Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains By Steven E. Nash Published by University of North Carolina Press (2016) $39.95 Hardcover, $27,95 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle.
When I first started seriously studying the subject six years ago I asked Daniel R. Weinfeld for good overviews of the subject. He told me that while books like Foner’s Reconstruction were important to read, the experiences of Reconstruction differed so much, depending on locality, that state by state or regional studies were the only way to see how the “Reconstruction Era” looked to people on the ground.
I have read and reviewed many of the books, going back to the Dunning School volumes, focusing on individual states. Steve Nash’s Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge is the first study of a region within a state that I am reviewing.
The western mountain region of North Carolina was an obscure place for many Americans during its Reconstruction. If you read the New York newspapers of the day you will find in-depth articles on many parts of the South, but few mentions of the mountain counties of the Old North State. Without railroads, few people knew the area who did not already live there. Unlike other less known areas under Reconstruction governments though, the mountain region is now heavily touristed for mountain adventures, resort living, and cultural festivals, so the scenes described in Nash’s book will be familiar to anyone who has gone white water rafting in the Pigeon River of taken in the allures of Ashville.
Nash begins his book by dispelling any notions that mountain life made the white people of western North Carolina more racially egalitarian. Only 10% of the population were slaves, but, writes Nash:
White mountaineers shared the South’s commitment to slavery and white supremacy. And African Americans had options in the mountain counties, some similar to and some unlike those available to freedpeople elsewhere. A limited transportation network and disparate population without a major urban area deprived former slaves of ease of movement or the community services associated with large towns and cities. (Kindle Locations 165-168).
While the experience of mountain Reconstruction had some similarities to those on the Carolina’s lowlands, the absence of large numbers of blacks meant that Republicans could not rely on African American votes to win elections and conservatives might not find appeals to white supremacy as galvanizing among white voters. While white conservative resistance to the Republican program could be Nash writes that :
This book explores a similar conflict in the mountain South, where the defeated foes were Americans equally determined to thwart social and political change through extralegal means in the 1860s and 1870s. In doing so, it reveals the array of issues hidden by an overarching interpretation of Reconstruction dominated by the struggle over black freedom. To be clear, race and the redefinition of African Americans’ place within the section, the state, and the nation were vital components of the South’s postwar experience. But the smaller black presence within the region meant that white mountain southerners divided among themselves along lines of class, loyalty, and other issues more frequently than in the former plantation belt. Western North Carolina existed both physically and socially on the edge of southern society, but at the center of Southern Appalachia. Reconstruction in western Carolina forces us to also recognize the issues of loyalty, state power, industrial development and market integration, and reunification that played critical roles in restoring the Union after the war. Reconstructing a place as diverse as the South required that federal agents apply governmental power in response to the people being “reconstructed.”
The mountain counties had been a “left-alone” region before the Civil War. The outbreak of the war meant that era was over for the next two decades. With the rebellion came increased Confederate intervention, and Reconstruction imposed a new level of control by outsiders. The book does a good job of telling us who “the people being reconstructed” were, and how they reacted to the constant transitions they went through from 1860 to the 1880s.
The mountains lacked the planter elites of the lowlands, but slavery still was an indicator of political power. For example, 87% of those elected to the state legislature from the region between 1840 and 1860 owned slaves. However, the smaller slave holdings of the better off resulted in closer alliances between the more wealthy and the yeomanry than were evident elsewhere in North Carolina.
Because it was less common in the western counties, slavery evolved differently than in the plantation zones. Nash says that:
Slaves occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder in the southern mountains, just as they did throughout the South. Yet African Americans in the western counties lived differently from their plantation counterparts. One reason for the difference was mountain slaves’ comparatively small percentage of the population (see Map 2 and Table 1). The white majority feared slave rebellions less and allowed their chattel more mobility throughout the region. Some mountain slaves served as guides for summer tourists. Slave owners in western North Carolina were less likely statistically to employ corporal punishment, and also less inclined to separate slave families through sale. Still, such benefits only altered, not negated, the exploitive characteristics common to the southern slave system. For example, historian Edward Phifer found sexual exploitation of slave women as common in Burke County as elsewhere in the South. Neither did living in western North Carolina remove the psychological scars inflicted by being classified as property. Kindle location 368.
The low number of slaves in the west also limited the political power of mountaineers. Representation in Carolina’s upper house was based on taxes paid and in the lower house by the Federal census enumeration which counted slaves towards the apportionment of representatives using the Federal formula. This meant that the voting power of easterners was magnified by wealth built on slavery.
The resentments of westerners towards the planter elites was reflected in the voting in the 1860 presidential election. Most of the eastern parts of the state went for the secessionists’ candidate Breckinridge. In the west, ten of the fifteen counties voted for the Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell. This did not mean that the region did not have committed secessionists. Congressman Thomas Clingman was a fire-eater who warned, after South Carolina seceded, that the mountain counties faced economic ruin if they did not support the breakaway moves by the Deep South. He also predicted that if the west kept aloof from the looming civil war, it would be overrun by escaped slaves who would pose a danger to the livelihoods (and daughters) of the yeomanry.
In February 1861 the mountain west rejected secession by a vote of 55% to 45%, showing both hesitancy of a majority of white voters to start a war, but also that there was a significant minority supporting the termination of the Union.
Within weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, and especially after Lincoln’s call for troops to quell the rebellion, a majority of mountain whites rallied to the secession cause. Nash examines the reasons for supporting the new Confederacy:
Western Carolinians’ final decision to unite with the Confederacy derived from a variety of sources. The most important was the perpetuation perpetuation of African American slavery. Conditional-Unionist Whigs argued that the Constitution protected slavery while secession threatened it. Secessionists, on the other hand, pointed to Lincoln’s stance against the expansion of slavery and claimed that the Republican Party truly intended to destroy the institution where it already existed. Whatever side of that argument one fell on, white western North Carolinians knew slavery was a central part of their lives. White highlanders not only shared the racial views of the South; they benefited from the tourism dollars rich slaveholders brought to their region each summer. Furthermore, they understood that the profits they realized from each hog drive to South Carolina and Georgia markets had a lot to do with slaveholders’ demand for foodstuffs. Mountaineers believed that they needed slavery in order to achieve their region’s economic potential following the advertisement of their natural resources, improvement of their farming techniques, and the continuation of its internal development. Democratic leader William Holland Thomas of Jackson County pronounced the Confederacy the best means to that end. Thomas believed, “The mountains of North Carolina would be the centre of the Confederacy. We shall then have one of the most prosperous countries in the world. It will become connected with every part of the South by railroad. It will then become the centre of manufacturing for the Southern market. The place where the Southern people will spend their money, educate their children and very probably make laws for the nation.” (Kindle Locations 450-452)
Thomas’s fantasy was, of course, never to be realized.
The mountaineers went from hesitant secessionists to (mostly) supporters of the Confederacy, volunteering in acceptable numbers for the Confederate armies. Communities turned out to support the rebel companies marching off to war, and Unionists were silenced by social disapprobation or violence.
Anti-Confederate sentiment only coalesced when conscription was introduced. Since the law exempted wealthy slave-owners and compromised local autonomy, many mountaineer grievances against lowlanders came to the fore again. The governor’s campaign of Zebulon Vance became a rallying point for mountaineers critical of the direction the Confederacy was headed in. William Holden, a former Conditional Unionist used his newspaper to support the Vance campaign. The secessionists were depicted as dangerous radicals who were transforming the Confederacy into a military state. The message was effective. In Ash County, for example, 97% of voters supported Vance. He received over 90% of the votes in four other western counties. Over all 15 mountain counties, 87% of the votes cast were for Vance.
During the last two years of the war, the region was the scene of an emerging Confederate partisan paramilitary movement. These were men who did not want to serve in the Confederate army, but who supported the Confederacy by striking at their Unionist neighbors. As their violence increased, the Unionists also began to form armed self-defense bands. Incursions by Tennessee Unionists added to the sense of a civil war within the Civil War. Extrajudicial killings of white Southerners by white Southerners would create hatreds that carried over long into Reconstruction. Resentment and revenge would soon become important determinants of political allegiance.
Wilkes and Caldwell became centers of Unionist guerrilla resistance. When the 64th North Carolina entered Madison County to enforce the conscription laws, they were met with partisan resistance from the locals. Ironically, the rebel regiment summarily executed thirteen of the rebel guerrillas for their secession from the Confederacy in the Shelton Laurel massacre.
As Confederate forces in Tennessee were pushed out of the eastern part of that state, deserters began flowing into the mountains, adding to the danger. Union raiding parties destroyed the region’s already poor transportation infrastructure, and Confederates confiscated the livestock and foodstuffs of Unionist farmers. By 1864 the clandestine pro-Union espionage group Heroes of America was active in the mountain counties.
Without a large slave labor force to continue agricultural work during the war, and with many of the white men in the Confederate armies or in hiding from them, agricultural output dropped significantly. In April 1864, a food riot erupted in Yancey County, led by women trying to feed their starving children.
By the end of the war, the region was significantly poorer than it had been and divided by blood hatreds. Nas writes that:
Western North Carolinians also faced significant demographic changes as a result of the war. Slavery was a casualty of the war across the nation. While the slave population fluctuated during the war, emancipation meant that approximately
fifteen thousand African Americans—or approximately 11.3 percent of the population—would gradually realize freedom in the Carolina mountains. According to one estimate, western North Carolina sent 1,836 soldiers into the Union army and 26,000 men into the Confederate ranks. Almost six thousand of the Confederate troops died in service. Coupled with the loss of men in the Union and Confederate armies, these changes foreshadowed significant changes in western North Carolina. While the larger number of Confederate soldiers reflects the highlands’ predominantly pro-Confederate sympathies, the given estimates obscure the ambiguity of men’s loyalty. Donning a uniform in service to one’s country can be a clear sign of devotion, but not everyone who volunteered for Confederate or Union service stayed in the ranks for the duration of the war. Many Confederate volunteers joined the army in order to gain access to the Federal ranks. Other men deserted midway through the conflict as the realities of war exceeded their expectations. Such shades of gray made an assumption of mountaineers’ loyalty to one side or the other far from clear after the war. (Kindle Locations 633-637)
If the end of the war saw the sharp decline in the cohesiveness and prosperity of white society, there was a limited birth of freedom for blacks. Because most slaves in the west had worked at a variety of tasks before the war, and had not been confined to picking cotton on plantations, the region experienced emancipation differently than in other parts of the Carolinas. However, the lack of urban centers and poor transportation infrastructure made it more difficult for blacks to organize themselves regionally. Their political power would also be limited. In many parts of the region, African Americans only constituted 5% of the population.
While the white mountaineers were more ready than most former Confederates to accept that slavery was dead, many could not envision blacks as their neighbors and fellow citizens. Nash recounts one manifestation of this:
In late 1865, Leander Sams Gash shared with the state senate petitions from the grand juries of Buncombe and Transylvania Counties for either the freedpeople’s colonization or strong laws regulating their freedom. Most whites, regardless of their politics, resisted any radical change in black mountaineers’ condition. When the anti-Confederate W. W. Rollins challenged Gash for a seat in the state senate in late 1865, he did so by supporting the antebellum racial order. This country was “a white man’s government,” Rollins proclaimed, and “it would be dangerous to the white race and the country, to elevate the freedman to be his political equal.” Echoing the sentiments expressed in the Buncombe and Transylvania residents’ petitions, Rollins endorsed the former slaves’ colonization to Liberia, which he dubbed “a beacon light, the lamp of hope, for the full redemption of Africa.”
Nash, Steven E.. Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains (Civil War America) (Kindle Locations 803-807). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
The Freedmen’s Bureau came late to the state. Arriving at the end of 1865, there were only four Federal regiments left in the entire state to provide military support for the transition from slavery to freedom. One newly arrived Freedmen’s Bureau agent wrote to his superiors that “as a general rule the whites are not willing to do fairly by the Blacks” in mountain labor contracts.
Ashville’s Freedmen’s Bureau agent Patrick Murphy found himself struggling to understand the local labor and legal systems and even to communicate with his superiors in Raleigh. Still, writes Nash, he;
proved…willing to assert the bureau’s authority to assist black adults in their labor agreements with white mountain landowners. Murphy attempted to secure fair contracts and payment for the black residents of his subdistrict throughout the spring and summer of 1866. For example, the Asheville agent wrote Cilley in support of Adelaide Walker, whose husband had performed labor for a white property owner in 1865, but when it became public knowledge that he passed information to Union forces during the war, the community shunned him. Threats and communal pressure increased to the point that Adelaide’s husband fled to Chattanooga. She was poor and had four small children, and she found local whites unwilling to aid or employ a black family with Union ties. Asheville’s agent collected wages successfully for fifteen African Americans in May 1866, but the Walkers posed something of a conundrum. He wanted to help the Walkers; doing so, however, required him to collect wages from 1865. (Kindle Locations 1066-1068)
Murphy, and the other bureau agents, also had to come to terms with the meaning of freedom that blacks developed. Former slaves recalled that they had not been allowed to attend their parents’ funeral during slave days and that their children had been sold away from them. So, while economic survival was always on the agent’s mind, blacks force the issue of family stability and personal autonomy to be equal consideration. Blacks were no longer mere objects and their lives could not be valued only for economic output.
The Reconstruction effort gained some support among white mountaineers because the Conservatives seemed to only offer the continuation of the Civil War by other means. Many forward-looking voters believed that a quick reintegration into the Union would both restore local control and encourage much needed transportation links to the east via new railroads. This could not be accomplished through a rejectionist stance. Investment would not come to a region on the verge of rebellion.
Conservatives refined their message to emphasize white supremacist, rather than disunionist themes. One conservative’s platform of opposition to “the Radical doctrine of Negro equality and oppression” was reflected in the speeches of other conservative politicians.
When the 14th Amendment ratification vote was held in the state senate in 1866, only one man supported it, a delegate from the mountains. The rejection of black citizenship in state after state of the old Confederacy led to the enactment of the Reconstruction Acts designed to force the civil and legal protection of of the freedmen. This result had been feared by many mountain moderates, who predicted that their eastern neighbors were engineering the Federal takeover of the state.
The persecution of white Unionists by former-Confederates stirred calls for Federal intervention in the mountain. For example, according to Nash:
William Lankford, who served in the Union’s Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry, wasted little time in taking his case before the military in the spring of 1867. It seemed that the clergyman had unknowingly married a man and woman, one of whom was part African American, after the war. State law prohibited such marriages, and Lankford was fined $20,000 for his role in the “crime.” Clearly, Lankford pleaded, he was being made an example of because of his refusal to “worship at the confederate shrine.” Lankford had stood as a candidate against Leander Sams Gash for the state senate in 1866, supporting the Fourteenth Amendment as opposed to Gash’s growing distance from the anti-Confederate coalition, and Alexander H. Jones had hailed him “as good a Union man as the State affords.” Still, his simple act of marrying a couple after the war put him on the edge of total ruin. His back against the wall, Lankford asked General E. R. S. Canby to protect him and other Unionists from “trators and trators [sic] laws.” Major General Daniel Sickles stayed the judgment against Lankford on May 15, 1867. Nevertheless, Buncombe County sheriff Jeremiah Rich informed Lankford that the case would move forward in spite of Sickles’s order. In a clear example of the exercise of federal power over local affairs, Sickles’s successor put the matter to rest on December 22, 1867. (Kindle Locations 1711-1713)
Unionists were also being tried by local courts for their actions in support of the United States during the secession crisis and the Civil War. Blacks and supporters of the Union found that the odds for justice in local courts were loaded against them. While many white mountaineers recognized that this unfairness invited Federal action, conservative magistrates continued their pro-Confederate effort, going so far as criticizing witnesses and litigants for having betrayed the Confederacy during the war!
The state’s voter registration in 1867 was the first to include blacks. Imposed by the Republicans in Washington, it was objectionable to many whites, but it marks a temporary transformation in North Carolina and mountain politics. Nash says:
Registration concluded for the coming elections in October 1867, and its results proved an invaluable political lesson for all North Carolinians. While the white population retained a sizable edge among registered voters across the state, it was not a decisive advantage. The state registered 117,431 white and 79,445 African American voters once the bureau completed its task. At first glance, the white electoral edge seemed insurmountable in the mountain counties. White
mountaineers constituted 86.4 percent of the region’s registered voters, far outnumbering the official black electorate of 3,323 (see Table 2). Such numbers also paralleled the region’s demographic makeup, with black voters numbering a slightly higher percentage of registered voters than they totaled in the 1860 population. White mountaineers’ electoral power proved far from decisive in practice as a result of their political divisions. A fair number of black voters in Burke, Buncombe, Rutherford, Henderson, and McDowell Counties stood ready to act as a swing vote in close elections. While far from the cries of “negro domination” emanating from white southerners in decidedly black sections of the state, white Conservatives still worried about the potential impact of expanded suffrage. (Kindle Locations 2174-2175).
In November 1867, the first election was held using the new voter rolls. The vote was on the authorization to hold a state constitutional convention. As was the case elsewhere in the South, there was an organized conservative boycott of the election. Nash says that;
The result was a signal victory for pro-convention elements and a decided Republican advantage in the body’s makeup. Nearly three of every four participants in the election supported a convention, and 107 of the 120 men belonged to the Republican Party. Fifteen of that number were African Americans.
(Kindle Locations 2179-2181).
The western counties, with small numbers of black voters, still selected mostly Republican delegates. Conservative governor Worth expressed his hostility to the emerging Republican electorate in a December 26, 1867 letter. Nash relates this correspondence:
The governor believed that “the negroes work better now than they will in future” and that “with free negro labor we will never prosper.” “If the miserable set of jackasses,” he continued, “from Generals down to the Freedmen’s Bureau men, were withdrawn and we were allowed to re-organize the militia and pass and enforce a stringent vagrant act—even if we were compelled to give transportation to every negro desiring to move to any of the negro loving States, to which they might be desired to remove, we would rapidly recuperate.” Worth saw “no rational ground of hope while Radicalism rules.” “In giving us Canby for Sickles,” the governor bitterly griped, “the Prest. swapped a devil for a witch.” Having written the president about these issues, Worth relished a possible showdown, vowing never to become “a subservient serf for the sake of office.” (Kindle Locations 2219-2222)
While the politics of Reconstruction was playing out, the Freedmen’s Bureau established its relief work. Unlike many other parts of the South, the majority of mountain recipients of food from the Bureau appear to have been white. In some counties, twice as many food rations were issued to white recipients as to blacks. Food shortages existed during the early years of Reconstruction and were exacerbated by the propensity of farmers to turn food grains into alcohol. A source of both cash and pleasure, distilling threatened hunger for many. Efforts to tax the products of the stills to encourage the sale of grains as food simply led to increased confrontations between Federal authorities and local farmers.
Blacks built churches and community organizations for the first time in many mountain communities. The Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged the building of schools for black and white children. Black voices were raised, and now that African Americans had the vote, those voices had to be heard.
In January 1868 the new state constitutional convention opened. Nash describes its character:
[The] delegates declared secession illegal, repudiated the state’s Civil War debts, and banned slavery. They also denied the governor the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, a clear response to the Confederate government’s
suspension of that right during the war in order to suppress wartime Unionists and other dissenters. The representatives further cemented their alliance with the national Republican Party as well. They followed the national legislature’s lead by proclaiming all men equal and granted the right to vote to any man—white or black—able to swear allegiance to the United States, while barring those guilty of treason, perjury, or dereliction of duty while in office previously from the polls. Support for education under the new constitution became an official state responsibility. During the antebellum period, North Carolina created an adequate public school system, but alarmist whites raised the specter of integrated schools following emancipation. In May 1866, state legislators had abolished the public schools because the state’s Literary Fund was bankrupt and to avoid public education for African Americans. The new constitution overcame that obstacle by mandating a capitation tax to support both education and poor relief.
(Kindle Locations 2349-2352)
Western whites benefited from the new structure of government. In the past, many local officials were appointed by a state government controlled by easterners. Now western officials would be elected by westerners. Nash says that
“These changes replaced the aristocratic antebellum political order with democratic government in each county. This was a most welcome change to westerners long determined to have more say in state and especially local politics.” (Kindle Locations 2360-2362)
The conservatives realized that their strategy of election boycotts had been a failure. They met in February, 1868 to form a new party. Former governor Zebulon Vance established the strategy for challenging the Republicans. Nash describes it:
In terms of the coming state election in April, the Conservatives determined that the great issue confronting North Carolina voters was race. Buncombe County native and former Confederate governor Zebulon Vance urged his fellow Conservatives to declare war upon the Republicans in the coming canvass. Black suffrage meant racial equality, in their eyes, and that was but a short step to complete racial domination by the state’s African Americans. Vance called upon Conservatives to prevent such a fate. By making race the central issue of the campaign, Vance and his colleagues seized upon an issue that they believed would unite the disparate elements of their own party while also luring lower-class whites away from the new democratic constitution and the Republicans. Such rhetoric and electoral appeals marked a strategic shift away from the politics of loyalty to the politics of white supremacy. (Kindle Locations 2371-2372).
The election of racial moderate William Holden as governor in 1868 seemed to consolidate the gains blacks had made under Reconstruction.
Nash describes the violent reaction of conservatives to their defeat in the 1868 elections:
frustrated at the polls, Conservatives turned to the counterrevolutionary tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. Historians have proven that the Klan played a leading role in the downfall of William W. Holden, whose efforts to suppress it in 1869 and 1870 led to his impeachment by a Conservative-dominated legislature. Because the Klan was strongest in communities where a racial balance existed, its role in predominantly white western North Carolina has been underappreciated. In western North Carolina, where further controversy surrounding the whiskey tax enhanced the Klan’s appeal among mountain residents, issues surrounding race and taxation weakened the Republicans, who had become dependent on federal aid. When no federal assistance came, the Republicans faltered.
(Kindle Locations 2611-2614)
Klan attacks destabilized the governments in many North Carolina counties and they led to calls for state action to protect black and white targets. In 1870 Holden was forced to mobilize a state unit to combat the Klan. Many of the men recruited for the force were white mountaineers. Nash does a remarkable job of ferreting out the backgrounds of the anti-Klan force. Most were too young to have fought in the Civil War, but they often came from mountain Unionist families. Their military efforts would be undermined soon by the electoral victories of the conservatives later in the year.
Mountain whites joined their eastern brethren in supporting conservative candidates. Their victory put the Holden administration on trial. Nash writes of the movement towards impeachment:
A prominent Klan leader and state legislator from Orange County, Frederick N. Strudwick, who counted Josiah Turner Jr. among his constituents, introduced a resolution of impeachment on December 9, 1870. Holden insisted throughout his trial that he had done nothing wrong, but the Conservatives’ desire for revenge overcame his defense. One Macon County Conservative worried that other governors might follow Holden’s example should the governor escape conviction. In Asheville, Thomas Johnston’s sister, Maria, deemed the conviction a foregone conclusion, “unless we dare to think of that body, that principle & common sense, can be bought with money, & thereby crime & corruption & injustice given the precedence.” Wilkes County Conservative James Gwyn saw the trial as the first step in the punishment of corrupt public officials. In Rutherford County, Conservative Edmund Bryan wondered why they should stop with Holden when they could also impeach Lieutenant Governor Caldwell, Chief Justice Pearson, and others. “I think the High Court of Impeachment might find matter for employment the whole summer,” he opined, “were it to try all the Radicals desiring removal from office.” On March 22, 1871, the legislature convicted the governor and barred him from ever holding another state office. (Kindle Locations 2983-2987).
Conclusion:
By 1871 the Klan was able to stage large-scale raids on Unionist communities in the mountains. Villages that had once resisted their citizens being taken out by the Klan now shut their windows when a Klan raid took place, leaving their Unionist neighbors to their fates. Reconstruction crumbled in the mountains long before the election of 1876.
Nash does a good job of uncovering the unique aspects of Reconstruction in the western counties. Unlike many other modern Reconstruction studies, this book tells a largely white story due to the particular demographics of the regions. It was a history that I was previously only familiar with in the most general way, and Nash supplies many details that I did not previously know about.
Nash devotes the final parts of the book to the region in the 1880s and to the later memory of Reconstruction in the mountains. This was a welcome”afterword” on the subject.
I would recommend this book to those interested in the history of Appalachia, and North Carolina, as well as to students of the Reconstruction Era.
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