Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

8. "Moving through Deserter Country": Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War

“Moving through Deserter Country” 175 Outside observers have been vital to both our understanding and our misunderstanding of Appalachian society. Particularly valuable as source material on the southern highlands in the nineteenth century, their works range from the amply descriptive antebellum travel accounts of Caroline Gilman, James Buckingham, and Frederick Law Olmsted, through the local-color fiction and nonfiction of the post– Civil War popular press, to the more socially conscious tracts of missionaries , social workers, and journalists in the latter part of the century. While all these works have been and remain essential to scholars seeking to understand preindustrial mountain life, all too often they have been sources of the many stereotypes, misconceptions, and distortions to which this region, more than almost any other in the country, has been subjected. Among the most overlooked of regional commentaries by outside observers are those documenting one of the chapters most crucial in the Southern Appalachian experience (as of course it was for the South and the nation as a whole), the Civil War.1 No other epoch in our history has elicited written records from so vast a number of participants . Edmund Wilson, in the introduction to his Patriotic Gore, asked, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–1865 in which so many people were so articulate?” Or, as Louis Masur more recently stated, “The Civil War was a written war,” one in which hundreds of participants and observers “struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday.”2 Among the vast literature that indeed did capture the texture of 8 Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War 176 Race, War, and Remembrance the extraordinary and the everyday is a considerable body of prison narratives. The most scholarly authority on the subject, William Hesseltine , noted in 1935 that the Library of Congress catalog listed almost three hundred titles of published reminiscences or personal narratives by former prisoners, most of them Union soldiers in Confederate prisons.3 Remarkably, almost a fourth of those works were by men who escaped from such prisons and whose narratives cover their post-prison experiences as fugitives. Among these, I have located twenty-five accounts by Union soldiers whose escape routes led them through the southern Appalachian Mountains. Published as early as 1863 and as late as 1915, these books and articles are often sensationalistic in nature and melodramatic in tone. Their titles reflect their various approaches, which range from the stark minimalism of W. H. Parkins’s How I Escaped, Alonzo Cooper’s In and Out of Rebel Prisons, and John Ennis’s Adventures in Rebeldom to J. Madison Drake’s Fast and Loose in Dixie—which bears a typical mid-nineteenth-century subtitle that doubles as a synopsis: An Unprejudiced Narrative of Personal Experience as a Prisoner of War . . . With An Account of a Desperate Leap from a Moving Train of Cars. A Weary Tramp of Forty-five Days through Swamps and Mountains . Places and People Visited. Etc., Etc.—and Junius Browne’s Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines: Embracing a Great Variety of Facts, Incidents, and Romance of the War, Including . . . six more lines of subtitle. The literary merit of these works, like their scope and format, varies considerably, re- flecting in part the very different types of experiences their authors had as soldiers, as prisoners, and as fugitives. Yet the narratives of those whose escape routes took them through Southern Appalachia share a great deal. In crossing what was unknown and perilous territory for most, these fugitive-authors observed and experienced the region in ways quite different from those of the more casual antebellum travelers or the late nineteenth-century mission workers and journalists. Union escapees found themselves in the highlands not by choice but by necessity. For many, the risk of capture or death was all too immediate, and their treks through this treacherous terrain were as surreptitious as they could make them. Their judgments of the people and situations they encountered often 177 “Moving through Deserter Country” were matters of life and death. Miscalculating the lay of the land or the loyalties of those upon it could—and on occasion did—prove fatal for these men, whose survival depended on knowing which residents they could trust and which they should avoid. As literature, their writings often are seriously flawed and amateurish; yet, because...