A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (review)

This fine study illuminates both guerrilla warfare and Appalachian localism in the Civil War. Jonathan Dean Sarris concentrates on two neighboring, but very different, north Georgia counties. Lumpkin, a product of the Georgia gold rush, was dominated by the town of Dahlonega, with its mint and an aggressive market-oriented merchant elite with strong ties southward to Atlanta. Fannin, on the Tennessee border, was peopled by subsistence farmers, had no real town, and looked north to East Tennessee. Both counties had initially opposed secession but rallied strongly after the outbreak of hostilities, sending large percentages of their military-age males into the Confederate army. But as casualties mounted, conscription and impressment began to be enforced, slaves became restive, and deserters flocked to the mountains, the two counties’ responses diverged. Fannin’s farmers, taking lessons from East Tennessee, became deeply anti-Confederate, and many of the county’s people sought refuge across the border. Meanwhile Lumpkin’s elite, very mindful of north Georgia’s reputation for disloyalty and stereotyping their enemies as frontier savages, put down their own dissenting minority with increasing violence, and at one point even sent the Lumpkin militia into Fannin to reestablish (Confederate) order there. As the war continued, and the Union army loomed larger in Georgia, order disappeared, outlawry flourished, and robbery and revenge motivated murder (including vigilante executions) in both counties. Dissenters lost the struggle over local control and how the war would be remembered; the myth of the Lost Cause overpainted violence and dissent with images of a romanticized Old South.

In stressing the importance of social makeup and economic orientation, Sarris rejects ideological interpretations of wartime loyalties. His dissenters are less unionists than anti-Confederates, reacting against very real threats to local well-being—foodstuffs and animals seized, farm labor drafted and sent far away. Joining the Union army meant good clothes, weapons, and food and shelter for a soldier’s refugee family. And Sarris’s Confederates, appalled at local authority’s inability to punish deserters and outlyers— who, unable to farm, stole provisions from their neighbors—also put local, immediate interests ahead of those of the (southern) nation. As the chaos increased, Union and Confederate soldiers alike were reluctant to leave their homes—the real war was local.

Located along the southern spur of the Blue Ridge Mountains, both Fannin and Lumpkin are part of the Mountain South. But their economic diversity defies stereotypes of a uniform Appalachia; the pragmatic, defensive roots of local violence contradict images of bloodthirsty hillbillies prone to murder; and certainly the myth of mountain unionism has little salience in these bitterly contested neighborhoods.

My main criticisms of this compelling study are matters of context. There’s a growing literature on guerrilla warfare, local versus national identity and loyalty, and the Appalachian South, and the author misses the opportunity to put the two counties into contexts that would reinforce his own findings. In East Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwest Virginia, there is evidence that sections tied into the southern economic system tended to be Confederate, while more isolated areas tended to be not so much unionist as anti-Confederate—Sarris’s distinction is very valuable here. Much of Appalachian war violence was local, even family based, and memories of it were carefully silenced. Lumpkin and Fannin’s descent into unrestrained violence, perceived as self-defense against savagery, has parallels in communities from coastal Carolina to the “Free State of Jones” in wiregrass Alabama; the most horrific result of these fears may have been the mass hangings at Gainesville, Texas. In short, I think the book needs a stronger historiographical conclusion, but it stands as a clearly argued, well-supported, convincing contribution to a literature that is changing some fundamental understandings of the Civil War.