Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870, and: Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861-1865 (review)

book reviews167 M. McPherson, George C. Rabie (his political study of the Confederacy), Marshall De Rosa, Eugene D. Genovese, and especially Michael Morrison's Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse ofManifest Destiny and the Coming ofthe Civil War (1977), which offer some new perspectives about the South, secession, and the origins of the Civil War. W. Kirk Wood Alabama State University Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870. By W. Todd Grace. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 218. $28.00.) MountainPartisans: Guerrilla Warfare in theSouthernAppalachians, 1861-1865. By Sean Michael O'Brien. (Westport, Ct.: Praeger, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 221. $35.00.) Do not be fooled by the similarity in titles. Mountain Rebels and Mountain Partisans both explore neglected aspects of the Civil War, and they share at times the same geographical perspective, but they have Utile else in common. Historians of the war in East Tennessee eagerly have awaited publication of W. Todd Grace's Mountain Rebels since 1992, when he completed the doctoral dissertation from which this book is derived. Its pubUcation in this revised form will make Grace's work more readily accessible, but, more importantly, it will solidify the reputation ofMountain Rebels as the single best work on Confederate East Tennessee. Noel C. Fisher's War at Every Door (1997), which owes some of its important insights to Grace's dissertation, has surveyed the fierce poUtical battles and accompanying guerrilla war that defined the clash between unionists and secessionists in East Tennessee. Grace now takes us deep inside the secessionist camp. It was not easy to be a Confederate in East Tennessee: the region represented one of the most significant enclaves of unionism in the South, which meant, says Grace, that rebels there had to wage war on three fronts: They had to fight the Union army in the field, a majority unionist population at home, and a suspicious Confederate government in Richmond. The third ofthese enemies is the most intriguing. Because East Tennessee was, in fact, largely unionist, the region could not provide the number of Confederate soldiers requested by Richmond . Jefferson Davis grew suspicious of these so-called Tennessee rebels, and his suspicions were confirmed when Gen. E. Kirby Smith arrived at Knoxville in March 1862. Every good book has a villain, and while Wilüam G. Brownlow fills the bill for Grace on most occasions, Smith may have done even more than the rebel-hating "Parson" to undermine the morale ofEast Tennessee Confederates . Frustrated by the lukewarm patriotism of East Tennesseans, Smith went out ofhis way to impugn their honor and exaggerate the disaffection and disloyalty of the region. By the time he departed a few months later, Smith had not only confirmed Richmond's negative impression, but he had also turned many l68CIVIL WAR history East Tennesseans against the government. Grace makes the waning of Confederate loyalty an important theme of his book, but there is much more in the seven carefuUy crafted and meticulously documented chapters. He also explains which East Tennesseans tended to support the Confederacy (mostly people in town and country who had profited from the arrival ofthe railroad and new market economy), their roles in sustaining the Confederacy, their reaction to Union occupation, and the retribution visited upon them during the postwar years. Grace steers a middle course between those historians who beUeve the Confederacy coUapsed internally from a loss of wiU and those who say the rebels were simply worn out by military defeat. He leans toward the former camp, but he also suggests a third possibiUty at work in East Tennessee, that the people did not so much abandon the Confederacy as they were abandoned by it. Summarizing the attitude of the region's Confederate soldiers, he writes, "Combating suspicion and insensitivity in Richmond while fighting disease, death, and Yankees on the battlefield proved too much for many" (108). Sean O'Brien's Mountain Partisans treats a portion of the war in East Tennessee , but only as it relates to guerriUa warfare. Historians have paid increasing attention over the past decade to the guerrilla war, yet virtually all of their published work has been limited to community or state studies...