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PART I: Home Front
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
part i Home Front late in the civil war, John Beaman of Montgomery County, North Carolina, fired off an angry letter to Governor Zebulon Vance blasting Confederate war policies. Complaining that planters and manufacturers received exemptions from the army while he and other “farmers and mechanics ” produced vast quantities of corn and beef, Beaman demanded that the governor explain why he should be forced to “fight for such men as thes[e]?” Around that same time, Romulus Sanders, the sheriff’s son, was charged with stealing a mare from John’s wife, Malinda. These were perilous times for the Beamans, who found their daily lives turned upside down by war.1 John and Malinda Beaman were among the small farmers in the South who vigorously opposed the Confederacy. The couple lived on the Montgomery -Randolph county line where they raised corn, wheat, and hogs alongside neighbors and kinfolk. The upheaval caused by war, however, prompted John Beaman to warn Governor Vance that farmers would be forced to “revolutionize unles this roten conscript exemption law is put down, for they air laws we don’t intend to obey.”2 And revolutionize they did. By late 1863, the Randolph County area in which the Beamans lived was a hotbed of Unionism, desertion, and guerrilla warfare. No isolated example, such pockets of resistance emerged in nonplantation regions throughout the Confederate South. Chapter 1 of part I tells the stories of three such regions of resistance: the Piedmont Quaker Belt of North Carolina, the Piney Woods of Mississippi , and the Big Thicket of East Texas. Within their respective states, home front 16 Unionist communities spilled over the borders of several counties, making the phrases “Jones County area,” “Hardin County area,” and “Randolph County area” the most useful ways to designate them. All three communities had solid nonslaveholding majorities, with slaves making up only 10 to 14 percent of their populations. Those who owned slaves were generally the wealthiest citizens in each community, but they did not culturally dominate their neighbors to the extent, or in the manner, commonly associated with plantation regions. Nor did nonslaveholders always defer to or share the worldview of slaveholders, even though some interacted and even inter married with them. Using a comparative context, chapter 1 reveals common and unique cultural features that shaped yeoman farmers’ responses to secession and war. The profiles of these three communities’ most notorious guerrilla leaders— Bill Owens, Newt Knight, and Warren Collins— provide further evidence that although similar class issues linked the uprisings across state lines, each setting was distinct, giving each its own particular characteristics. The most dramatic difference was displayed in the Randolph County area of North Carolina’s Quaker Belt, where dissent among plain folk such as the Beamans was motivated by religious principles as well as class. Not only did these farmers live outside the plantation belt, but they also lived among large populations of Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan Methodists. So important was religion to the Randolph County area uprising and so visible was women’s participation that chapter 2 focuses exclusively on the Quaker Belt to provide a detailed examination of the role of both. Women did far more than wonder and wait while husbands marched off to war or hid in the woods. Take the Beamans’ cousin, Martha Sheets, for example, who was arrested in early 1865 for threatening the sheriff of Montgomery County. Although Sheets’s behavior was hardly typical of Unionist women, it spoke directly to the issues of class and religion, as well as women’s personal desperation, which motivated protest in the Quaker Belt. In chapters 1 and 2, retaliation by Confederate forces against Union militants and their families is highlighted. Men who hid in the woods rather than serve the Confederacy relied on female kin to feed and shelter them. As a result, women were in danger of harassment and torture and the men were in danger of execution. The most thoroughly documented example of retaliation against deserters ’ wives is the torture of “Mrs. Owens,” wife of guerrilla leader Bill Owens. Deputy Sheriff Albert Pike, of Randolph County, unapologetically recounted his men’s abuse of Owens’s wife to Judge Thomas Settle, who [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:51 GMT) home front 17 investigated the matter. To Pike and his men, Mrs. Owens was simply an outlaw’s wife, and a mouthy one at that. Over and over, officers and soldiers repeated the dirge that no respectable woman...