Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

15. Guerrilla War and Remembrance: Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War

Guerrilla War and Remembrance 322 On June 17, 1864, Isaac Wilson, a forty-two-year-old farmer and Confederate lieutenant from the North Fork community of Ashe County, North Carolina, decided to spend the last morning of his furlough plowing his cornfield. Soon after leaving his wife and eight children to undertake that task, he was shot from a distance and killed by a group of Unionists who also happened to be his neighbors. While by no means the first such incident to take place in this tension- filled area only a few miles from the Tennessee border, Wilson’s murder reverberated in especially potent ways, and it intensified the level of local violence that would continue through much of the war’s remaining ten months. The story is well known locally and has been retold in numerous accounts of the war in Ashe County and western North Carolina. Yet the most thorough and moving account of the incident is in a memoir produced in the 1940s by Isaac’s third son.1 William Albert Wilson’s memoir is extraordinary for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he was only two and a half years old when his father was killed. Although he is rarely explicit about how much of his narrative comes from his own memory and how much comes from the memories of others, it is obvious that most of this remarkably vivid and detailed account of Isaac’s death and the final months of the war and its aftermath in Ashe County’s North Fork community is built from stories told to him—perhaps repeatedly and over many years—by family and local acquaintances. The value of this document then lies not only in its meticulous re-creation of the guerrilla warfare that proved so destructive to this 15 Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War 323 Guerrilla War and Remembrance Appalachian community, and by implication, to so many other highland communities like it. Equally intriguing is the way in which Will (as he seems to have been called)2 Wilson constructed his memoir. The nature and number of sources on which he drew to tell this story in itself tells us as much about the legacy of the war as it does about the nature both of memory, individual and collective, and of oral history in shaping that legacy. Within the vast and growing scholarship on memory and its relationship to history, the Civil War looms large. “The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history,” Robert Penn Warren wrote at the beginning of the war’s centennial in 1961. It is “our only felt history . . . an overwhelming and vital image of human , and national, experience.”3 For many white southerners who lived through the war, that “felt history” was determined not only by individual recollections of their own experiences over the course of the conflict and its aftermath, but also (and perhaps even more) by the collective memories that emerged at various levels—from households, neighborhoods, and communities, to states and throughout the region as a whole. What Warren refers to as “national imagination” was, for southern whites, an impressive feat of carefully constructed public memory meant for mass consumption and consensus. In the decades after the war’s end, largely elite groups of men and women throughout the former Confederacy shaped a very selective, subjective and politically useful version of the war for public memory. Codified and labeled early on as the “Lost Cause,” this version of the war in the national—or regional—imagination was a series of rationales for why the South seceded from the Union and why it lost the war, with neither immoral aims nor internal failings of either Confederate leadership or citizenry playing any part. The Lost Cause served instead to honor and even ennoble the military effort made by the Confederacy and the men who fought on its behalf. The fervor with which these beliefs were embraced and promoted made it almost a religion, and the commitment to these beliefs was manifested in a vast array of monuments and memorials, ceremonies and parades, veterans’ organizations and reunions, battlefield preservation and museums, political rhetoric, regimental histories and hagiographic biographies, children’s literature, and even the censorship of textbooks.4 324 Race, War, and Remembrance Within...