Born Fighting

by James Webb

  Kentucky remained in the Union, and eventually two-thirds of its soldiers fought for the North. Among these Union soldiers was one of my great-grandfathers, Asa William Hodges, who enlisted in Company B, 12th Kentucky Cavalry, on August 22, 1862, and fought as a sergeant continuously for three years, including at the battles of Resaca, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw, and ultimately, Atlanta. Indeed, the only time his military records show him away from his unit was when he returned home briefly in 1863 to bury his wife.

  Asa Hodges was the great-grandson of Samuel Cochran, who as a soldier in the Virginia Line during the Revolutionary War had crossed the Delaware with George Washington, spent the infamous winter at Valley Forge, and fought in many key battles of that war. A typical Scots-Irish Southerner, he was born in Sumner County, Tennessee, north of Nashville, where his father’s family had moved from the Blue Ridge Mountain region of southwest Virginia. The family of his mother, Mary Ann Murphy, had migrated to Sumner County from the mountains of western North Carolina. World War II hero Audie Murphy’s family also originated in this region of North Carolina, and given the paucity of traditionally Irish Catholic names in those communities, it is likely that they were collateral kin.

  And so Asa Hodges should by all logic have fought for the South. But his farm was near Beaver Dam in Ohio County, just up the road from the town of Bowling Green where Albert Sidney Johnston had sent several regiments. This put Asa Hodges’ home flush in the middle of the Confederate lines that extended westward from Bowling Green to Columbus. One can never reconstruct the full story for human motivations, but it is not difficult to assume that Asa Hodges fought against the Confederate Army for the same reason that many Confederates fought against the “Federals”—because they had crossed over from another state and invaded his home.

  Or—just as compellingly—one might examine the concept from the perspective of those who probably had never even met a slave, but who fought bravely and well for the Confederacy. As one whose family by this time had been “sown like the apple seeds” along the ridges and hollows of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and even into the fat river delta lands just north of Memphis, I could offer up a number of examples. But let us return, just for a while, to the harsh and unforgiving soil of Big Moccasin Gap. My great-great-grandfather David Webb could neither read nor write. The 1880 census, taken when he was sixty-three years old, indicates that he owned no land and that his total net worth in personal property was ten dollars. Although he had four children and was in his mid-forties, David enlisted and served as a private in the Confederate Army. In 1871 at the age of fifty-four he fathered his seventh child—back in Alley Hollow they still like to call this capacity the “Webb drive”—and named the boy Robert Lee Webb. And every generation from that point has followed suit. My great-grandfather named my grandfather Robert Lee Webb. My grandfather named one son Thomas Lee. My brother became Gary Lee. And my son is James Robert.

  Do we honor slavery? No, we honor courage, as well as loss. And let us now speak of both.

  William John Jewell, my great-great-grandmother’s brother, did not live long enough to father children of his own, so let me claim him. Another Big Moccasin Gap native who probably had never seen a slave, Jewell served in Company D of the Davis Rifles of the 37th Regiment, Virginia Infantry, under the leadership of the incomparable Gen. Stonewall Jackson. This regiment was drawn exclusively from Scott, Lee, Russell, and Washington Counties in the southwest corner of the state. The percentage of mountaineers who were slaveholders was approximately zero. Many of them were not even property owners. Few had a desire to leave the Union. But when Virginia seceded, the mountaineers followed Robert E. Lee into the Confederate Army.

  Official records show that 1,490 men volunteered to join the 37th Regiment and that by the end of the war only 39 were left. Company D, which was drawn from Scott County, began with 112 men. The records of eight of these cannot be found. Five others deserted over the years, taking the oath of allegiance to the Union. Two were transferred to other units. Of the 97 remaining men, 29 were killed, 48 were wounded, 11 were discharged due to disease, and 31 were captured by the enemy on the battlefield, becoming prisoners of war. If one adds those numbers up they come to more than 97, because many of those taken prisoner were already wounded. A few were wounded more than once, including William Jewell, who was wounded at Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862, wounded again at Sharpsburg (Antietam) on September 17, 1862, and finally killed in action at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863.

  The end result of all this was that, of the 39 men who stood in the ranks of the 37th Regiment when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox—meaning that only 3 percent of the original regiment survived—none belonged to Company D, which had no soldiers left.83

  The Davis Rifles were not unique in this fate. Such tragedies were played out repeatedly across the landscape of the South. To my knowledge, no modern army has exceeded the percentage of losses the Confederate Army endured, and only the Scottish regiments in World War I and the Germans in World War II come close. A generation of young men was destroyed. One is reminded of the inscription so often present on the graves of that era: “How many dreams died here?”

  The lesson regarding William John Jewell’s death, plus the hundreds of thousands of others in this war, is far more complex than those who simplify his service into racial slogans wish to make it. He and his fellow soldiers took an oath and then honored the judgment of their leaders, often at great cost. Intellectual analyses of national policy are subject to constant reevaluation by historians as the decades roll by, but duty is a constant, frozen in the context of the moment it is performed. Duty is action, taken after listening to one’s leaders and weighing risk and fear against the powerful draw of obligation to family, community, nation, and the unknown future. We, the progeny who live in that future, were among the intended beneficiaries of those frightful decisions made so long ago. As such, we are also the caretakers of the memory, and the reputation, of those who performed their duty—as they understood it—under circumstances too difficult for us ever to fully comprehend. No one but a fool—or a bigot in their own right—would call on the descendants of those Confederate veterans to forget the sacrifices of those who went before them or argue that they should not be remembered with honor.

  And that notion extends to the soldiers of both sides in this peculiar and tragic war. The two great defining characteristics of the Scots-Irish culture—a loyalty to strong leaders and an immediate fierceness when invaded from the outside—brought odd battlefield combinations that sometimes defy logic. The far-western counties of Virginia, which eventually became West Virginia, were heavily Scots-Irish, but they listened to their leaders and went with the Union, as did pockets of eastern Kentucky and even Tennessee. The northern counties of Missouri, which had been heavily settled by Scots-Irish migrations from Virginia and eastern Tennessee, saw many soldiers fight for the Confederacy. The Scots-Irish population of Pennsylvania largely honored its own leaders and provided thousands of soldiers to the Union. Indeed, the war became a jumble, with the raw, recent immigrants of the Irish brigades fighting alongside Scots-Irish Pennsylvanians whose ancestors might have faced theirs at Derry or the Boyne, and against Confederate soldiers whose grandfathers might well have suffered through Valley Forge alongside the ancestors of the Pennsylvanians.

  But the bulk of the Confederate Army, including most of its leaders, was Scots-Irish while the bulk of the Union Army and its leadership was not. Even here an irony abounds, however, when one considers that President Lincoln finally found “his general” in the hard-drinking Ulysses S. Grant, who was indeed of Scots-Irish descent. Confederate generals of Scots-Irish descent totally dominated the battlefield. Among others they included the doomed Albert Sidney Johnston; the famed raider Jeb Stuart; the unparalleled Nathan Bedford Forrest, a semiliterate who proved to be a master of maneuver and improvisation, and who defeated every West Point general he faced; and the brilliant Stonewall Jackson, wh
ose death at Chancellorsville—the same battle in which William John Jewell, who served in Jackson’s brigade, finally perished—deprived Robert E. Lee of his most adept battlefield innovator. And although Robert E. Lee himself was a scion of Virginia’s lowland Cavalier aristocracy, his mother was of Scottish ancestry, and it was widely reported that he was a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, the victor at Bannockburn.84

  The end result was that on the battlefield the Confederacy, whose culture had been shaped by the clannish, leader-worshiping, militaristic Scots-Irish, fought a Celtic war while the Union, whose culture had been most affected by intellectual, mercantile English settlers, fought in an entirely different manner. At bottom the Northern army was driven from the top like a machine—plodding, systematic, drawing from a far larger manpower pool and bleeding out the South in a brutal and unending war of attrition. By contrast, the Southern army was a living thing emanating from the spirit of its soldiers—daring, frequently impatient, always outnumbered, often innovative, relying on the unexpected and counting on the boldness of its leaders and the personal loyalties of those who followed. The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.

  One learned commentator professed that “Southerners lost the war because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”85 But in actuality the reverse was true. The South lasted for four horrific years with far fewer men, far less equipment, far inferior weapons, and a countryside that was persistently devastated as the Leviathan army worked its way like a steamroller across its landscape. It is fair to say that the Confederate Army endured as long as it did against such enormous odds because it was so wildly and recklessly Celtic that it did not know when to stop fighting. And its opponents pressed steadily on to win, and in its aftermath sowed the seeds for a century of hatred and resistance, because in a sense they were so English that they thought victory on the battlefield was the equivalent of conquering a region—and, more important, a culture.

  They were wrong, of course. The end result of this war was not to conquer a culture, although the South as a region would suffer enormously for another seventy years. Instead, the war’s horrendous aftermath drove so many people of Scots-Irish descent outward, to the north and west, that their core values became the very spirit of a large portion of working-class America.

  PART SIX

  Reconstruction. Diaspora.

  Reeducation?

  Daddy was a veteran, a Southern Democrat,

  They ought to get a rich man to vote like that.

  *

  Somebody told us Wall Street fell,

  But we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.

  Cotton was short and the weeds were tall,

  But Mr. Roosevelt was gonna save us all.

  Gone, gone with the wind,

  There ain’t nobody looking back again.

  —ALABAMA,

  “Song of the South”

  1

  The Mess the Yankees Made

  LITERATURE, DESPITE ITS emotional honesty, often thrives in the realm of imagination, histrionics, and deliberate exaggeration. But there are few lies that one could write about the South that would be any more interesting or compelling than its own odd and haunting truths. More than any other region in America, the South’s ethnic base has remained surprisingly constant. Although a continuous outflow of dispossessed Southerners has percolated through the other regions of America, particularly the Midwest, the North-Central factory belt, the Rocky Mountains, and along the Pacific Coast, until very recently only a small trickle of new blood has found its way back in. Thus its history still rings true to its inhabitants as a thing literally alive, not as an academic subject to be studied in order to understand the growth of a nation, but as a vivid reminder of the journey of one’s ancestors. As I wrote of the Appalachian Mountain region in my novel Fields of Fire, “Jackson’s people fought those rocks. Here they struggled still. Those sole places where a man could still walk where great-great-great-grandfather walked, still sleep where he died. Not because they were the first and seized it. Because they were the last and no one wanted it.”1 Or, as Nobel laureate novelist William Faulkner so famously put it, “In the South the past is not dead; it isn’t even past.”

  For more than two hundred years before the Civil War, the South was a variegated, ever-growing laboratory of truly odd social experimentation, a land of vast economic extremes, of romanticism unfazed by primitive reality, a place of clashing cultures whose barons somehow justified the outright ownership of hundreds of human beings as Athenian in its dignity as well as biblically proper. During that war, the region paid its dues to history, losing or scarring virtually a full generation of its young manhood, seeing its towns and cities besieged and leveled, and being forced through military occupation to rejoin a political compact that its leaders had rejected. And for nearly a hundred years after war and occupation, the South along with former slave states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and even parts of Missouri that had not officially joined the rebellion were denigrated, attacked repeatedly through the instruments of the federal government, and economically colonized while at the same time their leaders defiantly resisted all pressures from the outside.

  A form of self-protection eventually arrived through the Solid South’s power in the Congress, gained by the sort of bloc voting now used by ethnic groups such as blacks and Jews, except that in this case the voting was both regional and ethnic, with the deliberate exclusion of blacks after the turmoil of Reconstruction. Sadly, this solidarity against external manipulation came with quite an internal bill. For decades, fresh or even divergent opinions were stifled from above, sometimes violently, through the vehicle of a near-mandatory loyalty to the Democratic Party’s powerful monopoly. This control of the Southern political process extended from the local sheriff all the way to the Congress and the Senate, and resulted in the eventual diminishment not only of blacks but also of many whites.

  Contrary to the usual talk among the nation’s intellectual elites about a troublesome “white trash” fringe that circled a larger middle class, in the South of the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, a significant percentage of whites—one is tempted to say a plurality—were living in economic conditions no different than most blacks. And, contrary to a great deal of current mythology, much of it fed by Hollywood, the diminishment of blacks has always been less a “redneck” phenomenon than a device for maintaining social and economic control ordered from above at the threat of losing one’s place—or job—in the white community. The three-tiered power structure that had begun in Virginia from its earliest colonial days seemed actually to gain new momentum in the war-scarred postbellum South. Even on the eve of World War II, eight states of the old Confederacy still used a poll tax, preventing poorer citizens, white and black, from voting, although in many places blacks were further excluded by a series of cleverly administered “literacy tests” specifically designed to prevent their participation.

  But before this admitted overreaction by the region’s white leadership came the unreasoned and ill-advised onslaught from the North that lit the fires of a permanent and vitriolic resentment.

  The legacy of the years immediately following the Civil War is so divisive that it comprises a vast Rorschach test for anyone attempting to neatly assign blame or responsibility for the racial and sectional animosities that followed. The amorphous inkblot that all are asked to interpret is the plight of millions of former slaves who, in abrupt fashion, needed assistance in their voyage toward full freedom. In a nutshell, the victorious Northerners who came south with the military and Reconstruction government viewed the moral justification for the war purely in terms of empowering those who had been enslaved. This goal absorbed their postwar energies above all others, often at the deliberate expense of the “rebels” who had attempted to secede and who in their view had brought such blood and chaos to the country. Not surpri
singly their intended and frequent targets, the Southern whites, saw instead a military occupation and the deliberate vilification of their leaders, and also the cynical manipulation of illiterate and pliable former slaves as a weapon to politically destabilize the region.

  In the middle, as they would be for more than a hundred years, were the blacks themselves. And by virtue of a whole passel of Northern policies that on the one hand were filled with retribution and on the other ended in halfhearted resignation, they were doomed. As Wilbur Cash put it, “Had there been no Reconstruction the result would have been unhappy. . . . But mark how the Yankee was heaping up the odds. In his manipulation of the unfortunate black man he was of course generating a terrible new hatred for him. Worse, he was inevitably extending this hate to the quarter where there had been no hate before: to the master class.”2

  And the yeomen would stand by their Captains. Again, Cash: “Reconstruction was, for our purposes, simply an extension of [the] War. . . . During those thirty years the South was like nothing so much as a veteran army.” But the South itself had come together and was in its emotions a different place than during those years before the war. “If in that long-ago, already half-fabulous time before rebellion roared at Sumter, this South they had cheered had still perhaps seemed to them a little nebulous, it was not so any longer. . . . Four years of fighting for the preservation of their world and their heritage, four years of measuring themselves against the Yankee in the intimate and searching contact of battle, had left these Southerners far more self-conscious than they had been before, far more aware of their differences and of the line which divided what was Southern from what was not.”3