Reconstructing Appalachia

The Civil War's Aftermath

Andrew L. Slap

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780813145358
• eBook ISBN: 9780813139760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Families, communities, and the nation itself were irretrievably altered by the Civil War and the subsequent societal transformations of the nineteenth century. The repercussions of the war incited a broad range of unique problems in Appalachia, including political dynamics, racial prejudices, and the regional economy.

Andrew L. Slap's anthology Reconstructing Appalachia reveals life in Appalachia after the ravages of the Civil War, an unexplored area that has left a void in historical literature.
Addressing a gap in the chronicles of our nation, this vital collection explores little-known aspects of history with a particular focus on the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods. Acclaimed scholars John C. Inscoe, Gordon B. McKinney, and Ken Fones-Wolf are joined by up-and-comers like Mary Ella Engel, Anne E. Marshall, and Kyle Osborn in a unique volume of essays investigating postwar Appalachia with clarity and precision.

Featuring a broad geographic focus, these compelling essays cover postwar events in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. This approach provides an intimate portrait of Appalachia as a diverse collection of communities where the values of place and family are of crucial importance.
Highlighting a wide array of topics including racial reconciliation, tension between former Unionists and Confederates, the evolution of post–Civil War memory, and altered perceptions of race, gender, and economic status, Reconstructing Appalachia is a timely and essential study of a region rich in heritage and tradition.

Chapter 1

A New Frontier

Historians, Appalachian History,
and the Aftermath of the Civil War

Andrew L. Slap

John C. Inscoe, one of the deans of Appalachian history, commented in 2002 that “curiously, the Civil War era has been among the last to attract the full-fledged attention of Appalachian scholars.” While historians belatedly studied the Civil War in the mountain South, Inscoe observed that “Reconstruction remains one of the least examined eras” in the region's history. The field of Reconstruction—or, even more broadly, postwar–Appalachia started auspiciously in 1978 with Gordon B. McKinney's Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900. McKinney sought to test the validity of Appalachian stereotypes by analyzing why the region was the sole center of Republican strength in the Democratic-dominated post–Civil War South. Exploring the region's political, social, and economic history, he found that anti-Confederate sentiment fueled the Republican Party's growth immediately after the war, and only the skillfulness of mountain politicians allowed regional Republican Party organizations to survive the national party's embrace of African American civil rights during Reconstruction. Many of the new books on Civil War Appalachia end with a short chapter on the postwar period, and a few historians have published articles specifically on Reconstruction Appalachia, but unfortunately this has mainly been a case of a scholar writing a pathbreaking book and no one following after it. In 2002 Kenneth W. Noe could still write that “McKinney's now two-decades-old Southern Mountain Republicans remains the last word on regional Reconstruction.”¹

The dearth of work on Reconstruction-era Appalachia is particularly problematic given the nature of the region's scholarship as a whole. Scholars of the mountain South have concentrated on explaining its persistent poverty and debunking the region's long-standing stereotypes. The first wave of Appalachian historians, in the 1970s, argued that the region's industrialization (which lasted approximately from 1880 to 1920) caused the poverty that afflicted Appalachia throughout the twentieth century. Another group of historians has since contended that the sources of Appalachian poverty can be found before 1860 and the Civil War. The crucial decades between the periods covered by these two dominant interpretations of Appalachian poverty have received scant attention, and understanding the interval between 1865 and the mid-1880s may help answer this central question in Appalachian history.

The decades immediately after the Civil War are likewise vital for analyzing the region's stereotypes, for it was during this period that the idea of Appalachia was first constructed. While Appalachian scholars still debate the provenance of particular stereotypes, they do agree that the region has been, and continues to be, portrayed as a primitive, isolated frontier homogenously populated with white Anglo-Saxons who are lazy and prone to violent feuding and making moonshine, but who were loyal to the Union during the Civil War. “More often than not,” John Inscoe writes, “those studying the region have a strong attachment to place and commitment to those living there, both of which drive the passion with which scholars seek to overturn the stereotypes and promote a real understanding of the region.” In addition, many of the stereotypes are directly related to the region's poverty, so it is important to understand how and why the stereotypes were created, as well as their degree of validity. For instance, the degree to which Appalachia was isolated is one of the more contentious debates, and this issue is key to analyzing the region's poverty and its stereotypes. The history of Appalachia during Reconstruction, one of the most transformative periods in United States history, is important in its own right; but, perhaps more significantly, studying Reconstruction can also help refocus persistent debates by chronologically connecting the major fields of Appalachian scholarship.²

While Appalachianists have been overlooking Reconstruction, historians of Reconstruction have disregarded Appalachia. Examining Reconstruction in Appalachia will not only give new insights into the period but also may help the field of Reconstruction emerge from its two decades of stagnation following the 1988 publication of Eric Foner's grand synthesis of the era, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, which “represents the culmination of the Revisionist revolution: its final form so to speak,” as one leading historian concluded. The Revisionist revolution began in the middle of the twentieth century and sought to overturn the Dunning School, the first academic interpretation of Reconstruction, which originated with Professor William A. Dunning at Columbia University at the beginning of the century. The Dunning School's fundamental premise was the incapacity of African Americans, which meant that Reconstruction was doomed to failure because it sought to promote African American rights and equality. While some scholars challenged the Dunning School from the start, most notably W. E. B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction in America, it was not until the 1940s that a large number of historians sympathetic to African Americans and Republicans formed the Revisionist interpretation. By the time of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the premise of the Dunning School had been completely reversed, and Reconstruction was seen as a success, laying the groundwork for a second social revolution a century later. Disillusionment with the limitations of the civil rights movement, however, helped lead to the rise of the post-Revisionists in the 1970s and 1980s, who contended that Reconstruction had been a failure because it was too conservative. Foner's synthesis managed simultaneously to put the final nail in the coffin of the Dunning School while reconciling the Revisionists and post-Revisionists by acknowledging Reconstruction's accomplishments and its limitations, all of which created a huge vacuum in the field. In the twenty years since, historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have been stretching the traditional geographic and chronological boundaries of the era in an attempt to more fully understand it, while historians such as David W. Blight have analyzed how Americans remembered the Civil War in the decades afterward.³

Much of the growing work on the construction and uses of Civil War memory in the last few decades has focused on the postwar South. Historians such as Gaines M. Foster, Gary W. Gallagher, and Charles Reagan Wilson have analyzed how white southerners constructed the “Lost Cause,” a myth asserting in part that the war was about state rights and not slavery. This myth held that slavery was a benevolent institution in a superior society that the North only overcame through greater numbers. White southerners used the Lost Cause to find meaning and purpose after defeat, to keep the region politically united, and to help themselves adjust to the economic and social changes associated with the emergence of the New South. The study of the Lost Cause has led historians to look at such factors as the development of civic religion, representations of history in popular culture, and the influence of historical associations, but the major works on the Lost Cause rarely include Appalachia, a region that is often excluded from analysis of the South. Meanwhile, Appalachian historians have traditionally focused on the myth of Appalachia's Unionism and have neglected the importance of the Lost Cause in the region. Some historians, such as William L. Barney in the recent The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War, have begun to study the intersection of the Lost Cause and Appalachia, but much more needs to be done to integrate these two fields of study.⁴

The authors of the essays in this volume are using many of the methods and ideas developed in the study of Reconstruction and Civil War memory to study postwar Appalachia. Because the authors in this volume seek to integrate Appalachian history, Reconstruction, and memory of the Civil War, understanding the historiographical and methodological evolution of these is essential. This introductory essay will forgo repeating the well-known drama surrounding the history of Reconstruction and the Lost Cause, concentrating on the much more neglected evolution of Appalachian historiography.

The idea of Appalachia was first created during Reconstruction. The “local color” genre of writing, with its focus on the culture, land, and dialect of a particular region, dominated American literature from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, and local-color writers often turned their attention to the mountain South, regularly depicting it as a backward frontier that was culturally and economically behind the rest of the nation. Will Wallace Harney set the tone in one of the most famous early local-color pieces, an 1873 article about his travels through eastern Kentucky. The very title, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,” embodies the local-color movement's construction of Appalachia as an alien place. Harney described how “the natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the anatomical frame” and had unusual speech patterns. Other writers presented a similar image of Appalachia in the decades immediately after the Civil War; according to historian Henry D. Shapiro, “the cumulative effect of the publication of the numerous descriptive sketches and short stories of local color which used Appalachia as a subject was the establishment of a conventional view of the mountain region as an area untouched by the progressive and unifying forces that seemed to be at work elsewhere in the United States.” Rebecca Harding Davis was also a local-color writer whose stories evolved from an exposé of the iron industry in West Virginia to an examination of divisions within communities during the Civil War to stories that incorporated mountain stereotypes and sectional reunion in the mid-1870s in western North Carolina.⁵

William Goodell Frost, the Yale-educated president of Berea College in Kentucky, codified and gave a scholarly sheen to the local-color writers’ conception of Appalachia in 1899, describing the region's residents as “our contemporary ancestors,” an “anachronism” who were surviving remnants of the white frontiersmen who had first settled America. He insisted that since “Appalachian America has received no foreign immigration, it now contains a larger proportion of ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ of the Revolution than any other part of our country.” One result of this anachronism, according to Frost, was that “the feeling of toleration and justification of slavery, with all the subtleties of state rights and ‘South against North,’ which grew up after the Revolution did not penetrate the mountains.” The preserved Revolutionary heritage and antipathy toward slavery, he argued, made “Appalachian America clave to the old flag” and, “with its old-fashioned loyalty,” support the Union during the Civil War. Thus, while primitiveness made Appalachia different from the rest of the nation, the supposed absence of slavery and presence of a monolithic Unionism made it different from the rest of the South.⁶

By the turn of the twentieth century, novelists began using the otherness of Appalachia as a literary device to add dramatic tension, in the process reinforcing the developing image of Appalachia. John Fox Jr., probably the most famous and influential Appalachian novelist, used many Appalachian stereotypes in his popular novels. For instance, in his 1903 novel The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, he depicted a southern mountain boy's first meeting with an African American upon moving to a nearby valley. Though the character becomes accustomed to African Americans and slavery as a teen in Kentucky's Bluegrass region, when the Civil War breaks out he chooses to fight for the Union. The novel thus perpetuates the idea that Appalachians were ignorant of slavery and monolithically supported the Union during the Civil War. Five years later, Fox wrote the best-selling The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a contemporary novel about outsider John Hale coming to the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia just as the area started to industrialize. Hale becomes involved in a romance with a local woman and tries to transform her from a mountain girl to a sophisticated lady, an allegory for what others were trying to do to Appalachia as a whole. The novel, with its description of feuds and other stereotypes, highlights Appalachia's isolation and primitive otherness compared to modern America.

The sparse scholarly work done on Appalachia in the first half of the twentieth century attracted few historians and strengthened the power of existing stereotypes by treating the region as an isolated folk culture. For example, reformer John C. Campbell's influential 1921 book The Southern Highlander and His Homeland argues that the people of Appalachia needed to be uplifted and their folk arts preserved. According to the editors of Appalachia in the Making, “The early treatment of preindustrial Appalachia as an isolated folk culture had at least two important scholarly consequences.” On the positive side, it led to a tradition of ethnographic studies of rural Appalachia that are still indispensable, but unfortunately it also reinforced the idea of “Appalachians as a ‘people without history,’ thus making the study of the region the proper professional domain of anthropology and ethnography rather than history.”⁷

Renewed attention to poverty in the 1960s made the supposed peculiarity of Appalachia problematic rather than quaint. In his 1962 book The Other America, Michael Harrington helped to launch the War on Poverty, arguing that many poor people were invisible because they looked so much like other Americans. Appalachians were different, though, according to Harrington: tourists and outlanders saw the natural beauty of the region while failing to see the poverty, which was off the beaten path. When social scientists and reformers did look at Appalachia, one of the poorest areas of the United States, the generations-old stereotypes of Appalachia fit perfectly with the new theory of the culture of poverty, allowing outsiders to blame the region's poverty on its inhabitants’ culture.

While trying to convince people to help lift Appalachians out of poverty, missionary Jack E. Wells repeated many of the standard regional stereotypes in his 1965 Yesterday's People, a title eerily similar to Frost's “Our Contemporary Ancestors” more than six decades earlier. Wells asserts that “mountain people do both think and hope for many things—but in a different way from middle class people.” Harry M. Caudill explains in the book's foreword that a combination of historical circumstances created both Appalachia's peculiar culture and its poverty, starting with the first settlers in the colonial era, who moved to the region to avoid restraint. “They were stubborn, opinionated, and sometimes cruel. People have to have these qualities in order to survive on the tooth-and-talon frontier,” he explains; “the mountain walls sheltered their strengths, their quirks, and their shortcomings from the rest of the world. They turned aside subsequent streams of human migration. In a century of isolation Appalachian subculture was born.” The continued acceptance of Appalachia as an isolated, primitive culture often led reformers and social scientists to use modernization theory, which argued that the way to eradicate poverty in the region was to adapt Appalachian culture to modern society.⁸

Caudill, though, represented a transition from culture of poverty theory to dependency and modernization theory to explain Appalachian poverty. While Caudill portrayed Appalachians as a benighted people prone to feuding, he primarily blamed outside economic forces for the region's poverty in his 1963 polemic Night Comes to the Cumberlands, about eastern Kentucky. Outsiders looking for coal duped the natives into selling their rights for almost nothing, and “the countryside was then systematically plundered in what constitutes one of the ugliest eras of exploitation in American history,” he wrote. Borrowing from Third World dependency theory, Appalachian scholars began arguing that the region's poverty was not caused by its isolation from the rest of America but by the way it was connected with America. This became known as the colonial model or the inner colonial model. Significantly, this model explained the region's poverty without blaming its inhabitants, as did the culture of poverty theory. As Kenneth Noe puts it, “When combined with the foundations and methods of the ‘new social history,’ new-Marxist labor studies, a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches, and often an underlying anger and pride of place that grew from mountain roots and sixties activism, the colonial model metamorphosed far beyond Caudill's thesis into a movement that eventually came to be called Appalachian Revisionism.” Noe succinctly describes the Revisionist argument: “Into an Arcadian, Jeffersonian, preindustrial paradise of yeoman farming and relative equality, celebrated but rarely defined in any detail, had come ruthless outside industrialists seeking profits at all costs. The genesis of the industrial era was abrupt and violent.”⁹

The academic study of Appalachian history began in the 1970s as part of the interdisciplinary Appalachian Revisionism. Ronald D Eller provided th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A New Frontier: Historians, Appalachian History, and the Aftermath of the Civil War
• 2. Reconstruction-era Violence in North Georgia: The Mossy Creek Ku Klux Klan's Defense of Local Autonomy
• 3. UnReconstructed Appalachia: The Persistence of War in Appalachia
• 4. “The Other War Was but the Beginning”: The Politics of Loyalty in Western North Carolina, 1865–1867
• 5. “Resistless Uprising”?: Thomas Dixon's Uncle and Western North Carolinians as Klansmen and Statesmen
• 6. Reconstructing Race: Parson Brownlow and the Rhetoric of Race in Postwar East Tennessee
• 7. Gathering Georgians to Zion: John Hamilton Morgan's 1876 Mission to Georgia
• 8. “Neither War nor Peace”: West Virginia's Reconstruction Experience
• 9. A House Redivided: From Sectionalism to Political Economy in West Virginia
• 10. “Grudges and Loyalties Die So Slowly”: Contested Memories of the Civil War in Pennsylvania's Appalachia
• 11. The Lost Cause That Wasn't: East Tennessee and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia
• 12. “A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy”: Explaining Civil War Loyalties in the Age of Appalachian Discovery, 1900–1921
• 13. Civil War Memory in Eastern Kentucky Is “Predominately White”: The Confederate Flag in Unionist Appalachia
• List of Contributors
• Index