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"Deadened Color and Colder Horror" Rebecca Harding Davis and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia Kenneth W. Noe "When the civil war came;' Berea College presidentWilliam Goodell Frost confidently wrote in 1899, "there was a great surprise for both the North and the South. Appalachian America clave to the old flag. It was this old-fashioned loyalty which held Kentucky in the Union, made West Virginia 'secede from Secession; and performed prodigies ofvalor in east Tennessee, and even in the western Carolinas:'l Most students ofAppalachia2 are aware that one of Frost's great legacies is the mature incarnation of the mountain stereotype. While earlier generations of local colorists and missionaries had publicized and profited from the alleged "strangeness" and"otherness"ofsouthern mountain society,it took Frost's 1899 essay,"Our ContemporaryAncestors in the Southern Mountains;'to place firmly and finally in the national imagination, just in time for the twentieth century, the fully developed stereotype of a large, homogeneous, backward, and isolated"other"America he christened''AppalachianAmerica:'What largely has been forgotten is that an essential component of Frost's original argument that southern mountaineers were Americans' "contemporary ancestors" was their"Revolutionarypatriotism;'which allegedly reawoke as Unionism in 1861 after decades of dormancy. To Frost and many of his contemporaries, mountaineers ' all-but-universal opposition to slavery and secession was a central component ofAppalachian imagery, one ofthe few positive factors that made an otherwise ignorant and backward population deserving of gratitude, assistance , and uplift.3 As with the better-known elements of the Appalachian stereotype, broad descriptions ofmountain Unionism such as Frost's have been rejected recently by modern Appalachian historians, although the tradition ofa totally Unionist Appalachia survives in the popular mind, even among manymountaineers who 68 ~ Kenneth W. Noe disparage the rest of the hillbilly myth.4 Starting in the late 1970s, historians concerned with the period before mountain industrialization began to put to rest the notion thatAppalachia was an antislavery, Unionist monolith that"clave to the old flag" with "old-fashioned loyalty:' Some rediscovered the region's slaves and slave-owners, and maintained that the peculiar institution was not only important to mountain masters but also absolutely vital to the psyche of many nonslaveholders. Others began to relate the tragic wartime divisions and escalating violence between fluid groupings of Confederate sympathizers, Unionists, and those who rejected both ideologies in a futile attempt to avoid the horrors of war. While Unionism certainly was a dominant creed in places such as East Tennessee and West Virginia, they contend, support for secession and the Confederacy reigned supreme elsewhere, as in Southwest Virginia or western North Carolina. The residents of still other mountain sections defy such easy categorization altogether, so confused and volatile was the real situation . The end results of such heterogeneity were localized "inner civil wars" characterized bydivision, fear, privation, and the violence ofguerrilla warfare.5 If division rather than Unionist consensus truly characterized the southern mountains during the Civil War, how then did the fictional Unionist monolith propagated by commentators such as Frost, the "Myth of Unionist Appalachia:' take root in America's collective memory? In what manner were the southern mountains' slaves and Johnny Rebs swept under the nation's intellectual rug, and why?6 Henry D. Shapiro came closest to answering those questions in 1978 in his seminal discussion of Appalachian imagery. While largely concentrating on the other degrading aspects ofthe stereotype, Shapiro did consider the Unionist myth. He explained it as the end result ofa two-stage process that largely had to do with attracting northern dollars to the mountains . During the first phase, which lasted from 1865 until 1883, writers downplayed sectionalism and ignored the war as much as possible in hopes of attracting northern investment andYankee immigrants. In the reunited Union, reminders of the mountains' Confederate past were at best irrelevant and at worst stumbling blocks to industrialization, development, and modernization. In such a climate, accurate memories ofwartime divisions and especiallymountaineers in gray were liabilities. Thus, of the thirty-nine popular works concerning the region that were published between Appomattox and 1883 and considered by Shapiro, only nine mentioned the Civil War in any way. Moreover , ofthose nine, essays such as Edward King's "The Great South: Among the Mountains ofNorth Carolina" and Edward A. Pollard's "The Virginia Tourist" dismissed the topic in a few sentences. The CivilWar was a theme to be avoided for most chroniclers ofAppalachia in the immediate postwar period.7 Then in 1883, according to Shapiro, an abrupt...

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