Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Chapter 6: Violence against Slaves as a Catalyst in Changing Attitudes toward Slavery

In the three decades before the Civil War, escalating tensions over the issue of slavery between North and South led to the development of differing images of each section in the popular perceptions of the American people. Southerners increasingly saw their northern counterparts as rabid abolitionists , determined to destroy the peculiar institution immediately and with no compensation to the owner. Northerners, on the other hand, gradually gave credibility to theories that slaveholders actually plotted to destroy the freedom of all, not just their black bondsmen. Erroneous as both these counterimages of each section were, they assumed a life of their own through constant debate and agitation during the 1850s and framed the larger context of further changing, or hardening, attitudes against the rival section in both the South and the North. In a very real sense, these differing perceptions of the rival sections determined reality for most Americans, dictating not only how they viewed themselves but ultimately how they would react to any national political crisis involving slavery between regions of the country that were rapidly becoming differentiated from each other in both economic development and political culture.1 The single incident that best symbolized this growing alienation and the distorted images of the other section, both North and South, was John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown’s subsequent trial and death evoked the image of martyrdom in the North, but southerners saw only the brutal, seemingly psychotic killer who had escaped from Kansas and planned a bloody slave insurrection throughout the lower South. Arming slaves with crude iron staves Violence against Slaves as a Catalyst in Changing Attitudes toward Slavery Chapter 6 An 1857 Case Study in East Tennessee 145 Durwood Dunn 146 Durwood Dunn would enable them to murder their masters at night in their sleep, a deeply rooted fear among all southern slave owners after the 1790s massacre of white masters by their slaves in Saint-Domingue. Two years earlier, a Presbyterian minister had been forced to leave his church in a small East Tennessee town, Rogersville, because he questioned one of his prominent parishioners for brutally beating two slaves. This 1857 incident would likewise invoke widespread publicity in both competing sections and would be interpreted completely differently by proslavery forces in the South and by abolitionist forces in the North.2 Yet such analysis as that of competing images of rival sections greatly oversimplifies the reality of southerners living in border regions such as East Tennessee. Intrasectional attitudes varied in remarkably complex ways and often contained internal contradictory corollaries within them. Antislavery sentiment, as noted by Ezekiel Birdseye, a Connecticut Yankee living in this area during the 1840s, often varied from day to day, depending on their audience, among the same individuals, and sympathy toward particular slaves did not necessarily mean condemnation of the institution per se. Nevertheless, Birdseye frequently commented on the “prevailing public sentiment” among East Tennesseans, which discountenanced both cruelty toward slaves and their condition of servitude.3 East Tennessee’s exceptionalism to southern patterns of thought is explained by its distinctive history, differing geography, and sense of alienation and inferiority in relation to the rest of the state in the decades leading up to the Civil War, as historian John Inscoe so ably demonstrates. The “lost state of Franklin,” the section’s first effort to secede from North Carolina , failed miserably between 1784 and 1788. By the early 1840s, the much more successful growth of middle and west Tennessee further embittered an area whose geography of small farms did not lend itself to the plantation economy of the cotton South. Angered over perceived lack of equal treatment in state funding for internal improvements, the section again made an effort to secede from the state in 1842, unsuccessfully. Finally, the presence of an active manumission movement in East Tennessee in the 1820s left a lasting legacy of hostility toward slavery that survived into the 1850s and that partially explains why the section overwhelmingly voted against Tennessee ’s secession from the federal Union, then made a belated attempt, in two secession conventions at Greeneville and Knoxville in June 1861, to secede from the state itself and form a new state, such as West Virginia would eventually succeed in accomplishing.4 Violence against Slaves as a Catalyst in Changing Attitudes 147 But as historian Todd Groce has demonstrated, East Tennessee had numerous...