—and they themselves vary in terms of their own use of the historical past as explanatory forces in assessing mountain life and culture.

  Most of these new chroniclers were sympathetic toward their subjects; some displayed outright affection for mountaineers and admiration for their stalwart traditions, love of land, and the simplicity of their lifestyles. Whereas they often portrayed mountain life and attitudes in bemused or condescending tones, they saw themselves as advocates for, and often defenders of, this perceived constituency. Closely related to this attitude is the other biggest distinction in their writing over that of previous decades: all of these writers had specific agendas that drove their writings and shaped their characterizations for particular readerships. As ministers, educators, social workers, culture brokers, or merely as scholars, they sought to explain mountain people as worthy of attention and of help, and they worked to preserve and promote the distinctive music, folklore, and handicrafts of the region. In whatever form of “uplift” their agendas took, they looked to northern readers, benefactors, and organizations as their primary audiences. Although their characterization of highland life was basically presentist in outlook and emphasis, they also had to acknowledge the Civil War and to explain the role of southern highlander participants in it in ways conducive to what were, in effect, elaborate sales pitches for those very people.

  The most seminal of these works was not a book but a mere eight-page article. Published in 1899 in the Atlantic Monthly, William Goodell Frost’s “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains” embodies almost all the traits just mentioned, and it has served as an influential model for much of the subsequent scholarship on the region.9 The grandson of an abolitionist and son of a Congregational minister in upstate New York, Frost was educated and then taught at Oberlin College before moving to Berea College in Kentucky, which he served as president from 1892 to 1920. His leadership had much to do with reviving the college, which had faced serious financial and enrollment setbacks in the postwar decades. By shifting its mission and identity from a biracial student body to one that served the sons and daughters of Appalachia to its east, Frost made himself one of the era’s most influential spokesmen for educating and uplifting the mountain people.10

  In “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” Frost articulated for a national readership a portrait of southern highland society that resonated for many years. Folklorist W. K. McNeil has called it “perhaps the most famous essay ever written about Appalachia,” while Allen Batteau has credited Frost, in perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, with having “invented Appalachia as a social entity.”11 As the title of his essay suggests, Frost cast the region as a remnant of America’s pioneer past, with highlanders living in log cabins and living off the land with none of the trappings of modern technology or ideas. While at first glance, an outsider might have found such backwardness “rude and repellent,” Frost stressed the virtues they retained—among them, the purity of their Anglo-Saxon heritage, unpenetrated by foreign contamination, an abiding patriotism that emerged during the American Revolution, and an abhorrence of slavery. As a result of these traits, Frost maintained, “when civil war came, there was a great surprise for both the North and the South. Appalachian America clave to the old flag. It was this old-fashioned loyalty that held Kentucky in the Union, made West Virginia ‘secede from secession,’ and performed prodigies of valor in East Tennessee and even in the western Carolinas.”12 Somewhat more vaguely, he celebrated the “independent spirit” that inspired this loyalty and its rejection of slavery, though he did no better than any other writer of the era in clarifying the linkage between Unionism and this r
ugged individualism.

  None of these ideas originated with Frost; the notion of the region’s predominant Unionism, as we’ve seen, was well established by then. Yet by making them so integral a part of his sweeping characterization of mountain society and culture, Frost paved the way for much of the work on Appalachia that followed, and the traces of his claims, his assumptions, and even his phrases continued to appear in the work of his successors. It is clear that Frost was seeking substantial aid for the region; he even called his essay a “call for the intervention of intelligent, patriotic assistance.” “Appalachian America is a ward of the nation,” he claimed, and the means by which its residents “are to be put in step with the world is an educational one.”13 Essential to that effort was to create both sympathy and admiration for its people, and—as with an earlier generation making a similar plea—one means of doing so was to stress their devotion to the Union at a time when other southerners rebelled against it. Frost very consciously linked the word “Appalachian” with America, repeating the term at least seven times throughout the essay; thus he reminded readers of the most basic commonality they shared, even while delineating their “otherness.”

  Equally important to Frost, and to those who followed in his wake, was his emphasis on the Revolutionary War. That conflict proved a much safer historical context in which to place these highlanders, given that it evoked far more consensual sentiments among Americans, North and South. That most of Southern Appalachia was only sparsely settled in the 1770s, and that its few frontier inhabitants were likely as divided or detached as their descendants were during the Civil War were facts even easier to ignore than the messier realities of 1861–1865.14 As evidence of that “Revolutionary patriotism,” Frost posited a single event to stake his claim—the battle of King’s Mountain, where, he claimed all too simply, “backwoodsmen of Appalachian America annihilated a British army.” To further accentuate how closely tied later generations of Appalachians were to that era, he stated: “Cedar kegs used as canteens, and other accoutrements which saw service in that enterprise, may still be found in mountain cabins.”15

  Another, far more obscure essay produced at about the same time echoed Frost’s themes. In an essay on “The Mountaineers of Madison County, N.C.,” Mrs. D. L. Pierson, a Presbyterian mission worker based in the county at Hot Springs, just north of Asheville, dismissed the Civil War as irrelevant to their present backwardness. “We can not charge [the mountaineer’s] poverty to the war,” she wrote. “He never was a slaveowner and his uninviting little home was unmolested by the invading armies.”16 Such a claim took on particular irony, even absurdity, given that Madison County was notorious for the guerrilla warfare waged in its more remote sections, and was the site of one of the war’s most notorious atrocities, the infamous Shelton Laurel massacre, in which a Confederate regiment, the 64th North Carolina—mostly home-grown and based in the county seat of Marshall—invaded the Shelton Laurel community, where it captured and then executed thirteen suspected Unionists.17 To make no reference to that internecine violence a mere thirty-five years later seems to be a blatant oversight, intentional either on the part of the writer, or on that of the local populace who may have shielded her from that bitter but unspoken past.

  Yet Pierson did not neglect that more common theme in such pleas for sympathy and support. “The mountain people have a peculiar claim upon us, because they are purely American born,” she stated. “Probably ninety per cent of them would be eligible ‘Sons and Daughters of the Revolution.’ ” In an even greater stretch than Frost’s evoking of King’s Mountain, she harkened back to pre-Revolutionary incidents, from the Battle of Alamance in 1771 and the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (1775), which she claimed were somehow the “work of their ancestors” and thus made them worthy of assistance now, though neither locale was even remotely Appalachian-based.18

  Another Kentuckian, John Fox, was even more influential than William Frost in conveying southern highland life to a national readership in the early twentieth century. A native of the Bluegrass region, Fox spent most of his adult life in Big Stone Gap, in the heart of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, though most of his writing focused on Kentucky.19 Best known for his fiction (his novels The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come [1903] and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine [1908] were significant best sellers), Fox wrote of encounters between uncouth and primitive mountaineers and urbane, sophisticated lowlanders, which manifested themselves through cross-regional romances, politics, and even the Civil War, the setting for The Little Shepherd. Fox characterized mountain life in nonfictional form as well. In 1901, he published a collection of twelve essays contrasting the two sections of the state, entitled Bluegrass and Rhododendron: Outdoors in Old Kentucky. In the first of those essays, a broad overview of “The Southern Mountaineer,” Fox made a forceful case not only for Appalachia as a solid Unionist bastion, but also for its military significance in preventing the Confederacy from winning its independence, a claim made by few others referenced here.

  Obviously influenced by Frost’s 1899 essay, Fox took his argument to a new level, arguing that it was Confederate military leaders who first discovered the American mountaineer when they learned, through sad experience, that the Mason–Dixon Line was not necessarily a firm demarcation between northern and southern loyalties. He cited the plan of a Captain Garnett, who was charged with moving Confederate troops through the Virginia mountains and into Ohio in an effort to sever the Midwest from the Northeast, but got no farther than Harpers Ferry. “When he struck the mountains,” Fox wrote, “he struck enemies who shot at his men from ambush, cut down bridges before him, carried the news of his march to the Federals, and Garnett himself was felled with a bullet from a mountaineer’s squirrel rifle at Harpers Ferry.”20

  Only then, Fox stated, “did the South begin to realize what a long, lean powerful arm of the Union it was that the southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals.” In a passage obviously derived from Frost’s essay, he built his case state by state:

  For that arm helped hold Kentucky in the Union by giving preponderance to the Union sympathizers in the Blue-grass; it kept the East Tennesseans loyal to a man; it made West Virginia, as the phrase goes, “secede from secession”; it drew out a horde of one hundred thousand volunteers, when Lincoln called for troops, deleting Jackson County, Kentucky, for instance, of every male under sixty years of age and over fifteen; and it raised a hostile barrier between the armies of the coast and the armies of Mississippi.

  In short, he concluded, “The North has never realized, perhaps, what it owes for its victory to this nonslaveholding southern mountaineer.”21

  Fox was highly selective in making his case for highlanders’ attachment to the Union, having made no mention of those areas of Appalachia—in Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia—where Confederate sentiment was much more in evidence; nor did he acknowledge the guerrilla warfare waged not only in those areas, but in the very areas he suggests were solidly in support of the Union. Nevertheless, the very specificity with which he defined Unionist Appalachia lent credibility to that assumption, and he would reinforce it in the novels he had yet to write.

  In 1906, another Presbyterian, also a college president, sought to explain The Southern Mountaineers to the rest of America. Samuel Tyndale Wilson, the president of Maryville College on the western edge of the Great Smokies in Tennessee and just east of Knoxville, published his small book through the Presbyterian Home Missions Board in New York City. Born to missionary parents in Syria and educated at Maryville, Wilson himself served a brief stint as a missionary in Mexico. He returned to teach at his alma mater in 1884 and spent the rest of his career there, assuming the presidency in 1901.22 Wilson was forthright in stating of his title characters that his was a “story told by one who has been all of his lifetime identified with them, and loves them, and has been their ready champion whenever occasion offered.” Wilson echoed the themes of both Frost and Fox. As a Presbyterian, he stressed the Scots-
Irish roots of most highlanders; in an early section entitled “Service to the Nation,” he declared them “possessed by a fierce love of freedom,” and proceeded through the usual litany of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and the Battle of King’s Mountain, in which “mountaineers had, without order, without pay, without commission, without equipment, and without hope of monetary reward, struck a decisive blow for the entire country.”23

  For all of his rhapsodizing about highlanders’ valor, patriotism, and sacrifice in America’s wars—he gave nearly equal attention to their roles in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish American War—Wilson was more willing to acknowledge the very real divisions within the region during the Civil War, stating up front that “many on the Virginian side of the mountains and among the North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama mountains espoused the cause of the Confederacy, and made as good soldiers as the valorous hosts of the South could boast.” He also noted that Stonewall Jackson was a “mountaineer indubitably of the first class,” and that his famous brigade was made up “largely of the men of the hills.”24