Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (review)

Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South. By Martin Crawford. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. xiv, 239. Paper, $17.50.)

For more than a decade, British historian Martin Crawford's exciting work on Civil War-era Ashe County, North Carolina, has proven vital to scholars of the conflict in Appalachia. The importance of this book, however, the culminating version of that research, extends far beyond the Southern Mountain Region and its historians. A model community study that brings together threads from Appalachian and Southern community studies, modern research on the wider Confederate home front, and the latest findings regarding the motivations of Civil War soldiers, the book does nothing less than fully integrate Appalachian Civil War studies into the wider scholarship of the war. Indeed, Crawford's conclusions will significantly impact some of the field's major scholarly debates. One of the most enduring images of Appalachia is its perceived isolation. Few mountain counties were more physically remote than Ashe, high in the mountains along the Tennessee border, yet as Crawford makes clear, the county was never truly cut off from the major currents of antebellum American life. Traditional local farming communities bound by ties of kin and neighborhood were certainly central features of life there, but one could also find affluent farmers producing for the wider market, budding entrepreneurs, and a handful of slaves. Politics also involved Ashe Countians in the national issues of the day. A lively two-party system flourished within the county as long as it did anywhere else, fueled by local rivalries and kin networks but also by vital state-level issues such as internal improvements. By the late 1850s, however, no issue mattered as much as slavery, despite the relative paucity of slaves and slave owners in the county. Most white Ashe Countians feared the prospect of slave uprisings and expressed deep anger over the North's perceived betrayal of the sectional compact. A majority of residents still supported the Union conditionally during the secession winter, casting their votes for John Bell and then against calling a statewide secession convention, but after Fort Sumter they embraced the Confederacy with enthusiasm. No less than men, women embraced the new Southern nation.

The war widened Ashe County's vistas even more. Hundreds of local men served in the Confederate army. Thanks to the work of Reid Mitchell and others, it has become commonplace to refer to Civil War companies as extensions of their communities, but one is hard-pressed to find a work that tests that formula so extensively. Notably, Crawford challenges the notion that mountain soldiers were significantly less loyal than other Confederates troops, stressing that even most deserters eventually returned to their ranks voluntarily. His main concern, however, is how those units and events in the wider war shaped life at home. Despite disease, privations, hardships, and resentments, most white Ashe Countians remained loyal to the Confederacy until the bitter end, in no small part because their young men still in the army or killed in action morally compelled them to remain so. Men did avoid the draft, Unionism did exist, and guerrilla war to an extent flared up, but such voices remained a distinct minority, largely heard in the county's most rugged and noncommercial district and reflecting that community's nearness to East Tennessee. Even then, economic class was not a major determinant of loyalties; most Unionists were nonslaveholding small farmers or tenants, but most of the residents fitting that overall description supported the Confederacy. Like Gary Gallagher, in other words, Crawford envisions a Confederacy that failed due to external pressures, not internal collapse. Battered and strained though it was, Ashe County as a whole never gave up on the hope of Southern independence. Too much of the community's blood had been invested in the cause to do otherwise.

Deeply researched, steeped in a...