Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains

By Steven E. Nash

In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South.

Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469626253

Steven E. Nash

STEVEN E. NASH is an associate professor of history at East Tennessee State University and the author of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains.

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Introduction

Reconstruction was well under way when Rebecca Harding Davis, a journalist and respected literary realist who grew up in the mountains of western Virginia, penned a short story set in western North Carolina. Published in Lippincott’s in 1875, The Yares of the Black Mountains featured Miss Cook, a northern woman investigating the moral character of mountain southerners. Each time Miss Cook appeared in the story, she reveled in western Carolinians’ perceived backwardness. Her interactions with the people of Asheville and Buncombe County betrayed a sense of superiority that undermined her supposedly objective social studies. There was no business, both the mining and railroad operations had halted, and the prison was antiquated. The people of the mountains constituted a queer tribe in Miss Cook’s slanted view. They were poor, and they used farming and spinning methods she considered obsolete. She described the story’s titular mountain family as wild beasts. In her opinion, the antebellum social order stunted the region’s development, and the lack of internal improvements condemned it to postwar poverty. Satisfied with her findings regarding the region’s decadence, Miss Cook crowed that between slavery and want of railroads, humanity has reached its extremest conditions here.¹

At first glance, this story is a prime example of the late nineteenth-century local color literature that created an exceptional Appalachia, portrayed as isolated from the rest of the South socially, economically, and culturally. A second look at Davis’s story, however, shows more than the construction of an Appalachian other. On the same day that Miss Cook dismissed western North Carolinians as backward and hopeless, she witnessed other things that should have given her pause. She took in the splendor and beauty of Mount Pisgah as well as a serene, rustic town square full of activity. While Davis’s description of the square leads with the sleepy image of a cow grazing, it expands to include stores replete with various trade goods. It seems that this place, so stagnant and dreary in Miss Cook’s eyes, possessed enough commercial activity and natural attractions to lure in many future—and real—northerners. Finally, the fictitious northern woman observed a black woman milking as a former Confederate officer plowed his field. It seems that despite her dour conclusions, Miss Cook saw things in western North Carolina (see Map 1) that would soon become hidden from popular view: commerce, African Americans, and whites loyal to the Confederacy. In other words, Miss Cook observed something bigger. She was really looking at reconstruction.²

MAP 1. Western North Carolina Counties and County Seats, 1870. Map produced by Andrew Joyner, Department of Geosciences, East Tennessee State University.

Reconstruction was fundamentally about two things: African Americans’ freedom and the restoration of the Union. Simple as that may seem, in a large and diverse region like the American South, each subregion had its own internal dynamics. Ever the attentive realist, Davis recognized this fact. Her short stories portrayed a fiercely divided Southern Appalachia plagued by a brutal guerrilla war within the larger conflict between the Union and the Confederacy.³ Reconstructing the United States against the backdrop of such varied southern wartime experiences required complicated and flexible approaches. Local reality compelled officials to wield federal power with one eye on national expectations and the other on community dynamics. The fact that officials in the mountain South found things so familiar to southern reconstruction at large further disproves the notion of an exceptional Appalachia. But it also reveals the ongoing dialogue between state authority and local reality. It was reconstruction at the grass roots. Furthermore, in a region where there was a sizable white population majority, this incursion of federal power facilitated changes that complicate our understanding of the nineteenth-century American state, southern social relationships, and the economic development of Southern Appalachia. In other words, the postwar situation in western North Carolina mixed wartime loyalties, class and political rivalries between whites, African American aspirations, and economic development in a complex combination that defies neat characterization as Reconstruction.

Our understanding of the post–Civil War years has evolved dramatically over time. Early twentieth-century historians depicted Reconstruction as a crime perpetrated by conniving Republicans who manipulated supposedly simpleminded freedpeople in order to seize control of southern state governments and exploit the South’s natural resources for their own gain. A later generation of historians inspired by the civil rights movement reoriented discussion of the period around former slaves’ struggle for freedom. More recently, state and regional studies have drawn attention to the intersection between local, state, and national cultures of power that shaped the postwar period. Studies of regions such as southwest Georgia explain how the ‘socio-ecological order’ of a place infused larger processes with distinctive and localized dimensions. To that end, historians of Reconstruction are no longer bound solely to the plantation South—or even the South. By focusing on race as a construct outside the former Confederate states, historians have broadened our understanding of emancipation’s impact on the nation as a whole. In other words, Reconstruction was a national event with regional and local variations.⁴

While much of the scholarship shares an overarching focus on race in the postwar United States, western North Carolinians’ postwar experiences bring different issues to bear on reconstruction. 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. With things relatively calm on that front, white politicians seemed content to fight it out over loyalty to one’s country—not loyalty to one’s race. That latter allegiance was assumed. In the war’s wake, a call to action to defend the racial order was unnecessary in western North Carolina. Wartime loyalties, however, were as volatile and raw as ever. One’s loyalties shaped political coalitions to a greater extent than issues stemming from emancipation. This is not to dismiss the power of race in post–Civil War America. Despite a smaller black population, Southern Appalachians shared in this profound social revolution. The end of slavery caused a broad social redefinition that reverberated through every postwar development. However, a local focus shows that these changes did not always occur the same way. The challenge for this study is to examine the socioecological order of western North Carolina in order to better understand southerners’ diverse responses to the Civil War.

My work further reevaluates post–Civil War power relationships at the local level through an analysis of evolving social relationships in western North Carolina.⁵ Since work on this project began, Reconstruction has become much more prescient in Americans’ minds. Public commemoration surrounding the Civil War’s sesquicentennial has helped recapture the war in all its complexity. Such retrospection has also drawn new attention to Reconstruction, the United States’ attempt to rehabilitate a conquered enemy on its own soil. The war’s messiness bled across the neat endpoint of 1865. Defeated enemies or cultural dissidents often go underground, employing violence and terror to achieve their political and social goals. 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.

At the heart of this period was the exercise of power of the national state over local communities, of white over black highlanders, and between different classes of white mountaineers. The Civil War exploded the localized world mountaineers had known. Confederate defeat did not remove outside influence over the western Carolinians’ lives; in fact, Union victory expanded it as power shifted from Confederate leaders committed to defending southern society to a U.S. government bent on its reconstitution. Freedmen’s Bureau agents, occupation troops, and Internal Revenue collectors extended the federal government’s reach into mountain communities, informing debates between different classes of whites, African Americans and their white neighbors, market-minded economic boosters and farmers, and an elite accustomed to local rule and federal agents. Questions of loyalty that previously focused on one’s community, state, and section evolved to include one’s race and class. Northern victory mandated social change, but it did so by reminding white Confederates what they fought to prevent. Emotional racial rhetoric mixed with intimidation and violence in the form of the Ku Klux Klan resulted in the mountain Republican Party’s decline. In its shadow emerged a new coalition of whites bound by the issue of economic improvement, spurred on by the determined effort to build railroads and an 1870s tobacco boom that sent western North Carolina headlong into the southern staple crop market.

This study also breaks new ground on Southern Appalachia during the Civil War era. Most studies of the region during this period broadly challenge the exceptionalist argument that depicted Southern Appalachia as an insular world inhabited by subsistence farmers wedded to old Scots Irish folkways. Southern Appalachians were, in the immortal words of William Goodell Frost, our contemporary ancestors. Scholars have recaptured the importance of slavery to Southern Appalachia, its Civil War experience, the development of industry in the region, and the creation of the idea of Appalachia. However, a significant gap persists in our understanding of what happened between the end of the Civil War and the influx of outside capital and industry after 1880. Perhaps it has been easy to neglect this period in Appalachian history. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, African Americans constituted roughly 10 percent of the mountain counties’ population. That fact led many popular observers and historians to conclude that the region was less committed to slavery, hence less devoted to the Confederacy, and finally, less affected by emancipation. When conducting a community or regional study, historians must always be mindful of the defining traits within their place of study. As Thomas Bender noted in his Community and Social Change in America, community and change can take a variety of forms while developing in ways fitted to their specific settings. There is not one path to development. Local variations, social systems, and political cultures also mean that progress or change is neither uniform nor quick. With that in mind, Appalachian scholars have exploded the exceptionalist idea of the region to such a degree that this study follows suit on only the broadest level.⁶

What has been lost in debates about Southern Appalachia’s uniqueness is the centrality of mountain sections like western North Carolina to the larger Reconstruction process. In terms of national civil rights policy, the long-held argument was that white southern mountain Republicans resisted and lost support locally as a result of their national party’s stance on African Americans’ freedom. I argue that white mountain Republicans embraced outside power and cooperated with their black neighbors to transform regional politics. Furthermore, the issues plaguing the mountain counties influenced state policy from the moment the soldiers’ guns fell silent. The strength of the mountain Republican Party helped that party sweep the 1868 state elections, which led the Conservatives to the Ku Klux Klan and the use of terror to cow their opponents across the state. When the embattled Republican governor called for help to defeat the Klan in 1870, he found hundreds of volunteers from the mountain counties willing to come to his aid. Finally, when the state moved toward an industrial future, all North Carolinians knew of the scandals and corruption of the Western North Carolina Railroad, the long-desired rail link between the eastern and western parts of the state. In every major issue of the postwar period, western North Carolina stood near the center of the state’s experience. I hope this study pushes our understanding of the mountain South into a new, postexceptional phase where we worry less about stereotypes and images and more about how Southern Appalachia serves, as Ronald D. Eller suggests, as a mirror for the rest of America.⁷

Interpreting postwar western North Carolina as part of a larger regional and national process recaptures what has been lost for too long. The 1860s and 1870s were a period of profound transformation in western North Carolina. War brought conscript officers and impressment agents as well as soldiers in both blue and gray into the mountains. Although central authority remained fairly distant, wartime exigencies enhanced an opening of the region to outside influence that scholars often place in the late nineteenth century. But that process actually began during the late antebellum period, accelerated during the war, and further expanded through the postwar years. For lower-class white Unionists and African Americans, these outside agents made the federal government accessible to mountaineers and provided powerful allies in their struggle against the region’s white elites for local control. Their cooperation with outside authority broke down mountaineers’ resistance to external forces and created an atmosphere favorable to the northern capitalists who descended upon the region after the railroads integrated much of it into the national market system.⁸

This book follows a generally chronological structure. Chapter 1 offers an overview of western North Carolina during the antebellum and Civil War periods. It establishes many of the major political issues, social classes, and power relationships that influenced postwar events. One of the most important of these relationships, master and slave, is the foundation for chapter 2. In 1860, African Americans constituted only 10.2 percent of the mountain counties’ total inhabitants. In terms of their desires, however, members of the black minority pursued goals comparable to their peers in the plantation counties. Reuniting family units, securing land and employment, and getting an education figured prominently in their understanding of their freedom. And, as in other sections of the South, their efforts to establish their independence generated a variety of reactions ranging from acceptance to bloodshed.

The anti-Confederates’ struggle to wrest control from the wartime leadership is the subject of chapter 3. Like much of Appalachia, western North Carolina divided between Confederates, Unionists, and those somewhere in between during the Civil War. Wartime loyalties were fluid, which meant postwar loyalties were neither fully formed nor predictable. Although a resurgent Conservative Party defeated these groups in 1865 and 1866, the increased power given to the military in the state—especially after the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867—helped bring about the creation of a state Republican Party buoyed by the pockets of Unionists found in areas like western North Carolina.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) shared in the task of bringing order to a disorganized South. Chapter 4 explores the role this organization played in western North Carolina’s reconstruction. It may seem ironic that an agency tasked with aiding the adjustment from slavery to free labor was in the southern mountains, but the irony dissipates in light of the evidence. The Conservatives’ resumption of local control in 1865 led white Unionists to embrace the Republican Party and black political cooperation two years later, a move that would have been impossible without the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its agents represented the most tangible source of federal power in the mountain counties, and as such helped mountain Republicans win the pivotal state elections of 1868.

Mountain Conservatives found Republican control as bitter a pill to swallow as did the white planters in the Black Belt—even if they never faced the negro domination their lowland compatriots decried between 1868 and 1872. Following the Republicans’ victories in 1868, the federal government deemed North Carolina sufficiently reconstructed to withdraw the troops and Freedmen’s Bureau agents from the state. The departure of the mountain Republicans’ strongest national allies opened the door for Conservatives who condemned their rivals’ victories as illegitimate because of their close alliance with outside forces. With the white elite’s control crumbling, the Conservatives employed a terrorist campaign that broke apart the biracial Republican Party in the mountain counties. The Ku Klux Klan and the Republicans’ fall from power are the subject of chapter 5.

Logic suggests that the Conservatives—once more going by the name Democrats after the 1872 campaign—would have entrenched in order to consolidate their power. But they did not. Nor could they have done so, even if they had wanted. As chapter 6 explains, bipartisan support for internal improvements fractured the Republicans and allowed the Democrats to open the region to development while confidently retaining local control. While other sections of the South paid lip service to agriculture as they courted an industrial New South, western Carolinians ultimately found their market commodity in staple crop production of tobacco. Local elites used the promise of tobacco’s profits to further argue for internal improvements—namely, railroads—to lure disillusioned Republicans to their cause. As white Republicans turned away from the struggle over civil rights, African Americans lost some of the political power they had wielded in the previous decade. With a renewed commitment to economic growth uniting white western Carolinians, the divisive issues of civil rights and loyalty faded into the background. When the railroad reached Asheville in 1880, it brought an end to the major issues and battles that defined Reconstruction in the Carolina mountains.

In the end, the region that many considered exceptional confronted many of the issues that plagued the state’s restoration to the Union. This book also sheds significant light on the Civil War’s varied consequences—and how they reshaped western North Carolinians’ lives. National policymakers contemplated freedom and citizenship, but it was not until policy reached the ground that reconstruction could actually take place. Local communities and regions have their own internal dynamics, and failure to adapt policies to those needs can be fatal. When the Freedmen’s Bureau was strongest, the federal government gained greater power within the western counties. Its success proved that reconstruction necessitated a strong but flexible federal presence. Bureau agents integrated into the local political network, but they were not given the time to succeed. The moment when significant social change appeared possible proved fleeting in the Carolina mountains. The legacy of that involvement, however, took an unusual shape. By injecting outside power into local communities, federal officials created conditions for later investment and economic development. National strategies called for the expansion of citizenship; instead, local events facilitated western North Carolina’s integration into the nation’s market.

Chapter One: Setting the Stage

Antebellum and Civil War Western North Carolina

On September 1, 1867, Scottish-born botanist and naturalist John Muir set out from Jeffersonville, Indiana, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Moving south through Kentucky and southeast through Tennessee, Muir studied and collected specimens of southern plant life. A Tennessee blacksmith could not believe that Muir—on his own volition and without a government commission—was simply walking through the recently war-torn South. As the blacksmith put it, Muir’s plan to wander over the country and look at weeds and blossoms made little sense in the tough times that followed the Civil War. Muir recorded his own thoughts about his voyage, including opinions about the environment and the people he discovered. This is the most primitive country I have seen, he wrote about East Tennessee and western North Carolina on September 17. When he arrived in western North Carolina, a Mr. Beale welcomed the traveler into his home in the Cherokee County seat of Murphy. Here for the first time since his trek to Florida began, Muir encountered a house decked with flowers and vines, clean within and without, and stamped with the comforts and culture of refinement in all its arrangements. It was, he mused, a stark difference from the primitive homes along the border.¹

The region through which Muir passed has proven difficult to define culturally and geographically. Today, we call it Appalachia, a name derived from the Apalachee Indians and given to the region by French artist Jacques Le Moyne in 1564. When Muir completed his journey, however, he referred to it as Alleghania, a name used in the late eighteenth century. Around 1900, geographers adopted Appalachia as the term for the larger mountain range, encompassing the Blue Ridge Mountains as well as the alluvial Tennessee Valley and parts of eastern Kentucky. Regardless of its name, western North Carolina garnered special notice within this section of the South. The Old North State’s western counties possessed the nation’s highest peaks east of the Rocky Mountains, many of which clustered along the Tennessee and North Carolina borders near the Oconaluftee and Little Pigeon Rivers.²

Muir was not alone in traveling throughout the South after the Civil War. Unlike the small army of northern journalists, government officials, and other visitors, the plight of white Unionists, former slaves, and defeated Confederates had no interest for Muir. Even if little of the physical mountain landscape had changed as a result of the war, the social and cultural landscape had changed profoundly. The people Muir encountered had lived through the rise of an economically divided region that saw mountain slave owners, like their counterparts in the lowland South, capture the lion’s share of western North Carolina’s economic and political capital. The first half of the nineteenth century saw western North Carolinians develop strong economic ties with the southern cotton economy, which led a majority of white western Carolinians into the war for southern independence. Despite internal divisions among its population, western North Carolina contributed its share of men and materiel to the Confederate war effort. In the end, however, that conflict exploded the localized antebellum political culture. The strains of war—the absence of many military-aged white men, weakening bonds of slavery, localized guerrilla violence, strong national governmental policies—opened the region to a variety of external sources of power that threatened elite whites’ domination of the region.

Many travelers like Muir noted the raw beauty of the southern mountain landscape, but the region had also been home to humans for centuries. Its first residents were Mississippians, a cultural group characterized by their large earthen mounds and central temples. These earlier chiefdoms evolved into the indigenous populations encountered by Europeans in the 1500s. Spread across parts of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, the Cherokee were the most powerful Native American group within Southern Appalachia.³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many Scots-Irish immigrants came to America to escape the rigidity of society in Northern Ireland where, like much of Europe at that time, a small landholding class exercised vast economic and political control over a landless laboring class. Migrating slowly from Pennsylvania into Virginia and western North Carolina, the Scots-Irish settled the fertile river valleys that served as the easiest means of travel and trade, making western North Carolina’s early white pioneers successful farmers and merchants. Slavery soon followed. Although some mountain masters, such as the Pattersons of Caldwell County, fit within the state’s wealthiest slaveholding population, the majority of highland slave owners fell within a middle class of commercial farmers, merchants, manufacturers, artisans, and small-scale professionals with fewer than twenty slaves. Wealthy, business-oriented mountaineers recognized the economic advantages of slavery and used the revenue from their various business ventures to purchase and employ their slaves.⁴

Not large planters in the same vein as slave owners in the Deep South and Cotton Belt, mountain slaveholders exhibited a level of political and economic control comparable to the broader southern gentry. One-fourth of all white families in the plantation South owned slaves and controlled over 93 percent of that section’s total wealth. North Carolina’s mountain slaveholding class also owned large amounts of land. In northwestern North Carolina, Ashe County’s eighty slaveholders owned a disproportionate 28 percent of the improved farm acreage in the 1850s. Parallel situations existed throughout the Carolina highlands, where slaveholders commanded 59 percent of the total wealth. The smaller percentage of mountain slaveholder-controlled wealth is misleading because western North Carolina slave owners made up only one-tenth of the region’s white families. Hence, mountain slaveholders possessed a higher comparative percentage of their region’s total wealth compared to their plantation counterparts.⁵

Yeoman farmers, who owned land but few if any slaves, constituted a far greater portion of the mountain populace. The earliest white settlers’ occupation of the rich bottomlands and reliance upon open-range livestock pushed these settlers onto less fertile land, where they settled into a predominantly local system of exchange. Whereas yeomen living in the plantation districts were often bound to local planters for economic assistance, the independent small farmers outside the Black Belt relied on one another. Large-scale agricultural projects requiring intensive labor, such as clearing trees, became community functions joining local yeomen together. Despite their settlement of more remote mountain areas, Southern Appalachian yeomen were not isolated. East Tennessee farmers shared many characteristics with their counterparts across the mountains in western North Carolina. Hog drives proved extremely profitable for farmers in both regions and served to tie small farmers to Lower South markets. Following the completion of the East Tennessee and Georgia and the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroads by 1855, the entire East Tennessee Valley had rail access. Farmers began producing wheat largely for markets. Without a railroad, western North Carolina farmers remained committed to livestock production. The absence of a viable cash crop, such as cotton, prevented the formation of typical southern plantations and promoted agricultural diversity. Rough terrain and a cooler climate allowed grains to thrive where cotton floundered. Cattle, sheep, and hogs proved especially profitable because they adjusted well to mountain conditions. In addition, cotton’s dominance in the Lower South increased the demand for foodstuffs from the Upper South. Since mountain farmers traditionally produced an abundance of food, it was only a matter of directing that surplus to market. Hence, western North Carolinians had a strong interest in the success of the staple crop.⁶

Landless white tenants rested below the yeomen in the southern social hierarchy. Tenancy was on the rise throughout the South during the late antebellum period. Sociologist Wilma Dunaway has argued that landless tenants were essential to the settlement of Southern Appalachia. Land speculators purchased large tracts of Southern Appalachia through the final decades of the eighteenth century, which Dunaway claims rendered three-fourths of the total acreage in the highlands the property of absentee owners. This speculative trend, begun in western North Carolina in 1783, made it difficult for small farmers to acquire land legally. Dunaway concludes that this combination of absentee owners and landless settlers entrenched [tenancy] on every Southern Appalachian frontier. Still, the material differences between landless whites and landowning yeomen were subtle. Both groups worked small tracts of land for personal use and raised livestock with similar rewards. Renters enjoyed a degree of freedom denied yeomen. Because their labor agreements were temporary, tenants could leave a bad situation, and they did not pay property taxes. Such benefits exacted a price. Landless tenants lacked the security and independence of the landowning yeomanry. Poor landless whites were subjected to evictions, biased written contracts that favored their employers, and the confiscation of their crops by creditors.⁷

Class conflict remained muted before the Civil War in western North Carolina, despite the declining position of landless whites. As was the case throughout the South, family ties eased social tensions. Intermarriage among the region’s wealthiest families fostered bonds that solidified the slaveholders as a class. For example, the influential Lenoir family of Caldwell County linked several of the western counties’ most powerful families. Revolutionary War veteran and early settler William Lenoir’s children and grandchildren brought the Lenoirs together with the Avery family of Burke County, the Joneses and Gwyns in Wilkes County, as well as their Caldwell County neighbors the Pattersons. Still, the slave-owning elite remained mindful of their largely nonslaveholding constituents. Political campaigns created personal relationships between lower-class voters and wealthier neighbors who hosted visiting candidates and organized meetings. Perhaps it was the region’s lack of a true planter class that most effectively fostered unity among mountain whites. Though mountaineer masters dominated the region’s politics—87.1 percent of the men elected to the state legislature between 1840 and 1860 owned slaves—their diverse economic interests created common ground with their community. Middling and lower-class whites in the upcountry and mountain sections supported slaveholders politically because they pushed for the region’s recognition and development at the state level. More broadly, the slaveholders’ promotion of states’ rights staved off outside power—primarily the federal government—and allowed lower-class whites more autonomy within their lives and communities.⁸

MAP 2. African American Population in Western North Carolina, 1860. Map produced by Andrew Joyner, Department of Geosciences, East Tennessee State University.

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.⁹

TABLE 1 African American Population in Western North Carolina Counties, 1860

Note: Clay, Mitchell, and Transylvania Counties formed in 1861. See Corbitt, Formation of the North Carolina Counties 1663–1943, 67, 149, 204.

Sources: Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61; and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data (computer file).

While the basic contours of society in the mountain South paralleled the section as a whole, mountain residents generally outpaced their lower-elevation compatriots in their support for internal improvements. Western North Carolinians believed their region was on the rise, and they urged the state to support projects that facilitated their growth. Turnpikes, such as the highly traveled Buncombe Turnpike completed in 1828, became a top priority in the 1830s and 1840s. But opposition from the eastern part of the state—such sectional rivalry within the state was a defining trait of the state’s antebellum politics—threatened western development. Eastern North Carolinians refused to pay the taxes necessary to fund such projects because they failed to see how they benefited from western improvements. The discovery of valuable mineral resources in southwestern North Carolina and East Tennessee’s success with mining and railroads led western Carolinians to explore all possibilities to obtain their own railroad. By the 1850s the issue garnered such popular backing that both mountain Whigs and Democrats supported it. Finally in 1855, western North Carolina secured a charter and a $4 million state appropriation for the Western North Carolina Railroad (WNCRR). That high price, however, forced the construction of the road in segments, with the completion of one part to precede the construction of the next.¹⁰

During the 1830s and 1840s, the Whig Party’s commitment to internal improvements contributed to the party’s consistent popularity in western North Carolina; however, an economic depression limited the state’s spending power for much of that period. One Whig member of the state assembly believed that North Carolina would have to raise taxes fivefold in order to finance its desired internal improvements, an unsavory idea for any politician. Consequently, the Whigs were unable to deliver funding for improvement projects during that time. Realizing that proposed railroads through western North Carolina by both South Carolina and Virginia would divert mountain trade out of the state, Democrats dropped their opposition to state-funded internal improvements. The Whigs’ inability to receive public funds for western improvement projects, along with the orchestration of the WNCRR’s creation by a Democratic governor, hurt but did not destroy them. By 1860, the Whigs had slipped in terms of their influence within western North Carolina, but their commitment to internal improvements sustained them as political players in the mountains even after their national party collapsed in the mid-1850s.¹¹

Two political issues heightened the state’s internal east-west rivalry and stirred class tensions during the late antebellum period. The state constitution apportioned the upper legislative house according to taxes paid and the lower house based on federal population, including slaves as three-fifths of a person. This system concentrated power in the plantation-dominated eastern counties. In 1848, Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Reid proposed the elimination of the property qualification that limited the political voice of lower-class Carolinians. Mountaineers demanded a constitutional convention to convert the basis of representation in the lower house to conform to Reid’s proposal. Failure to support the convention weakened the mountain Whigs and brought Reid’s Democrats to power in the state. Chastised by the voters, Whigs regrouped in a convention in Raleigh in 1850. The resulting pamphlet known as The Western Address challenged the dominance of a propertied—especially slaveholding—elite at the expense of lower-class whites. By the end of the antebellum period, the Whigs further regained lost ground through support of ad valorem taxation, touted by Whigs as equal taxation. Eastern planters opposed the proposal because it would tax all slave property according to value, whereas the existing poll tax only assessed male slaves between twelve and fifty years old. Although nonslaveholders became indignant that their wealthier neighbors would not carry their share of the tax burden, the Democrats successfully convinced nonslaveholders that ad valorem taxation represented governmental encroachment upon individual property rights and would increase the taxes on all property—not just slaves. Still, the issue helped restore the two-party balance in the mountains on the eve of disunion.¹²

The turbulent presidential election of 1860 revealed white western Carolinians’ complex self-image. Although westerners within North Carolina, their opposition to the Republican Party in the 1860 presidential election revealed them as southerners within the United States. In western North Carolina and the South, the election centered on John C. Breckinridge, a southern rights Democrat, and John Bell, of the moderate Constitutional Union Party. A few mountaineers backed Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois, but the majority limited their choice to either Breckinridge or Bell, the candidates believed to have the best chance of defeating the Black Republican, Abraham Lincoln. Breckinridge won the state by approximately eight hundred votes, but the continued Whig influence carried Bell in the mountains. Five counties (Burke, Haywood, Polk, Rutherford, and Yancey) gave a majority to Breckinridge, while ten (Alleghany, Ashe, Caldwell, Cherokee, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, McDowell, Watauga, and Wilkes) supported the Constitutional Union Party and John Bell. Western North Carolina’s support of a middle-road candidate closely resembling a Whig did not represent