Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South (review)

The words in the title of Will Wallace Harney’s 1873 essay, A Strange Land and a Peculiar People, about a trip through the Cumberland Mountains, may be the most well-known description of Appalachia. An aversion to slavery and a solid Unionist stance supposedly helped make the region unique. In his collection of essays, John Inscoe, one of the deans of Appalachian history, seeks to show how these generalizations are flawed. He argues that “they were myths, but myths with remarkably strong staying power. Taking issue with those two conceptions is, in effect, the driving force behind the essays collected here” (2). While these issues are important, Inscoe is being characteristically modest, for he is after even larger game. Ultimately, he tackles a central issue in Appalachian studies which is to what degree Appalachia was and is a coherent region separate from the rest of the South. Inscoe’s central thesis is that “southern highlanders were also southerners—sometimes foremost, sometimes more secondarily—and their actions and attitudes were often dictated as much or more by identity with that larger regional entity than by the smaller geographical area” (6–7).

Inscoe persuasively suggests that nothing exposed the dual and overlapping identities of southern Appalachians like the Civil War, and, as the title suggests, he divides the seventeen essays into sections on race, the war itself, and how the war and Appalachia have been remembered. He begins with an essay exploring race and slavery in nineteenth-century Appalachia, convincingly arguing that “southern mountaineers were first and foremost southerners and that they viewed slavery and race not unlike those of their yeomen or even slaveholding counterparts elsewhere in the South” (24). A later essay shows the fissures within Appalachia by examining why eastern Tennessee embraced secession and western North Carolina opposed it even though the two areas were so similar. Inscoe thinks that the crucial difference was in their self-perception, for, despite similar economic situations, eastern Tennessee saw itself as a passed-over area while western North Carolina viewed itself as an area on the rise (111). After using essays like these to question some of Appalachia’s central myths, Inscoe scrutinizes how the myths developed and spread. In an essay on the perception of Civil War loyalties in Appalachia during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Inscoe acknowledges that some writers stressed the Unionism of the region for economic and political reasons. He contends, though, that many writers largely ignored the war altogether because “it may also have been that these writers felt that only by downplaying Appalachia’s role in or impact on this most central event of the nation’s history could they make a convincing case for the isolation or insulation of its inhabitants” (276).

An unexpected pleasure of this collection is the balance between the broad scholarly essays mentioned above and the essays that focus on a particular event or person to bring the larger themes into sharp relief. These more focused essays range from an examination of single women’s Civil War experiences as a case study of Appalachian women on the Confederate home front to a discussion of the recent play about the Shelton Laurel Massacre to demonstrate how remembering the Civil War in Appalachia is still contested. The mix of essays make this collection appropriate for many different audiences, from scholars to general readers. Throughout the collection Inscoe successfully challenges previous perceptions of Appalachia, showing how it is both less coherent as a separate region and more southern than commonly thought. Race, War, and Remembrance will change how people conceptualize Appalachia.