Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (review)

Book Review John C. Inscoe. Mountain Masters, Slavery , and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. $29.95. Well, Burke County, North Carolina, has done it again! First it was Edward Phifer's excellent study, "Slavery in Microcosm ," which appeared in the Journal of Southern History in 1962. Dr. Phifer was a local surgeon, but his skills as a historian were such that he gave us the best in-depth, county-wide study of slavery and slave-owning that has been available for thirty years. Then came John E. Fleming, a Burke County black who became my student at Berea, then went off to Howard for his doctorate involving a remarkable Roots-like study of his family and his ancestor, Tamisnan. (See "An Appalachian Afro-American Family," page 9 of this issue.) Now comes another Burke County native, John C. Inscoe, who went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his training, and has now broadened our understanding of Appalachian slavery with his insightful study, Mountain Masters. Inscoe, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, is now editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly and has served as guest editor of the Journal of Southern History. Inscoe's coverage in this book stretches beyond Burke into all of Western North Carolina, and even into the whole world the slave owners made. The connections were political, economic and matrimonial . Inscoe's picture of Western North Carolina's slave-owning elite finds a predominantly rural community well integrated into the larger market system of the antebellum South. Many mountain masters were professional men; many others were in business. But this elite was invested in land and slaves, and was tied intimately to the Old South's system of power and wealth. In fact, according to Inscoe, Western Carolina's principal politicians were leading Southerners and secessionists. Senator Thomas L. Clingman is Inscoe's principal example of a mountain sessionist and passionate defender of slavery. Another is William Holland Thomas of Jackson County. Inscoe's efforts are clearly revisionist. He takes care to prove the interconnections between mountain society and the rest of the South. Unlike Carter G. Woodson, John C. Campbell, and Carl Degler, Inscoe does not see the Appalachian South as "another South." Rather, he sees Appalachia as an integral part of the Old South. But in his revisionism, Inscoe penetrates into debatable territory, especially when he attempts to build a case that slavery in Western Carolina was remarkably moderate. His evidence for a benign mountain slavery involves, first of all, masters who made substantial efforts to preserve slave families despite economic difficulties, as well as evidence of considerate treatment. Another line of his argument relates to the strong, even enthusiastic support of secession by nonslaveholding whites, along with the general lack of protest in the region against the system by the North Carolina's slaves themselves. Such an interpretation flies in the face of the recent , massive and impressive historiography that has appeared since Kenneth Stampp's book, The Peculiar Institution, in 1956. I am prepared to accept Inscoe's point that slavery may have been "more mild" in Western North Carolina, but it appears clear that many varieties of slavery existed in the United States in the antebellum period. Wherever slavery has emerged, it has had remarkable variations, as between Latin America and North America, which Frank 68 Tannenbaum pointed out in the 1940s, or between the Deep South and the Border South in the United States. Even within the southern mountains, the world of slavery presented wide variations. In the cotton-growing Tennessee Valley counties of northern Alabama , the plantation-slave system was nearly as fully developed as in any other of the Cotton Kingdom. Yet in a tencounty area surrounding Parkersburg, (West) Virginia, blacks and slaves were almost totally absent. The Shenandoah Valley counties in Virginia, furthermore, were so open to "hostile penetration" from both the free states and the large free black population of Maryland, that running away was an immense problem, and Shenandoah slave-owners were always apprehensive and suspicious of subversion , an important variable when compared with more "secure" areas. Apparently Western North Carolina was...