Thomas Clingman, Mountain Whiggery, and the Southern Cause

THOMAS CLINGMAN, MOUNTAIN WHIGGERY, AND THE SOUTHERN CAUSE John C. Inscoe One ofthe moststrikinc anomalies in antebellum southern politics lies in the fact that one of the earliest and most militant proslavery voices in Washington was that of a congressman who owned no slaves himself and who represented a district with among the fewest slaves and slaveholders of any in the South. For all but two years between 1843 and 1858, Thomas Lanier Clingman served North Carolina's westernmost congressional district. His constituency included all but one of the state's mountain counties, where in 1850 slaves made up only twelve percent of the overall population and only one in ten white families held black property.1 Yet he served longer in Congress than did any other North Carolinian during that period. This was no small achievement considering that he switched from the Whig to the Democratic party in the midst of his congressional career, yet still managed to maintain the electoral support of what had been the state's most solid Whig constituency. A significant aspect of this remarkable electoral feat is the fact that as Clingman's outspoken defense of slavery and southern rights became increasingly central to his rhetoric, his popularity and support grew among those for whom the "peculiar institution" was far from central or even vital to their social and economic well-being. It has long been a widely held and deeply ingrained assumption that because southern highlanders so rarely owned slaves, they had no real stake in the sectional crisis that threatened slavery and were either indifferent or hostile to the defense of southern rights, to secession, and to the Confederacy. Southern Appalachia was thought to have been a hotbed of Unionism 1 North Carolina's mountain region is generally defined as the state's two westernmost tiers of counties. Their number changed during the 1840s and 1850s as new counties were created. From 1842 through 1852, Clingman's First Congressional District consisted of all the mountain counties except Ashe and included one piedmont county, Cleveland. In 1852 the First District became the Eighth, with Cleveland County dropped and Wilkes County added. See John C. Inscoe, "Mountain Masters: Slaveholding in Western North Carolina," North Carolina HistoricalReviewßl (Apr. 1984): 143-45, for a more detailed discussion of the demographics of slavery in the region. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, © 1987 by The Kent State University Press THOMAS CLINCMAN43 before and during the Civil War and a staunch Republican stronghold after it. Why then did a mountain native become so ardent a spokesman for the South and for slavery, and why did such a substantial segment of his fellow Appalachian residents support him in doing so? Most treatments of Clingman's career pass over this seeming incongruity without ever examining the values or attitudes of those constituents on which that career was so vitally dependent. Even those scholars who acknowledge this presumed discrepancy between the views of the mountain congressman and those he represented reason that this "most ultra-Southern of the North Carolina delegation in Congress" continued to be reelected, not because of that role, but in spite of it.2 According to Thomas E. Jeffrey , it was Clingman's "personal popularity and his vocal support for 'western rights' and state reform" that kept mountain residents from holding his southern rights rhetoric against him. Clingman's ambition to move from the House to the Senate is the explanation most often cited for his adoption of an increasingly proslavery stance. Thus, according to Jeffrey, in order to broaden his political appeal to win a Senate seat chosen by the legislature, Clingman presumably aimed his message at the influential planters of the eastern half of the state and sought to downplay it in his own section. This strategy finally paid off in 1858 when he was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Senator Asa Biggs and was reelected on his own in I860.3 These assumptions are logical and factually based. Clingman was indeed seen as a champion of the mountain region in the state legislature, where western Carolinians felt themselves to be overtaxed, underrepresented , and, in the struggle for internal improvement funding...