Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

4. Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists:The Slave Trade in Western North Carolina, 1861–1865

Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists 80 On October 7, 1861, Colonel George Bower, the largest slaveholder in Ashe County, North Carolina, drowned. He was swept downstream when his two-horse carriage overturned as he attempted to ford the swollen Yadkin River at the start of a trip to Raleigh from his mountain home in the state’s northwesternmost county. Two days later, Calvin Cowles, his friend and fellow slaveholder from nearby Wilkesboro , reported the tragedy in a letter to W. W. Holden in Raleigh. Cowles stated that Bower had been accompanied by a slave, who had urged him not to attempt the crossing given the force of the current. “The Carriage capsized and all went downstream,” Cowles wrote, “except the Negro who fortunately escaped to tell the story. The alarm being given, 20 or 30 people went immediately through a drenching rain,” where they searched in vain for the elderly colonel’s body. In his account of the incident in the North Carolina Standard a week later, editor Holden shifted words just enough to imply a somewhat different scenario: that the “negro boy who was driving him made his escape.”1 While Holden may well have meant simply that he escaped his master’s watery death, soon thereafter and ever since, the standard version of the incident has been that, as Ashe County’s one history states, Bower drowned “while pursuing a runaway slave.”2 It is tempting to speculate on whether or not Holden intentionally altered Cowles’s version of the tragedy and on just how and why the slave became the cause of Bower’s death rather than his attempted savior in the community’s collective memory of the incident. Perhaps 4 The Slave Trade in Western North Carolina, 1861–1865 81 Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists in hindsight the ominous implications of that latter version proved too fitting to resist: that less than six months into the war, a powerful slaveholder had already fallen victim to his human property, with Bower’s death an extreme portent perhaps of the fate of his counterparts throughout the South. Its implications are significant in the Carolina mountains alone, where the Bower drowning was part of a rather striking statistic: he was the first of four of the region’s forty largest slaveholders who died violent deaths at or near their homes over the course of the war. Those losses were compounded by such numerous battlefield casualties among the sons of that elite that Zebulon Vance commented just after the war that in western North Carolina, “many old families are almost extinct in the male line.”3 Yet if the war took an unusually heavy toll on the mountains’ slaveholders , the institution itself suffered remarkably little in that particular region. Because of its insulation from any major military incursion until the war’s waning months, the home-front experience in the Carolina highlands differed markedly from that elsewhere in the South, and even from that in other areas of Appalachia. Among the more striking and unexplored aspects of that experience is the continued stability and profitability of slavery for most of the war’s duration. Despite a vast literature documenting the wide range of emancipation experiences among bondsmen and women throughout the Confederacy and border state South, little attention has been given to the impact of the war on the economics of slavery in those areas not in the path of liberating armies. Nor has the war’s effect on the value of slave property or the dynamics of a slave trade been examined except as black labor was engaged directly in the Confederate war effort.4 The institution of slavery in the southern highlands exhibited a number of traits that distinguished it from plantation slavery elsewhere in the American South. Slaveholders made up only 10 percent of North Carolina’s mountain population in 1860, and only 10 percent of the total were slaves. The limitations imposed on the region’s agriculture by climate and terrain would have neither justified nor supported even this small labor force. Consequently, perhaps the most distinctive variation in the institution’s highland manifestation was that its slaveholders were, as Frederick Law Olmsted accurately ob- 82 Race, War, and Remembrance served in 1854, “chiefly professional men, shop-keepers, and men in office who are also land owners, and give only divided attention to farming.” As such, they utilized...