Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

5. The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image: The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee

The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image 103 No two adjacent regions of the upper South, and certainly none so much alike, reacted so differently to the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861 as did western North Carolina and East Tennessee. Despite similarities in topography, agricultural output, racial demography, and socioeconomic makeup, highlanders on either side of the border between the two states demonstrated sharp contrasts in their collective views regarding their commitment to the Union and to the South. No other part of what would become a Confederate state—except the northwestern counties of Virginia—resisted secession longer or with more vehemence than did the eastern third of Tennessee. Even after Tennessee passed its secession ordinance in June (the last state to do so), the vast majority of its mountain residents opposed casting their lot with the rest of the South, and even made a concerted effort to secede from their state in order to do so. No other part of the Confederacy supplied so many soldiers (more than 30,000) to the Union army, a contribution greater than that made by Rhode Island, Delaware , or Minnesota. Just across their eastern border, North Carolina highlanders were far more divided among themselves as to the wisdom and merits of secession. But pro-secession arguments received as full a hearing there as they did anywhere in the upper South, and a substantial number of western Carolinians actively supported joining a new southern nation , starting with Lincoln’s election in November 1860. A February 1861 referendum on a secession convention fully demonstrated the split among these westerners. But by May, the state’s mountain coun5 The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee 104 Race, War, and Remembrance ties were unanimous in their support of withdrawal from the Union and went on to provide the state’s largest per capita number of volunteers to the Confederate army during the early months of the war. This chapter is an attempt both to characterize the nature of the differences in attitudes demonstrated by these two sets of southern highlanders , and to propose—if only tentatively—an explanation for those differences. On the basis of their most quantifiable characteristics, one is struck far more by how much alike East Tennessee and western North Carolina were than by any marked differences. East Tennessee is generally defined as the state’s thirty easternmost counties. It consists of three major mountain chains, the Cumberlands to the west and the Blue Ridge to the northeast and the Great Smokies to the southeast, separated by the broad valleys of the Tennessee and Holston rivers. Western North Carolina was never quite so specifically delineated, but it is defined here as what were in 1860 the state’s fifteen westernmost counties, which for the most part make up a double tier of counties bordering Tennessee. This area also encompasses large parts of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountains, along with all of the small but more rugged Black Mountain chain. The vast majority of residents of both sections were small farmers with limited—but, by 1860, much improved—access to commercial markets beyond their region’s bounds. No single cash crop dominated their agricultural output. Cotton was not conducive to either the terrain or the climate of the southern highlands, but corn, wheat, and other grains were grown in abundance, along with flax, tobacco, apples and peaches in more select areas within each section. Livestock proved to be the most marketable of mountain products, with many hogs and cattle and somewhat fewer sheep raised on both sides of the state line. Western Carolinians maintained an active trade with the plantation markets of South Carolina and Georgia, and its leaders eagerly pushed for railroad lines to link their part of the state with its eastern half and/or with those states to the south. By 1860, the Western North Carolina Railroad had almost reached Morganton, the most accessible of the region’s commercial outlets, and construction was under way as far west as Asheville by the war’s outbreak. Internal improvements in East Tennessee had made a quantum 105 The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image leap forward just a few years before the Civil War with the completion of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad in 1855 and the East Tennessee and Virginia line in 1858, which together cut through the heart of...