High Mountains Rising (12 page)

By the spring of 1865, Appalachian society appeared to be on the verge of disintegration from the powerful assaults of the war. The collapse of the Confederacy left substantial portions of the mountains with little political structure. Raids by organized armies and guerrilla bands disrupted the society and economy even further. Even after the surrender of the two main Confederate armies in April 1865, peace did not immediately return to Appalachia. Some of the most aggressive of the partisan groups refused to disband. A particularly notorious example was Ft. Hamby in Wilkes County, North Carolina. These outlaws were finally surrounded by returned veterans from the Confederate army and attacked, and their fort was destroyed.
²³

Attempts to reconstruct society and government in the mountain counties had already begun before the fighting ended. In Tennessee, Appalachian political leader Andrew Johnson had been appointed military governor of Tennessee. Although his efforts to return Union men to positions of power in eastern Tennessee were not entirely successful, Johnson received sufficient national attention to be nominated as vice president by the Republicans in November 1864. After Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, an Appalachian leader was president of the United States. Johnson used his position to try to restore peace to his beleaguered section. Coalitions of pro-Union politicians—including mountain politicians—in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland held tenuous control over their respective state governments.
²⁴

Andrew Johnson's attempt to reconstruct the governments in Appalachian states was not successful. Many European Americans were hostile to African Americans and resisted the extension of political and civil rights to the recently freed people. In addition, the former political and economic elite sought to regain their accustomed positions in mountain life. Consequently, between the end of the war and March 1867 conservative and elite members of mountain counties tried to limit the impact of the changes the war brought to their communities. In Lumpkin County, Georgia, a local grand jury refused to indict men known to have committed an atrocity during the war. In many places in Appalachia, African Americans preferred to leave the mountains rather than face the hostility of their European American neighbors.
²⁵

Attempts to revive the mountain economy after the war were fraught with difficulties. Because of the death of many men, entire families and neighborhoods lacked the expertise and labor needed to sustain their communities. In addition, the transportation infrastructure of the entire region was badly damaged, and state and local governments did not have the resources to make repairs. For much of the elite, the end of slavery and the repudiation of Confederate currency and bonds meant that these people had fewer personal resources to reinvest in the region. All these factors combined to plunge Appalachia into a severe economic downturn.
²⁶

The economic and political challenges Appalachia faced were mirrored in efforts to reconstruct mountain society. Religious organizations and educational systems had to be recreated and staffed. The difficulties involved in the process were illustrated by the controversies involving the Methodist Church in East Tennessee. In that region, Unionist political leader William G. Brownlow—who was also a Methodist minister—led a movement to claim all church buildings and property for Methodists who had supported the Union. Those who were associated with the Confederacy refused to accept that assertion, and many congregations were badly divided, which only further weakened the church. Many schools failed to reopen. The men who had been teachers were unavailable or were forced to support their families by working on family farms that needed their labor. Thus, by the spring of 1867 Appalachia was in a very distressed condition.
²⁷

In March 1867, the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress seized control of the political reconstruction process. They passed several pieces of legislation that placed Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina under Federal jurisdiction. In these states, much of the Confederate leadership was initially barred from further political participation, and African American men were given the right to vote. With the subsequent passage in the next two years of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the national Constitution, black men received the right to vote in all parts of
Appalachia. The result of this momentous change was the creation of the Republican party in all parts of the mountain South.
²⁸

The Republicans drew support from European Americans who had supported the Union during the war and from African Americans. Because African Americans were few in number in the mountains, the Republicans relied on Union Army veterans and sympathizers with the cause as their main support. As a result, there were few Republicans in southwestern Virginia, northern Georgia, and northern Alabama. There were individual counties such as Fannin in Georgia and Winston in Alabama that supported the new party. There was enough backing in western North Carolina, western Maryland, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and East Tennessee for the party to fully participate in elections. With many former Confederates excluded from the initial elections under the Reconstruction Acts, Republicans won local contests in all of these states. These Republican governments not only facilitated political activities by African Americans but also often passed legislation that favored poor Appalachians. Starting with Maryland in 1864, a number of them provided free state educational systems for the first time. Maryland and North Carolina passed “stay laws”—or homestead exemptions—that made it difficult for creditors to seize the homes and land of those in debt.
²⁹

Former Confederates and the region's former leadership were greatly angered by these changes and combined in a reconstituted Democratic party. When traditional election methods failed to bring victory, some Democrats resorted to extralegal means to return to power. The vehicle often used was intimidation of Republican voters and party workers through such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. In both Estill County, Kentucky, and Rutherford County, North Carolina, this racist organization perpetrated a series of outrages. By 1870, most of the former Confederates had been allowed to return to the political process, and the Democrats began to dominate elections in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Maryland. Only in eastern Tennessee did the Republicans remain the dominant party.
³⁰

As the political process became somewhat less turbulent, the first attempts to reintroduce industry in the region began. Northern soldiers who had fought at the battle of Chattanooga noticed evidence of coal and iron deposits in the vicinity. By 1869, they and local entrepreneurs had formed companies that would grow into Tennessee Coal and Iron, a major regional industry. In northern Alabama, businesspeople from the state recognized the same potential in their area and created the model city of Birmingham to act as another center for coal and iron production. These initiatives took place because of a rapid advance in railroad building in parts of the mountain South. Much more could have been accomplished, but corruption in
some state subsidy programs, including the Western North Carolina Railroad, limited expansion.
³¹

As Democrats returned to office at the state level in all of the Appalachian states by 1874—Alabama Democrats were the last to capture their legislature in that year—they sought to control taxes by greatly reducing government expenditures. This meant that increasingly impoverished mountain communities and counties would receive little or no assistance from the states to rebuild. In fact, many lowland leaders viewed the mountain counties as hostile political territory and refused to send resources their way. This situation was particularly tragic in the field of education. Many mountain counties were unable to develop a rudimentary educational system, and literacy began to decline in the rural parts of the highlands. This created a situation in which Appalachian leaders began to look beyond the South for the capital needed to develop their region.
³²

The Democratic governments also ended the policies that favored the poor in mountain counties. Virginia and Georgia restricted the right of the poor to hunt and fish on land owned by other people. Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina repealed the homestead exemption laws that allowed the poor to keep their homes even though they were in debt. In 1872, West Virginia added a provision to its state constitution that facilitated the transfer of property and mineral rights from small land owners to mining and timber companies. To ensure that the poor mountaineers would not join a political coalition to challenge these changes, Georgia, Maryland, and Tennessee imposed poll taxes in 1870 to discourage poor blacks and whites from voting.
³³

These setbacks did not go unnoticed. It was during this period of economic, social, cultural, and political collapse that writers of the Local Color School of fiction took notice of the Southern mountaineers. Starting in 1873, short story writers began to depict the mountain people in ways that led directly to the creation of the mountaineer stereotype. Rebecca Harding Davis's “The Yares of Black Mountain,” which appeared in
Lippincott's Magazine
in 1875, is an excellent example of this treatment of Appalachians as a poor people living in a declining society. Unfortunately for many mountain dwellers, the fictional accounts were close to reality.
³⁴

The Civil War and Reconstruction were sixteen years of war, social and economic disorganization, and political turmoil. The people of the Appalachian South were caught in the middle of a catastrophic national quarrel. They suffered as few other Americans did during this period. When peace returned after 1876, the region was politically and economically weaker than it had been before 1861. Many communities and families had been shattered by death, disability, and political and personal hatreds. In
this weakened condition, the region and its leaders could not resist outside powers that sought to control Appalachia's resources and people.

NOTES

1.
Victor B. Howard, “John Brown's Raid at Harper's Ferry and the Sectional Crisis in North Carolina,”
North Carolina Historical Review
55 (Oct. 1978): 396–420.

2.
Daniel W. Crofts,
Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 164–94;W. Dean Burnham,
Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 852–64; Paul Horton, “Submitting to the ‘Shadow of Slavery': The Secession Crisis and Civil War in Alabama's Lawrence County,”
Civil War History
44 (June 1998): 111–36.

3.
Richard O. Curry,
A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964).

4.
Charles L. Wagandt, “Redemption or Reaction? Maryland in the Post-Civil War Years,” in
Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction
, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 149, 152; David Madden, “Unionist Resistance to Confederate Occupation: The Bridge Burners of East Tennessee,”
East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications
52 (1980–81): 22–39; W. Todd Groce,
Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

5.
James I. Robertson Jr.,
Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend
(New York: Macmillan, 1997); D. Warren Lambert,
When the Ripe Pears Fell: The Battle of Richmond, Kentucky
(Richmond, Ky.: Madison County Historical Society, 1995).

6.
Ted Alexander, “Destruction, Disease, and Death: The Battle of Antietam and the Sharpsburg Civilians,”
Civil War Regiments
6 (1998): 143–73; Stephen H. Sears,
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
(New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1983).

7.
William Marvel,
Burnside
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 264–343; Peter Cozzens,
This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Steven E. Woodworth,
Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

8.
Woodworth,
Six Armies;
Albert Castel,
Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Richard M. McMurry,
Atlanta, 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

9.
John L. Heatwole,
The Burning: Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley
(Charlottesville, Va.: Howell Press, 1998); Frank E. Vandiver,
Jubal's Raid: General Early's Famous Attack on Washington in 1864
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

10.
William Marvel,
Southwest Virginia in the Civil War: The Battle for Saltville
(Lynchburg, Va.: H. E. Howard, 1992); Chris J. Hartley, “Like an Avalanche: George Stoneman's 1865 Cavalry Raid,”
Civil War Regiments
6 (1998): 74–92; John C.
Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney,
The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

11.
Kenneth W. Noe, “Red String Scare: Civil War in Southwest Virginia and the Heroes of America,”
North Carolina Historical Review
69 (July 1992): 301–22; John W. Shaffer, “Loyalties in Conflict: Union and Confederate Sentiment in Barbour County,”
West Virginia History
50 (1991): 109–28.