Sisson’s Kingdom: Floyd County’s Civil War

By Rand Dotson

Like most Southern counties, Floyd County, Virginia, enthusiastically supported the Confederacy at the outset of the Civil War. But by the end of the war, more than 25% of the Floyd County soldiers had deserted, a number that was more than twice the national average. However, what really set Floyd apart from the rest of the South was its inhabitants’ willingness to hide and protect deserters, even those who hailed from outside of their county. In the fall of 1864, a regiment of Confederate reserves marched into Floyd County, under orders to capture or drive away as many deserters as it could. By then, hundreds of local soldiers had run away from their units and returned home. Confederate officials believed that most of the county’s residents had joined a secret Unionist peace society called the Heroes of America. Guerrilla warfare between Confederate sympathizers, Unionists, and deserters had plunged the county into near anarchy. The district was widely known as “Sisson’s Kingdom” in recognition of the two brothers who commanded its largest deserter gang.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written. Rand Dotson gives us a fascinating glimpse into the unusual history of Floyd County, Virginia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515448983

Book preview

Sisson’s Kingdom

Floyd County’s Civil War

By Rand Dotson

Wilder Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1997 by Paul Randolph Dotson, Jr / Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4897-6

e-book ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4898-3

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One Antebellum Floyd County

Industry, Agriculture, and Labor, 1850–1860

Secession and War

Summoning the Flower and Pride of Our Young Men: Confederate Enlistment

Conscientious Objection, Unionism, and Disloyalty to the Confederacy

Chapter Two Sisson’s Kingdom

I am Coming Some Way or Another: Floyd County Soldiers Abandoning the War

A Great Friend to Us Poor Fellows Who Had to Stay in the Woods: Community Support of Deserters

This Growing and Disgraceful Nuisance: Persecution of Deserters

Chapter Three Confederate Disloyalty, Unionism, and Red Strings

Levying War Against the State, Adhering to its Enemies, and Giving Them Aid and Comfort:Unionist Activity in Floyd County

A Notorious Union Man or Something Worse: Floyd County Magistrate Ferdinand A. Winston

Fervently Hoping that the Governor May Devise Some Plan to Restore Order in Our Afflicted County: Local Responses to Unionism

The Repression of the Evil: Confederate Responses to Unionism in Sisson’s Kingdom

Epilogue Floyd County’s Civil War

Notes

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Epilogue

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Manuscripts, Records, and Petitions

Letters and Papers

Unpublished Government Documents

Published Government Documents

Newspapers

Pamphlets, Maps, and Guides

Periodicals

Memoirs and Travel Accounts

Published Documents

Secondary Sources

Books

Journal Articles

Dissertations and Theses

Preface

In the fall of 1864, a regiment of Confederate reserves marched into Floyd County, in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, under orders to capture or drive away as many deserters as it could. By then, according to the Confederate authorities, hundreds of local soldiers had run away from their units and returned home. Officials believed that most of the county’s residents had joined a secret Unionist peace society called the Heroes of America. They were also aware that guerrilla warfare between Confederate sympathizers, Unionists, and deserters had plunged the county into near anarchy. Indeed, by then, the district was widely known as Sisson’s Kingdom in recognition of the two brothers who commanded its largest deserter gang.

The 4th Virginia Reserves spent most of November tracking deserters in the community but managed to arrest only a few dozen. Lieutenant John S. Wise took part in the operation that season. According to him, deserters’ relatives openly hindered the troops’ efforts. The mission failed, Wise believed, because everybody was kin to everybody there. The rampant disloyalty Wise witnessed led him to conclude that Floyd County’s citizens were ignorant mountaineers with little knowledge and less sympathy with the troubles of the slaveholders, and as a class were opposed to secession. Acrimony over the issue of slavery and opposition to disunion, however, played only minor roles in the erosion of Confederate loyalty in the community. Instead, residents’ firm commitment to their families drove many of them to turn against the Confederate war effort.¹

Historians of the Confederate homefront, including those who have focused exclusively on southwestern Virginia, typically cite class resentment over slavery and war-weariness as the prevailing circumstances responsible for desertion and Confederate disloyalty. Other factors, however, prompted their occurrence in Floyd County. Most prominently, the connection between runaway soldiers and their kin led to disaffection: the hardships experienced by soldiers’ families led to desertion, persecution of deserters’ kin led to disloyalty, and the disaffection of deserters’ relatives, which rose by degrees throughout the conflict, allowed the county’s minority of Unionists to vie for political control of the district.

Throughout the war, county residents mediated decisions about loyalty based upon their concern for kin. In 1861, many decided to support the new southern government because it appealed to their sense of familial duty—it offered protection from hostile outsiders and promised to maintain long-established social, economic, and racial norms. Later, when the Confederacy demanded that inhabitants related to deserters betray them, scores of residents withdrew their support and looked elsewhere for means to safeguard their families. Some decided to support dissident politicians or joined the Heroes of America; others enlisted in Unionist militias or did what they could to impede the southern war effort. Whatever the case, commitment to their families guided the choices they made.²

Chapter One

Antebellum Floyd County

Secession and the Civil War profoundly and bitterly divided the residents of Floyd County. Virginia’s decision to attempt to leave the United States forced members of the community to choose sides: many decided to embrace the nascent Confederacy and fight for independence; others chose to remain loyal to the Union and fight against the Confederacy; just as many wanted no part of the war and sought ways to stay out of the fight. These decisions drove residents apart, causing suspicion, intimidation, violence, chaos, and murder. They also caused rampant mistrust, leading former friends and neighbors to scrutinize one other’s behavior for signs of Confederate loyalty or disloyalty. Those suspicions increased throughout the war, transforming much of the community into informants for Confederates, Unionists, or deserters.

Residents’ wartime behavior deeply contrasted their thirty-year history of cohesion, cooperation, and solidarity. From their first settlements on the Blue Ridge Plateau at Wood’s Gap in the eighteenth century to the formation of Floyd County in 1831 and an economic boom of the 1850s, county residents worked together to better their mountaintop community.¹ They cooperated to bring much-needed transportation improvements to their community and profited together from the economic gains that resulted. They worshipped together in the county’s many different religious denominations and, in the summer months, congregated at camp meetings and revivals.² They provided for each other in times of need, pitched in to raise neighbors’ barns, swapped labor, and enjoyed each other’s company.³ Secession and war shattered this pattern of behavior and left the community profoundly divided.

Floyd County’s path to wartime division had its roots in an economic boom of the 1850s, a decade in which a portion of the community moved away from traditional pre-capitalist economic practices and into the market-based economy. During the decade, residents incorporated their first township, lobbied successfully for transportation improvements, and experienced growth in agriculture, professional, merchant, and industrial development. Improvements in transportation, the critical factor for much of the advancement, eventually linked the district’s farmers to markets outside the plateau region, prompting a dramatic shift from the production of traditional food crops to more extensive tobacco harvesting. Local farmers’ access to new markets, facilitated first by the construction of turnpikes through the county in the early 1850s, was solidified later in the decade with the completion of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad to nearby Cambria Depot in Montgomery County. The first upgraded road links allowed county farmers safe access to Lynchburg markets and prompted many of them to sell their harvests there and then purchase sugar, salt, molasses, bale cotton, coffee, and other necessities as couldn’t be made at home.⁴ The revolutionary connection to the new railroad offered the county’s farmers an unparalleled opportunity to seek profits in Virginia’s eastern markets, forever changing the district’s agricultural practices and political interests.

Residents’ quests for state and local funding to construct turnpikes through Floyd County began in the late 1840s when citizens organized regionally to find the means of getting said roads made.⁵ The county’s delegates in the state legislature, like most delegates from southwest Virginia, bargained with the representatives of eastern portions of the state, trading votes for the maintenance of slavery in exchange for votes supporting regional transportation improvements.⁶ In the early 1850s, these combined efforts resulted in a partial allocation of funds from the state legislature to complete a couple of toll roads.

The eventual construction of those turnpikes provided Floyd County residents with improved access to Carroll and Franklin Counties as well as to Cambria Depot.⁷ The roads served as the primary routes for goods moving out of the county toward markets in Lynchburg and to trains at the depot linked to markets in Richmond and the east.⁸ Floyd County’s few slaveholders were early and enthusiastic transportation boosters, serving exclusively as the commissioners who sold subscriptions to the stock of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad Company.⁹ Once completed, the railroad provided access to eastern tobacco markets, gradually moving a portion of the district’s farmers into the regional market economy through more extensive cash crop production. The steady increase in trade with markets in eastern Virginia also fostered growth in the community’s ties to that region’s economic and political interests. The bonds that resulted eventually drew Floyd County into the Confederacy, the Civil War, and economic ruin despite its comparatively few enslaved workers.¹⁰

Industry, Agriculture, and Labor, 1850–1860

In early 1858, residents established the Town of Jacksonville (later renamed the Town of Floyd) from 100 acres in the Court House district. Once incorporated by an act of the Virginia General Assembly that year, Jacksonville became the county seat.¹¹ The town served as the location for the district’s government and courts. It also quickly became the hub of its educational system as well as the social center of the community. In 1860, Jacksonville featured six general merchandise stores as well as two tailor shops, several doctor and lawyer offices, a tavern, and a hotel.¹² Half the county’s industries operated there, producing goods varying from saddles and furniture to boots, shoes, and guns.¹³ Two Jacksonville academies offered classical education to approximately forty-five male and female students per year.¹⁴ The Floyd Citizen, which later became the Floyd Citizen and Intelligencer, began publishing in Jacksonville in the late 1850s, providing residents with political coverage that it claimed showed independence in all things.¹⁵ The Southern Era, a Democratic weekly, replaced the other newspapers in 1860, securing subscriptions among 700 Floyd County readers per week.¹⁶ Jacksonville’s industry, advanced educational facilities, professional services, and newspapers offer a hint of parallel economic gains taking place in the county throughout much of the decade.

Although a significant portion of the community experienced wage labor and the market economy for the first time in the decade before the Civil War, many residents also clung to traditional pre-capitalist notions, relying primarily on trade and labor exchange. Tenant farmers such as John A. Ratliff continued to swap one and a half days chopping wood and one day hauling hay as partial payment for a Jacksonville merchant’s pine table.¹⁷ Like many in the community, Ratliff also relied on labor trading for the services