When Katherine Polk Gale arrived in Asheville in the summer of 1863 via stagecoach, she breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that her long refugee odyssey might finally be at an end. She proclaimed that “the drive up the lovely French Broad river was charming the scenery was beautiful; peace & plenty ruled everywhere; the country was shut in from the world, it seemed almost impossible for the desolations of the war to reach the happy homes along the route.” With three children in tow, all under the age of three, Katherine Polk Gale was exhausted from nearly two years of forced relocations preceding her arrival in Asheville, where she would settle for the remainder of the war. When the stagecoach pulled in front of the rented house, she was greeted by her mother, Frances Polk, and her four younger sisters and one sister-in-law, all of whom had relocated to the site the previous December, hoping that it would serve “as a home for the rest of the war; as that was consider a safe retired place.”
Married in 1858 and with a young daughter born in 1860 and a son in 1861, Katherine Polk Gale knew that the beginning of hostilities would greatly disrupt her new family in Yazoo, Mississippi. Her father, Leonidas Polk, a prosperous sugar planter and Episcopal bishop for Louisiana, was commissioned a general in the Confederate army in June 1861. Her brother and uncles also joined the Confederate ranks, although her husband was one of the few men in the family who did not enlist. While the men planned for war, the women looked out for the security and safety of themselves and their children. Among the first decisions made during the summer of 1861 was to relocate Mary Gale, Katherine Polk Gale’s teenage stepdaughter, from a school in Nashville to St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, “that being a good school & a safe place.”
Katherine Polk Gale spent the winter of 1861 with her husband and children at their Holly Bend plantation on the Yazoo River, just north of Vicksburg. Their peace was upset, however, in February 1862 when the Union capture of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the Tennessee River necessitated the evacuation of Nashville, where her mother and sisters were spending the winter. She later recalled that “my Mother, with her large family, had to leave at an hour’s notice; for she did not wish to be caught in the enemy’s lines & be cut off from her husband & sons. They were to take the last train leaving the city, took time to save nothing but their valuables & clothes & left the house unoccupied. . . . The only idea with them was to get away, out of the reach of the Federals.” Her mother headed to New Orleans, which then still remained in Confederate hands, a trip described as taking “many weary hours” as “they could get nothing along the way to eat.” They only had a few months of peace before the Union occupation of New Orleans under Gen. Benjamin Butler began on the first of May 1862. Although concerned about Butler’s infamous General Order No. 28, which said that a woman who expressed hostility to Union soldiers would be treated as a woman of the town “plying her avocation,” Frances Polk and her daughters were, according to Katherine Polk Gale, “not annoyed in that way; for my sisters never went on the streets & my Mother rarely.”
While her mother and sisters were afraid to leave the house in New Orleans, Katherine Polk Gale worried that her home would be flooded. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to siege Vicksburg included breaching a levee on the Yazoo River, inundating the surrounding countryside, such that “we were soon surrounded by water; snakes and frogs were seen swimming in all directions.” Fearing that the children might drown, the family relocated to Jackson, some forty miles away. Over the next year, the Polk and Gale families wandered the Confederacy in search of a place of safety, spending brief periods in Mobile, Richmond, and Raleigh. During this period, two events transformed Katherine Polk Gale’s family. First, her husband enlisted in the Confederate army, serving as an aide-de-camp to his father-in-law, Gen. Leonidas Polk. Second, she gave birth to her third child, a daughter. With the exception of Gen. Leonidas Polk and William Gale, the entire family reunited outside of Asheville in May 1863 for what they hoped would be a peaceful and uneventful existence for the duration of the war. With more than fifty slaves brought from Mississippi, the extended family assumed that the remoteness of their new home would provide some semblance of normality.
Hundreds of other refugees joined the Gale-Polk clan in the North Carolina mountains, particularly in Buncombe and Henderson Counties. Katherine Polk Gale recalled that “we met some extremely agreeable people in Asheville, great hospitality was shown us by people in the town & the surrounding country, many charming friendships were formed; for Asheville & ‘Flat Rock’ about twenty-five miles away, was the summer resort for many charming, cultivated people, especially from the Carolinas.”1 As a refugee destination, western North Carolina lacked many of the amenities present in the Piedmont. The towns in the mountain counties were smaller than those in the Piedmont; Asheville, by far the largest town in the region, had fewer than one thousand residents in 1860. Most mountain towns consisted of little more than a church, a smattering of dwellings, and (in county seats) a courthouse. Travel to and within the mountains proved challenging. Chartered in 1855, the Western North Carolina Railroad was only partially completed by 1861 and ran only a few miles past Morganton, leaving the western fifth of the state cut off from direct rail traffic. Travel into the region was conducted primarily via two turnpike roads. Built in 1828, the Buncombe Turnpike ran from the Saluda Gap on the South Carolina border, along the French Broad River to Asheville, and through Warm Springs to the Tennessee line. In 1851 it was joined by the Asheville and Greenville Plank Road.2 Although daily stages ran from Greenville, South Carolina, to Asheville, many travelers found the route tiring and expensive. West of Asheville, mountain travel proved difficult and slow, and in inclement weather, nearly impossible.
While most of the refugees in the Piedmont came from Virginia and eastern North Carolina, the orientation of the mountain turnpikes meant that most of the refugees entering western North Carolina came from South Carolina and, to a lesser extent, from east Tennessee. The South Carolina refugees who ended up in western North Carolina were part of a mass exodus from the Low Country to Columbia, Greenville, and Spartanburg. Those who ended up in North Carolina tended to be among the wealthiest of South Carolina refugees, including many of the Low Country planter elite. The most important destinations for refugees lay along the turnpike roads, especially the remote hamlet of Flat Rock.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the small town of Flat Rock became an enclave for a number of refugee South Carolina planters. Starting in the 1820s, Low Country planters had established summer retreats in Flat Rock, escaping the heat, humidity, and malaria that made living in or around Charleston unbearable and dangerous. By the 1850s, this summer retreat of the planter class had grown to several hundred people, including representatives from some of the most wealthy and politically connected families from South Carolina. The register for St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church, established by South Carolina planters in 1836, reveals that the remote hamlet attracted Low County aristocracy, including the Pinckneys, Middlestons, Memmingers, Hugers, and Lowdnes, leading the town to be nicknamed “Little Charleston.”3
Figure 7. The North Carolina mountains. John R. Niernsee and John McRae, “Map of the Reconnaissance of the South Carolina Passes in Connection with those of Western North Carolina and Tennessee.” Jeremy Francis Gilmer Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The Civil War transformed Flat Rock in two significant respects. First, South Carolina planter families decided to make Flat Rock a permanent retreat rather than a temporary respite from the Low Country miasma. Traditionally, they had arrived in Flat Rock in June and left by fall. After the Union incursions to the Sea Islands and coastal rice plantations in late 1861 and 1862, however, many South Carolina planters sought a permanent refuge in the remote mountain hamlet, sheltering friends and family members seeking a secure locale for the war. Many of the refugee planters who arrived in 1861 or 1862 did not leave Flat Rock until 1865.
Second, refugee planters brought hundreds of slaves with them. While they had always brought some of their domestic slaves with them on their summer retreat, the threat posed to their plantations by Union forces caused them to remove hundreds of field hands to Flat Rock, an environment radically different from their Low Country rice plantation homes. In November 1861 Union forces under Samuel du Pont captured Port Royal on the South Carolina coast, placing the entire Atlantic seaboard between Charleston and Savannah under threat. Du Pont’s seizure included not only a significant Confederate port but also more than ten thousand slaves, who became the nucleus for the famous Port Royal Experiment. For Low Country planters just outside of Union-occupied territory, the fear that they would be visited by Union soldiers or that their slaves would run away to join those at Port Royal provided a powerful incentive to remove them.4
Coastal South Carolina planters faced a similar calculus as their North Carolina brethren in deciding whether, when, where, and how to remove their slaves from the threat posed by Union forces. In September 1861 William Elliott, an elderly South Carolina cotton and rice planter, warned his son, then serving in the Confederate army, that he should remove his slaves to the interior. “Your plantation at Hilton Head will be in imminent danger [from Union occupation],” he wrote. “I advise you to move off most your hands, carrying what provisions you can collect and what cotton you can take away without exposing your hands.” At seventy-three years of age, Elliott had, through inheritance and marriage, acquired thousands of acres of prime Low Country farmland and more than two hundred slaves. He had established a home in Flat Rock in 1848, with the family spending most of their summers there, escaping the Low Country heat and humidity. His daughter Mary, wife of his fellow South Carolina planter Andrew Johnstone, had already decided not to return to Charleston for the winter, and her husband had begun the process of removing their slaves to Flat Rock. Presumably she expected to return to their plantation shortly, as “such a move could only be temporary I imagine—for in the pine region they were going to, there would be no provision or work to occupy them.”5
Low Country rice planters faced one significant complication that their tobacco- and cotton-planting neighbors to the north did not. Unlike tobacco or cotton fields, which benefited from a period of laying fallow, rice cultivation required carefully managed irrigation, run through a complex and delicate system of canals and dikes. Without constant supervision and maintenance, these irrigation systems would collapse, resulting in the need for expensive and timely repairs when the planter and his slaves returned. In a series of letters, the cousins Susan and Harriott Middleton explained the rationale behind their families’ (and many other planters’) decision to remove their slaves to Flat Rock and other sites in western North Carolina. On January 31, 1862, Susan observed that “the [Low Country] planters are in anxiety about their negroes,” with many of them planning on removing them to the interior. By May 1862, Harriott’s father, Henry A. Middleton, had decided to remove most of their slaves to their home in Flat Rock. In Greenville, South Carolina, after disembarking from the train from Charleston and prior to boarding the stage for Flat Rock, Harriott wrote to Susan that “the agitation amongst the servants in town [Charleston] was becoming very unpleasant and we did not care to subject ours to it any longer.” In response, Susan, who remained in Charleston, envied her cousin, noting, “How lucky you all are in having a comfortable home in a fine climate ready for you!” Her family had attempted to find a refugee home in Columbia but had found that “there is so much difficulty here [Columbia], in this mean little town, in finding a place of refuge, even at an exorbitant price, the extortions which are practiced upon the low-country refugees, by the so-called ‘best people in Columbia,’ are enough to disgrace the place forever.”6
The flight of Low Country planters, their families, and their slaves in late 1861 and 1862 clogged the roads to western North Carolina. One refugee noted his discomfort in September 1862 as he waited for the “Stage to leave Greenville [South Carolina] for Flat Rock at 1 A.M.” During the fourteen-hour trip, the passengers sat in lamplit darkness on the overcrowded stagecoach until sunrise. “Precious close packing it was, ten inside,” noted the refugee in his diary. “One of the ten was an immense fat negro woman, the washerwoman for no less a person than the Secretary of the Treasury at Richmond, Mr. Memminger, whose family were at Flat Rock.” When Mary Boykin Chesnut’s niece Mary Williams traveled from Greenville to Flat Rock, she complained about being crowded with “four or five other persons in a most dilapidated old rattle-trap of a stage,” traveling through “sleet and snow and slush . . . over the great corkscrew roads across the mountains.” When one of the overworked horses died, the party marched to the next house along the road, a distance of twelve to fifteen miles, until “our feet became stiff and cold and our hair frozen to our faces.”7
The arrival in Flat Rock of refugee planters and their slaves exposed class tensions within the Blue Ridge that had been festering for decades. One observer noted that throughout the antebellum period, South Carolina planters “contributed but little to the general improvement of the country. Their slaves furnished them labor, and store goods were furnished from abroad. The natives were kept at a great distance, and if they were employed at all, only for menial occupations at inadequate remuneration. A feeling of great bitterness sprung up between both classes.”8 Although South Carolina planters had been visiting the area for more than two decades, there remained a significant social distance between the locals and the summer residents of Flat Rock. For their part, the planters rarely interacted directly with locals, preferring to socialize with their Low Country compatriots. Planters in Flat Rock, for instance, built and attended their own Episcopal church, St. John in the Wilderness, rather than attend services at any of the several Methodist or Baptist churches in the area where locals worshipped. Prior to 1861, St. John’s remained open only during the summer, when Low Country planters were in residence. Nestled among pine trees, St. John in the Wilderness had been remodeled in 1852 by the famed Charleston architect Charles C. Jones, who modeled the structure on a Tuscan hill church, including a square bell tower and round-arched windows. A gallery at the lower end of the church provided pews for slaves, while wealthy summer residents, such as Charleston judge Mitchell King, routinely paid fifty dollars to rent a pew at St. John’s, considerably more than mountain yeoman farmers could afford.9 Compared to the humble, rough-hewn churches of the surrounding communities, the ornate brick edifice of St. John in the Wilderness must have seemed like a cathedral.
This social distance, built and maintained during the 1840s and 1850s, allowed planters to mythologize their mountain neighbors. At times they admired the mountain yeoman’s apparent individualism and ruggedness. For instance, a child of Civil War refugees noted that
to many of the South Carolina rice planters the Mountain White was an interest and much admired revelation. We might say that in more ways than one he lived in high places: he was lofty in his habitat and in his opinion of himself. Having wrested his living from the mountain steeps, he very properly had a high estimate of his own abilities and was able to look with undaunted eyes upon these “flat-landers”. Though he might be as poor as a pike staff, the mountaineer was independence itself, and his honesty was such that it was said you could leave an ax (an ax being a most highly prized tool) and come back the next day and find it where you left it on the road.
Other outsiders developed negative stereotypes, emphasizing the financial, intellectual, and moral poverty of the region. One described the mountain residents as “poor tenants of small farms, or parts of farms or still ruder mountaineers, dwelling in squalid log huts, and living by fishing, by occasional day’s work in the gold mines, by illicit distilling, roguery of all sorts and other invisible means of support.”10
The house of C. G. Memminger, a South Carolina lawyer, politician, and Confederate secretary of the treasury, was representative of the social divide between the South Carolina aristocracy in Flat Rock and the neighboring yeoman farmers. While modest compared to their Low Country plantations and Charleston residences, the summer residences in Flat Rock dwarfed in both scale and grandeur the modest homes of neighboring locals. Memminger decided that his summer cottage, built in 1838 atop a steep hill overlooking the valley below, was worthy of a name. He dubbed it Rock Hill and used that name rather than Flat Rock when addressing his correspondence. Other Charlestonians in Flat Rock adopted a similar pretense, with neighboring houses designated Beaumont, Argyle, and Tranquility. With approximately nine thousand square feet of living space, not including the numerous outbuildings, Memminger’s house featured fifteen-foot ceilings and ornate molding. He decorated the house with five crates of furniture imported from Germany, including twenty-four dining chairs, a dressing bureau, and a tea table. Most of the property’s more than two hundred acres were wooded and rocky, inappropriate for commercial agriculture (Memminger called it “miserably barren”), but very picturesque. The view from his front porch consisted of a small lake, nearby Glassy Mountain, and on clear days, the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.11
As historians John Inscoe and Gordon McKinney have demonstrated, the mountains of North Carolina contained a greater socioeconomic diversity than many contemporaries and historians have supposed. Although the region had few slaves or slave owners, especially in the counties bordering Tennessee, the practice was not entirely foreign. According to figures calculated by Inscoe and McKinney, slaves composed approximately 10 percent of the regional population and slave owners maintained a significant position within the local political and economic hierarchy.12 Yet South Carolina planters, whether they were summer visitors prior to the Civil War or refugees during it, appeared largely ignorant of the social complexity within the local populace. They rarely, if ever, mentioned locals by name in their diaries and correspondence and preferred to socialize only with other Low Country South Carolinians.
In their economic relationships, South Carolina planters also preferred to keep local residents at arm’s length. While small truck gardens on their property provided fruits and vegetables, planters purchased flour, corn, and animal fodder produced by local yeoman farmers. Rather than buy these items directly from the farmers, however, planters usually purchased them from a local merchant, who served as an economic conduit between the planters and locals. In Flat Rock this role was filled by Henry T. Farmer, a merchant, miller, and innkeeper.
Due to its low slave population, western North Carolina developed a reputation as a hotbed for Unionism. However, recent scholarship has suggested that Unionism in western North Carolina was neither as robust nor as universal as had been supposed. Like people in the rest of North Carolina, mountain residents were hesitant about secession until after Fort Sumter. Indeed, support for secession was probably stronger in the mountains than it was in the Piedmont. During the first two years of the conflict, western North Carolina supported the Confederate war effort with the same fervor as the rest of state, with more than four thousand volunteers from mountain counties enlisting by October 1861 and more than eight thousand by the year’s end. Not all mountain residents, however, responded favorably to the call for arms. A Baptist minister wrote to Governor Clark in August 1861 that most mountain farmers “have no negroes to defend and will not take up arms for the South.”13
As the war progressed, many mountain residents soured on the Confederate cause. The turning point for many of them was the implementation of the Confederate draft. The passage of the conscription act in April 1862 marked the first significant turning point in the relationship between Low Country refugee planters and their mountain neighbors. During the winter of 1861-62, the rage militaire had diminished, and dropping enlistment prompted the Confederate Congress to enact the first conscription act in American history. The act made all able-bodied white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five liable for military service for three years. It also extended the service of men who had one-year enlistments for an additional two years. This blanket enlistment had several significant loopholes. First, those with the means to do so could purchase substitutes from among the “persons not liable for duty.” Since most men of fighting age were subject to the draft, the price of substitutes (most of whom were foreign nationals or above draft age) rose to $6,000 by late 1863, well out of the price range of all but the most wealthy Southerners. Second, certain occupational categories were except from the draft, including government officials, clergymen, and teachers. Widely unpopular throughout the South, the new conscription law drew the particular ire of mountain yeomen, who saw clear class bias in the legislation. Although many of the men of draft age had already enlisted, the draft threatened the already depleted labor force to the extent that many mountain residents worried about starvation. One Stokes County farmer noted that “if all the conscripts from my county are taken off, it will be impossible for those left behind to make support for another year.”14
Some mountain residents vowed to resist conscription. Although most mountain men begrudgingly joined the Confederate army, a few fled into the mountains rather than submit to conscription, forming the nucleus of draft resisters’ bands that would grow and proliferate over the next three years. According to one Yadkin County resident, “When the time came for them to go, perhaps 100 in this county took to the woods, lying out day and night to avoid arrest.” Although it is difficult to assess the size and number of these bands during the summer of 1862, rampant rumors suggest that they were not insignificant. By 1863 Governor Vance estimated that at least twelve hundred armed deserters, many of them in deserter bands, roamed “the mountains and inaccessible wilds of the west.”15 Furthermore, many mountain soldiers who had enlisted in 1861 for twelve months felt that the two-year extension of their service infringed on their liberty. Matthew Love, a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth North Carolina Regiment, wrote to his father in Henderson County, not far from the refugee enclave of Flat Rock, that “there is a great deal of dissatisfaction in camp concerning the press law[.] some say they are going home when their times is out regardless of consequences.”16
Flat Rock refugees largely dismissed the mountain residents’ complaints about conscription. Mary Johnstone wrote to her mother that “we have had a conscript commotion in this county and several others, the ignorant natives, asserting that there was no law to compel me to enlist, and many of them threaten to take to the Balsam [Mountains] and there resist to the death. When it came to the test, however, most of those liable formed into Volunteer companies.” Mary Johnstone presumed that their reluctance to enlist resulted from their hostility to a war they saw as benefiting the planter class rather than hardscrabble farmers. This hostility manifested itself not only in resistance to the Confederate draft but also in animosity directed at the South Carolina refugee planters. Mary Johnstone wrote that “a great deal of animosity is felt against the low country gentlemen it seems, (‘this being a rich man’s war’),” resulting in one of her relatives being “assaulted by one of these outlaws, who sneaked behind him, and gave him a violent blow on his head with a rock, stunning him for the time, . . . and Mr. Lowndes has had a gentle hint that ‘he is to be hung.’ They are too cowardly a race to give me any anxiety tho’ I should much regret the necessity of shooting any of them.”17 The palpable disdain in Mary Johnstone’s letter reflected the low opinion that most refugee planters held of their mountain neighbors.
Approximately 130 Henderson County men submitted to the Confederate conscription in July 1862, forming Company B of the Sixty-Fourth North Carolina Regiment. Instead of fighting against Union forces, the Sixty-Fourth Regiment was detailed primarily with patrolling the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains for deserters, duty that disheartened and discouraged the soldiers. Although they rarely caught deserters, when they did, the deserters received brutal treatment. In the case of the notorious Shelton Laurel Massacre in January 1863, thirteen captured Madison County Unionists, ranging in age from thirteen to sixty-four, were executed.18
Ironically for a unit tasked with hunting deserters, many soldiers in Company B abandoned their assignment. Within a year after its formation, nearly half of the company had deserted, one of the highest rates of desertion in the entire Confederacy.19 Almost none of the deserters from Company B returned to Confederate service, preferring to remain outlaws. At least two dozen of the deserters eventually joined the Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry, one of two Union regiments formed in Tennessee from Unionists and Confederate deserters. Led by Capt. George Kirk, the Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry conducted raids into western North Carolina during the latter half of the conflict. In September 1863 the remainder of Company B was captured by Union forces near the Cumberland Gap in Tennessee. Sent to a Union prison camp in Illinois, many of the soldiers died of disease, while others decided that enlistment in the Union military was superior to languishing in confinement.20
Henderson County locals directed much of their hostility toward Mary Johnstone’s husband, Andrew Johnstone, a South Carolina rice planter. Johnstone’s plantations near Georgetown were home to more than two hundred slaves. Johnstone had purchased more than eight hundred acres in Flat Rock in the 1830s, erecting his summer house (Beaumont) there in 1839. Built of granite, Beaumont featured eighteen rooms spread over two stories. In 1861 Johnstone relocated himself, his wife, his children, and most of his slaves to Flat Rock year-round, fearing for their safety in coastal South Carolina. Johnstone surmised that his family and human property would be secure within the confines of his Flat Rock estate, as far from Union armies as one could be within the Confederacy.21
Two weeks after the initial confrontation over conscription, Mary Johnstone wrote to her mother that her husband had received “a written warning from ‘the citizens of Crab Creek, Mud Creek, Willow Little River, and other parts of the country’ to remove from the state within a week all of his negroes until the war is over, or failing to do so they will come and remove Mr. J with his negroes, not choosing to leave their wives and children among so many negroes.” Rumors of the threats against Johnstone spread quickly in the Flat Rock refugee community. Mary Boykin Chesnut, visiting her sister in Flat Rock during the summer, wrote to her husband that “we had a fright here. The North Carolina people threatened to burn down Mr. Andrew Johnstone’s place because he brought his negroes here.” Harriott Middleton wrote to her cousin that “the country people here objected to Mr. Johnston’s bringing up his negroes from the plantation saying it would raise the price of provisions. A hundred men swore to put him and his people beyond the state line.”22
It is unclear why Andrew Johnstone became the subject of the particular ire of mountain farmers. Harriott Middleton’s supposition that their anger resulted from fear that the presence of the refugeed slave population would lead to an increase in food prices appears justified. Johnstone himself knew that his property in Flat Rock could not sustain the nearly fifty people now living there. He had already decided, like many large planters, to divide his slaveholdings, placing the “old people and children” in Santee, South Carolina, while bringing up his house slaves and prime field hands to Flat Rock. Andrew Johnstone believed it was imperative to keep the “prime darkies” nearby, “thinking the risks immense in keeping them in such accessible positions” near possible Union invasions. Even with their slaves divided, the Johnstones found it challenging to acquire adequate sustenance for themselves and their slaves in Flat Rock. Mary Johnstone lamented that “the difficulties this year are so numerous that many have determined to do without.” However, with financial resources far exceeding the average mountain resident, Mary Johnstone was able to procure four hundred pounds of flour for fifty dollars, as well as “plenty of bread, beef, and fine mutton.” Despite her temporary ability to purchase foodstuffs in Flat Rock, Mary Johnstone worried that the local supply would soon evaporate. She wrote to her mother, then contemplating joining them, that she “had better save as much of your bacon, lard, rice, salt, peas, and everything eatable to bring with you as you possibly can. Times will I fear be even more hard than they are now.” Finding adequate provisions for livestock also proved problematic. During the summer of 1862, Mary Johnstone lamented, “Provisions are so high that teams are not to be had.” Later that year Mitchell King agreed that “provisions here [in Flat Rock] for both man & beast are expected to be quite exorbitant.”23
Flat Rock refugees quickly organized to protect Johnstone. After hearing of the threat, Mitchell King rode out to Andrew Johnstone’s house and encountered Johnstone en route. Nearly eighty years old, King was a plantation owner and judge in South Carolina who had been among the first to purchase land in Flat Rock. In poor health and mourning the recent death of his son at the battle of Secessionville, King nevertheless felt that he had to take action in response to the threat against Johnstone. According to King’s diary, the men conversed at length about the “Conspiracy agt. Souther[n] men.” Together they went to see Rev. Charles Pinckney, who concurred that “action [was] essential,” especially against Unionists rumored to be in the area. They agreed to have a “defensive gathering at Johnstons Friday.” Around Johnstone’s dinner table, the refugee planters discussed their options. They agreed to have a rotating watch at Johnstone’s house each evening. Capt. George Cuthbert, on leave from Lee’s army after being wounded in battle, volunteered to take the first shift. The men also agreed to send for additional ammunition to defend themselves.24
The defensive measures taken on Johnstone’s behalf temporarily prevented direct physical confrontation between refugee planters and their Henderson County neighbors. A month after the threats against Andrew Johnstone began, however, five refugee planters were arrested and taken to the Henderson County jail in Hendersonville, accused of “having beaten an old country woman nearly to death.” Found “tied to her bed, and dreadfully bruised and cut up,” Mrs. Corn accused the refugee planters of assaulting her. The five accused, however, were unlikely assailants, as they consisted of an elderly Episcopal clergyman, a doctor, their wives, and an unmarried young woman. When the refugee planter community, which had gathered that morning at St. John in the Wilderness Church for a Thanksgiving service, heard of the arrest, “the whole church convulsed.” Timely intervention with the sheriff by Andrew Johnstone and Henry Farmer and a brief trial secured their release. To Harriott Middleton, this incident illustrated the “bitter feeling entertained here to the low country people.” Mary Johnstone was more pointed in her analysis, asking, “Did you ever hear of such impertinence?”25
The apparent attack on Mrs. Corn in September 1862 coincided with two significant changes in the Confederate conscription law. First, it was amended to raise the upper age limit to forty-five. For many mountain families, this enlargement of the draft engulfed many male heads of household on the eve of the harvest, when their labor was most needed. Second, the Confederate Congress simultaneously exempted from the draft one white man on every plantation with more than twenty slaves. The ostensible purpose of the infamous “Twenty-Negro Law” was to ensure that slaves would be supervised, preventing them from running to Union lines, which by late 1862 was becoming endemic in many parts of the Confederacy.26
The approaching harvest and the reversal of Lee’s army at Antietam in September 1862 pushed refugee planters to reconsider their situation. Many of those who had come to Flat Rock the previous summer envisioned their stay in the mountains as merely an extended version of their usual summer retreat. By the fall of 1862, however, it became clear that the war’s end was nowhere in sight. The conflicts between refugee planters and their mountain neighbors had deteriorated significantly, and many refugee planters worried that they would be unable to secure sufficient provisions to feed themselves and their slaves in the future.
Newly elected governor Zebulon Vance complained to President Jefferson Davis in October 1862 that “thousands are flying from our Eastern Counties with their slaves to the centre & West to devour the very short crops and increase the prospect of starvation.”27 Born in Buncombe County, Vance knew instinctively how the introduction of thousands of refugeed slaves into the North Carolina mountains would compromise the ability of the region’s subsistence farmers to feed themselves, especially with the yeoman workforce conscripted into the Confederate army.
Many mountain residents worried about the danger presented by so many Low Country slaves. In February 1863 a group from Yadkin County calling themselves “Confederate Friends” urged Governor Vance to remove refugeed slaves from the region because they threatened public safety. If Vance did not act soon, they warned, “we will Bee Ablige to put Some of them to deth for this.” Later that year Vance received a letter from a Buncombe County slaveholder who informed him that many whites in the region feared that the importation of so many slaves would result in “negro Ravages.”28 Two days before Christmas, 1863, Henry Farmer “summ[on] ed all the Gentlemen to a meeting at Flat Rock” because “it was reported that the negroes in Transylvania (French Broad) were to demolish the white.” They organized a patrol, with Andrew Johnstone and Dr. Thomas Means taking responsibility for Flat Rock. According to Mary Johnstone, the measures were unnecessary: “Of course it was all a farce. The darkies all expected the patrol and receiving them politely the next day.” Johnstone surmised that the rumors about a slave “insurrectionary attempt” had been started by “some of the Militia men who were sent off from here, and wished to be recalled for home protection. . . . I do not imagine the negroes had the remotest intention of mischief, but the accidental absence of some of the proprietors may have alarmed the natives.”29
While Mary Johnstone dismissed the threat posed by refugeed slaves, Katherine Polk Gale’s family near Asheville had their house burned to the ground by a disgruntled slave. After being awoken by screams in the middle of the night, Katherine Gale initially believed that they were the victims of a Yankee raid, only to discover that their house was on fire. Gale rushed her children out of the house and joined the line passing buckets of water from the cistern to the house. After interrogating the other slaves, “we were all compelled to come to the conclusion it was the work of ‘Josh’ the cook, who had a very bad temper.” The property of Katherine Gale’s mother, Josh had been brought to Asheville from New Orleans and had supposedly threatened arson in the past. When Josh’s role in the fire was uncovered, the family arranged for him to be sent to Atlanta, which General Polk, Katherine Gale’s father, was defending. En route, Josh escaped.30
As in other parts of the Confederacy, refugees in the mountains struggled to secure sufficient food. In February 1863 Henry Middleton worried that he was “quite at a loss to imagine how it will be possible for me to make my limited income, even under the most economic management, pay the expenses of the war.” He bemoaned the exorbitant prices he had to pay for meager foodstuffs and the expenses necessary to maintain not only his family but the slaves he had brought with him, noting that he recently paid seven dollars to mend a pair of slave shoes. “Unless something is done, and done soon to change the course which things are going,” he wrote, “I can not see anything ahead but utter bankruptcy and ruin.” Henry’s daughter Harriott concurred in a letter to her cousin that same month, noting that “people here are taken up with the difficulty of getting any thing to eat and to wear. No beef to be killed, and not bacon or poultry to be bought!” As the adult daughter of a planter and unaccustomed to manual labor, Harriott remarked to her cousin that while they had insufficient food, “we have indeed a spinning wheel, and weaving machine, and intend to manufacture cloth!” Several months later, Harriott elaborated on their dietary difficulties, noting that “we are not starving but living on bacon, rice and hominy. Those who can, eat bacon. The unfortunates who can’t go without meat. I am in the latter class, which has so distressed Mamma, that she has sacrificed two chickens.” Harriott worried that the immediate gratification of eating chicken came at the cost of future eggs, noting that “I felt quite overwhelmed. . . . how shall I be able to eat this chicken when I think of the dozens of eggs and broods of chickens I am devouring.”31
Andrew Johnstone decided that he could make better use of his slaves in the mountains were he to acquire additional land. In September 1862 Mary Johnstone wrote to her mother that “Mr. J. is thinking of getting some lands on the river to plant if the war continues. Our prospects for the winter are gloomy enough, as the absolute scarcity of food is becoming alarming.” Two months later Andrew Johnstone left Flat Rock in search of additional places to house his slaves, some of whom were still at his Low Country plantations, although his wife lamented that “it seems impossible to get food, shelter, and lands to cultivate provision.” Johnstone planned to keep many of the women and children at an encampment at Santee, roughly halfway between Charleston and Columbia, and entertained the idea of “sending the men . . . to work upon a N.C. Railroad.” When his expedition took longer than Mary Johnstone anticipated, she noted, “I hope he will be back soon or the darkies here will die from idleness.”32
By the spring of 1864Johnstone had put nearly one hundred acres of his Flat Rock estate into cultivation, as well as an additional sixty acres along the French Broad River. Unlike most refugee planters, the Johnstones had a wagon and team, facilitating the transition of their Flat Rock estate to agricultural production. At Mary Johnstone’s father’s estate in Flat Rock, refugeed slaves had to work without the benefit of a plow because he could not afford to feed the draft animals.33 According to Mary Johnstone, most refugee planters had to pay “4 dollars a bushel for corn” to be delivered to them by locals. Even with the additional land under cultivation, the Johnstones struggled to procure sufficient food for themselves and their slaves at Flat Rock. Mary Johnstone lamented that they had difficulty purchasing additional foodstuffs from locals, since “the country people having taken to eat their own poultry, butter, & eggs.” Mountain farmers, who had traditionally sold their surpluses to Flat Rock summer residents, found that the Confederate tax-in-kind and the conscription of male labor into the Confederate army necessitated conserving whatever temporary surpluses they produced. To refugee planters, this conservation by mountain farmers amounted to hoarding. Mary Johnstone spoke approvingly of efforts by government officials to “put a stop to the hoarding of corn by the farmers and obliging them to take in payment Confederate money which they have refused heretofore.”34
By March 1864 the situation for the Middleton family and other refugees in Flat Rock had grown worse. Harriott Middleton grieved, “We are in a present state of disagreeable corn uncertainty.” The local merchant from whom they had been purchasing corn for themselves and their slaves informed them that “he cannot send us another ear! And what are we to do! . . . I have never heard of genteel people starving.” In March 1864 the food shortage was compounded when soldiers under Gen. James Longstreet’s command marched through western North Carolina on a foraging expedition, stripping the region of food. Impressing horses and mules, Longstreet’s soldiers seized much of the previous year’s grain harvest, leaving already destitute mountain farmers even more imperiled. Harriott Middleton wrote to her cousin that “as we were looking at the soldiers[,] an old man passed us on his way from the mill and said . . . ‘It’s a sad sight for us. They will leave us nothing to eat.’” Mary Johnstone lamented to her mother that “three thousand of Longstreet’s men passed thro’ here a few since going to Johnston and stripped the all [foodstuffs] that was left.” One mountain resident wrote to Governor Vance, complaining that Longstreet’s men had “come down through McDowell, Burke & Caldwell [Counties] & have nearly consumed all the grain they could pick up on their tracks. What are poor day laborers to do for bread when every crib in the land is depleted to the lowest possible standard. . . . I see a dark day ahead for the poor sons of toil and in fact for us all unless some unforeseen good luck should happen.”35
Accustomed to luxurious dining at their South Carolina plantations, the Middleton family and other refugees were compelled to eat whatever was available. In March 1864 Harriett Middleton noted that the family had been regularly eating potato soup, which she described as “but disguised hot water.” In sharing the recipe with her cousin, she noted its “demoralizing effects,” but as they had been “so long debarred from luxuries,” they “could not enjoy them!” Mary Johnstone observed that “the prices of everything and scarcity are excessive. If you meet a neighbor they can only talk of the impossibility of getting anything to eat. Many of them have no meat for days.”36
If wealthy white refugees worried about the state of their diet, their slaves fared far worse. Rations, especially meat rations, were cut back significantly. In March 1864 Laura Norwood noted that “our negroes have been doing with less. . . . We have had a very inadequate supply of bacon for this year, and no prospect of being able to get any more I have of late allowed the men 1/3 of a pound of bacon a day.” Refugee planters in Flat Rock also struggled to find adequate housing for their slaves. Unlike their Low Country plantations, their summer residences in Flat Rock had few slave cabins and were completely inadequate for the number of slaves refugeed during the Civil War. Furthermore, many of the slave cabins and converted barns that planters used to house their slaves were never intended to be occupied during winter months, exposing the poorly clad slaves to bitterly cold drafts. In October 1862 the Johnstone’s gardener, a local farmer named Cartwright, informed his employer and landlord that he would no longer live in the small house on the Johnstone estate, as “he could not stand the negroes—their dancing and fighting at night was too much for him.” Rather than regret losing the man who had cared for their property for many years, Mary Johnstone observed that she wished the Cartwright family “would vacate now instead of in a month that we might have their house for the negroes.”37
Many of the slaves refugeed to Flat Rock and other mountain communities suffered from ill health, undoubtedly enhanced by the inadequate food, shelter, and clothing. In November 1861 Mary Johnstone complained that “in spite of the fine weather, we have had the servants all ailing with pains & aches.” Like many of their refugee planter neighbors, the Johnstones sought out Dr. Mitchell King to tend to their ailing slaves. According to his medical ledger, Dr. King, the son of the elderly judge Mitchell King and the only practicing physician in Flat Rock, treated dozens of cases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and typhoid. Writing to her mother, Mary Johnstone noted that under Dr. King’s care, their slaves’ heath had improved, such that “the negroes with diphtheria are also well, so is the man with the dropsy. . . . [I] have been very busy lately (or rather Nonie Gran and Eleanore have) in making comforts for the negroes having obtained some cotton, and using all the quilts and curtains to be found.” Despite Dr. King’s efforts, the ravages of disease took a significant toll on refugeed slaves in Flat Rock, including Johnstone’s slave Nonie Gran, an elderly nurse who had cared for the Johnstone children and most recently for other sick slaves. Having died after “three weeks of unceasing pain and restlessness,” Nonie Gran appeared unrecognizable with her emaciated body in a black burial gown and muslin cap. Andrew Johnstone arranged to have her buried in the family’s enclosure at St. John in the Wilderness but had the funeral service performed at his house, as “it would be impossible for family and servants all to get to the church.” Nonie Gran’s name does not appear in the church’s register of deaths; however, the ledger does indicate that Nonie Gran was not the only refugeed slave in Flat Rock to succumb to disease during the Civil War. According to the incomplete records kept by the church at least a dozen slaves shared her fate, including five who died during a one-month period at the height of summer in 1864.38
Like slave-owning refugees in the Piedmont, many Low Country refugees attempted to rent out their slaves in order to reduce the burden of feeding and housing them. Unlike the Piedmont, however, the mountains had no major employer of refugeed slave labor to rival the railroads or hospitals that rented much of the surplus slave labor in central North Carolina. The closest analogue in the mountains was the Asheville Armory, a wartime factory that rented a handful of refugeed slaves in 1862 and 1863. As in Flat Rock, locals in Asheville resented the economic and social competition posed by refugeed slaves, severely whipping a South Carolina slave named Allen, who was discovered without a pass from the armory. In some parts of the North Carolina mountains, slave trading remained robust throughout the Civil War, and slave renting appeared to have increased, with mountain masters such as Nicholas Woodfin, Calvin Cowles, and Walter Lenoir taking advantage of wartime dislocations.39
Some mountain residents saw the widespread availability of slaves on the market as an opportunity to enter the slaveholding ranks for the first time. In March 1864 Mary Bell purchased her first three slaves, a family that had been removed from Charleston, South Carolina. Shortly after their purchase, she wrote to her husband, a dentist then serving in the Confederate army in Alabama, “I told you that you need not be surprised if [I] made a nigger trade. Well I have done it.” Because of some shrewd investments, Mary Bell had some disposable income, which her husband urged her to invest. “I don’t think it a good policy to keep money on hand,” he wrote her from the army. “I want you to invest what you have in something; either for a negro or land.” In weighing these alternatives, Mary Bell must have been struck by the effect that the recent arrival of hundreds of white and black refugees had on the respective prices of slaves and land. While the price of land in Macon County, a western county with a miniscule antebellum slave population, had increased significantly since the beginning of the war, due to the increased demand created by white refugees, the price of slaves, if controlled for inflation, had decreased significantly. Given the alternative, Mary Bell’s purchase seemed to make good financial sense. During her year as a member of the slaveholding class, she expressed mixed feelings about the wisdom of her purchase. On the one hand, she regretted that the slaves did not work as hard as she had hoped, writing to her husband that “these low country negroes are not like ours in their work or anything else.” In a moment of desperation, Mary complained that Patsy “is like all other south niggers—don’t know much about the work as we do” and contemplated selling the slaves if “they do not make my crib full of corn.” On the other hand, she considered purchasing additional slaves, a venture that her husband encouraged.40
In and around Flat Rock, however, few opportunities existed for refugee slave owners to rent their slaves. Several Flat Rock refugees attempted to rent their slaves to the railroads in the Piedmont. In October 1862 Susan Middleton noted that some eighty of her family’s slaves were sent to Greensboro to work on the Piedmont Railroad. She observed that “they seemed quite willing to go, and in good spirits, declar[ing] that they had no idea of going to the Yankees,” while at the same time she urged her cousin to “get an up-country place, and move their families, where they would be safe.” Recognizing the weakness of Confederate currency, some refugee slaveholders rented their slaves for food. The Polk family rented “some twenty excellent negro men & their families” to neighboring farmers in exchange for “supplies of Bacon, wheat, flour, potatoes, etc.; in that way provisions for the family were secured so long as hostilities lasted.”41
Like other refugees, Low Country refugees in Flat Rock anxiously anticipated news from home and from the front lines. With the nearest telegraph station nearly eighty miles away in Morganton, Flat Rock refugees depended on the sporadic mail delivery via the Buncombe Turnpike. In the aftermath of the battle of Port Royal in November 1861, refugee planters in Flat Rock worried about the fate of their Low Country plantations. Unable to wait for news to reach them, they sent an express coach to Greenville, South Carolina, the nearest railroad terminus, for the most recent updates, but, observed Mary Johnstone, “as yet we have no news, and the suspense is harassing.” A month later, Mary Johnstone noted that “the mail continues to be the chief object of interest.” News of war developments came too slowly and late for most refugee planters in Flat Rock. When Union forces occupied New Orleans in May 1862, it took nearly a month for the news to reach Flat Rock, and then details were sparse. In September 1862, more than four months later, Mary Johnstone complained, “How slowly we get news. Our New Orleans neighbors must feel pretty blue about their property.” Although she never named them explicitly, the New Orleans neighbors Johnstone referred to were probably the Urquhart and Fisk families. These refugee families had arrived in Flat Rock after leaving Union-occupied New Orleans in June 1862, having received permission from Gen. Benjamin Butler to leave the city. During their absence from New Orleans, they knew that their adjacent homes were used by Union officers, although the exact state of their homes remained a mystery until their return to the city in the fall of 1865.42
When inclement weather washed out the roads, mail delivery often ceased for days at a time, leading Mary Johnstone to observe, “In consequence of bad weather and horrible roads we have been without mails since Monday, a privation severely felt in these anxious times.” Katherine Polk Gale regretted that “letters took a long time to come; they gave but meager news; but in our mountain home how we watch for the coming mail; only three time a week; but some one in our large circle, always got news from the absent ones, of only a few lines on the march.” When news did reach Flat Rock, it was rarely good. Low Country refugees received accounts, often second- and thirdhand, that their plantations had been burned or occupied by Union soldiers. Many refugee planters also regularly received news that their slaves in South Carolina had fled to Union lines. In May 1862 Mitchell King noted in his diary that he had heard about a “steamer stolen from our wharves last night by negroes & carried to the Lincolnites.” Two months later, the Johnstones learned that two dozen slaves they had left at Santee had attempted to run to the Union-occupied enclaves on the coast. While some had been captured by Confederate patrols, most of them had managed to make it to the Sea Islands. When Union raids on the Combahee River district in June 1863 imperiled several refugees’ plantations, Mary Johnstone wrote to her mother that “after the raid upon the Combahee neighborhood where we hear the negroes were packed up ready to leave, I feel extremely uneasy. I do not think Jacob’s faithfulness will prevent a stampede from Social Hall, and the success at Combahee will only renew the wish of the Oak Lawn darkies to test freedom for themselves.” While the Johnstones’ plantations survived that raid, several of their refugee neighbors’ homes fell to the torch. When Flat Rock residents received the June 4, 1863, issue of the Charleston Mercury, they discovered that the Middleton, Manigault, and Lowdnes plantations had gone up in flames during the raid, Union soldiers “pillaging the premises of these gentlemen, the enemy set fire to the residences, outbuildings and whatever grain, etc., they could find . . . taking with them between 600 and 700 negroes.” In the months to come, Mary Johnstone wrote to her mother that Flat Rock refugees “dread to hear of some new trouble [in South Carolina] in the shape of negro raids.”43
The forced separation from home brought about severe homesickness in some refugee planters. On Christmas Day 1863, after more than a year in Flat Rock, Harriott Middleton expressed her longing for home in a letter to her cousin, noting, “I wonder if you feel the same intense love which I do for that low country, weather, atmosphere. . . . The very thought of that low lying, dimly colored landscape, sometimes flooded with sunshine, sometimes veiled in haze, stirs my heart and thoughts in a way that only one or two others ideas in the world can produce.” When Ann Stuart, a Flat Rock refugee from Beaufort, South Carolina, died in May 1862, her family inscribed her tombstone in the St. John in the Wilderness graveyard with the epitaph that she had died “driven in her last years from her beloved home by the casualties of war.” Less than a year after Stuart’s death, her daughter grieved that as “an Exile from Home & Motherless, this has been the darkest & saddest season of my life. . . . It often makes my heart ache to think of my beautiful Home in ruins & of my dear old Beaufort in the hands of the Enemy. I sometimes think I will never feel at Home.”44
During the summer of 1863, tensions between Flat Rock refugee planters and their neighbors intensified. The increasing size and strength of deserter gangs, formed the previous summer, terrorized the civilian population. In an 1863 letter to the Confederate secretary of war, Rev. Thomas Atkin of Asheville “and other citizens of Western North Carolina” argued that “the safety and security of [their] homes and property . . . [were] seriously menaced and openly assaulted by herds of disloyal citizens and gangs of deserters from the Confederate army. . . . In the event, the conscripts . . . are taken into the Confederate service, we shall doubtless fall an easy prey to the malicious hands of marauders, which now openly parade themselves in the different counties, west of the Blue Ridge.” In a letter to her husband, then serving in the Confederate army, Sarepta Revis of Henderson County wrote that “the war has commenced hear [sic] at last. . . . There is more deserters than there is malishey [Home Guard] hear.”45
Although many mountain residents worried about the looming presence of bushwhacker gangs, these deserter bands posed a particular threat to refugee planters in Flat Rock, who felt that they had become the preferred target. Not only were they significantly wealthier than their Henderson County neighbors, but as Low Country South Carolinians, they represented the secessionist impulse, a physical manifestation of a war and a government that many mountain residents had soured on. In a worried letter to her cousin, Harriott Middleton noted that “a hundred deserters are lurking around, and in consequence the militia of the County has been ordered out.” Constantly outnumbered, members of the Henderson County Home Guard were both apprehensive and ineffective against deserters. With deeper social and familial connections to the deserters than to refugee planters in Flat Rock, the Home Guard was reluctant to intervene when refugee planters were targeted. Harriott Middleton complained in October 1863 that “there was another horse theft in the neighborhood last night. . . . It is said that the magistrates are afraid of taking any measures to prevent the robberies, for fear that their own will be taken, and hitherto only the horses of the Low country people have been taken.” Some refugee planters concluded that while they had successfully escaped war on the South Carolina coast, they had found another one in the North Carolina mountains. Mary Johnstone lamented in April 1863 that a state of war had broken out in Flat Rock, as “the tories threatened to burn out the Lowlanders.”46
Refugee planters’ growing paranoia about deserters caused them to be on edge. In a letter to her cousin in December 1863, Harriott Middleton revealed that the rumors of outlaw and deserter bands had gotten the better of her: “I quite alarmed the house hold last night. There was a series of most mysterious noises in the house—wood falling down, steps walking about, the doors visibly shaken. . . . I stood it for a long time, but when I heard the doors being tried alternately, and the falling of the umbrella which stood in the corner, I rushed into Mama’s room and declared some person must be there. She rang the bell violently, and soon Isabella and a servant came rushing to our assistance. They searched every where and could find nothing.” After a lengthy hunt, they surmised that the noises had been made by a large cat.47 Although Harriott Middleton intended the episode to assuage and amuse her cousin, it indicates the extent to which their fears of attack permeated refugee planters’ thoughts and dreams.
The looming threats against Andrew Johnstone came to fruition one evening in early June 1864. As the family completed their dinner, a band of six men rode up to Johnstone’s Beaumont estate. Johnstone excused himself from the table to greet the men, who presented themselves as a detachment from the Confederate army searching for deserters. After asking for forage for their horses, the men came into the house for dinner, with Johnstone’s slave Annie scrabbling to prepare a second dinner from their meager pantry. Johnstone’s daughters followed their father’s lead in extending hospitality to the visitors, playing for them on the piano and “German music box.” Johnstone’s fifteen-year-old son, Elliott, noticed that some of the men had paused by the hat rack in the hall, trying on the hats. When the visitors “became too free in their manners,” Johnstone sent his daughters upstairs, whispering to them as they retired to watch for signs of pilfering. Recent robberies in the area, especially committed against wealthy refugees, had put Johnstone and other refugee planters on guard against theft. Andrew Johnstone silently handed his son the key to the upstairs wardrobe, where he kept a loaded English fowling piece.
Although disturbed by their guests’ behavior, Andrew, Mary, and Elliott Johnstone continued to entertain the men. Alarmed by the threats against her husband and rumors of deserter bands roaming the mountains, Mary Johnstone tried to make conversation with their guests, nervously brushing flies away from the food, while Elliott slipped out and seized the gun from the upstairs wardrobe. After a tense meal and coffee made with rye, the leader of the gang, described in some sources as the “Sergeant,” demanded that Andrew Johnstone fill their satchels with food, a request to which Johnstone acquiesced. Calling to his men, some of whom had retired to the passageway outside the dining room, the Sergeant pulled his pistol on Johnstone, declaring, “You are my prisoner, Sir.” When Johnstone reached for his small pocket revolver, a constant companion since the first threats against him in Flat Rock, the Sergeant fired. The bullet passed through Johnstone’s body and into the wall behind. Hearing the shot as he returned downstairs, Elliott Johnstone exchanged fire with one of the other men in the hallway, receiving a grazing wound in his shoulder. In the confusion that followed, the mortally wounded Andrew Johnstone fired wildly at his assailants as they bolted from the house, collapsing shortly thereafter.
While Mary Johnstone cradled her dying husband, Elliott pursued the attackers. On the porch, he found one man lying on his back, whom he initially presumed dead, until the man raised his pistol to fire at Elliott. Before he could fire, Elliott wrestled the pistol from the fallen intruder and “shot him where he lay,” before pursuing the other bushwackers. In an exchange of fire between Elliott Johnstone on the porch and his father’s assailants in the nearby woods, the teenage refugee managed to mortally wound two of them; in “his just anger,” the wounds left “lasting marks for repentance.” When neighbors, alarmed by the gunfire, came to Elliott’s aid, the remaining men fled into the woods. By the time Elliott returned to his father’s side, Andrew Johnstone had less than an hour to live.48
Immediately after Andrew Johnstone’s murder, a posse drawn from Flat Rock’s refugee community and Home Guard soldiers searched the nearby woods and fields in pursuit of his attackers. Not far from the house, they found a wounded man and “gave him no quarter, [but] killed and buried him on the spot.” They later captured another wounded man in the woods and “if both barrels of I’On Lowndes’ gun had not snapped, he would have killed him also.” After a brief stint in the Hendersonville jail, the wounded man was court-martialed in Asheville as a deserter and sentenced to hang in Morganton. The soldiers escorting him “pretended to give him a chance to escape and shot him.”49
The identities and motivations of the men who attacked Johnstone remain unclear. Oral tradition within Flat Rock suggests that they had come via “a trail through the Dark Swamp from the general direction of Brevard.”50 Several sources, including a letter written more than forty years later by Elliott Johnstone, point to the Kuykendall gang, a band of deserters led by three brothers from Henderson County who had deserted from the Confederate army. The gang’s leader and the most likely suspect in Andrew Johnstone’s murder, Jahu Kuykendall, enlisted in the Sixteenth North Carolina Regiment in March 1862 and was wounded at the battle of Gaines Mill but deserted in July 1863. He enlisted in the Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry Regiment, a Union regiment raised in Tennessee, in October 1863, only to desert a few months later. Throughout 1864 and 1865, “Kuykendoll and his gang of deserters” had terrorized the residents of Flat Rock, “restricting their operations generally to the breaking into and pillaging the houses of the South Carolinians.” In addition to Andrew Johnstone’s murder, the Kuykendall gang reportedly attacked the home of Beatrix and Eliza De Choiseul, daughters of the French consul to Charleston, beating Beatrix “with the butt of a pistol to insensibility,” leaving her unconscious with “a terrible sabre cut on her head,” while they “pillaged the house at their leisure.” The gang also attacked Mary Boykin Williams’s home. Awakened at two in the morning by a loud knock at the door, Mary’s mother yelled from an upstairs window that there was nothing left in the house to steal. The gang first threatened to burn the house down, then broke open the door, attacking Mary’s mother and attempting to rape Mary’s sister. When the women fought back, the men looted the house and fled.51
After her husband’s murder, Mary Johnstone debated moving her family to Greenville, South Carolina, fearing that her son would be targeted for killing his father’s murderer. As refugee families rallied around her in the aftermath of her husband’s murder, Mary Johnstone felt that she “could not unless in absolute danger to my children leave this place, although at first I felt inclined to rush from it forever.” Her brother urged her to relocate, as Elliott’s “life will be forfeited if he is not brought away.” Two weeks after his father’s murder, Elliott moved to Greenville on the counsel of friends. Mary Johnstone remained steadfast in her determination to stay in Flat Rock, although she asked her brother to remain with her, ostensibly to “assist in the council of war.” With the family’s Low Country plantations under Union control, Mary Johnstone deliberated with her brother, weighing the “discomfort, expense, and ruination of the only home which this family possesses, which a removal will cause . . . against the possible danger which may ensue from their remaining here.” Their decision was complicated by the absence of her husband’s will, which they believed was in South Carolina. Without it, it would be difficult to sell Beaumont or find alternative housing in Greenville.52
While Mary Johnstone resisted leaving Flat Rock, many other refugees quickly concluded that the situation in the North Carolina mountains was more hazardous than they had anticipated. After Andrew Johnstone’s murder and the attack on their home, Mary Boykin Williams and her family fled Flat Rock to Greenville, South Carolina, where they were joined “by many of those who had fled like ourselves from the terror of the deserters.” Their number included Elliott Johnstone, “with his partly healed arm,” and Beatrix De Choiseul, “with a part of her raven black hair cut off and a plastered with black court-plaster.” Crammed into a small house in Greenville, the Flat Rock refugees, driven for a second time from their homes, “sat and talked over our experiences,” wondering if they would ever return to Flat Rock or to the Low Country.53
A month after her husband’s murder, Mary Johnstone left Flat Rock for Greenville, joining her son, who had managed to secure temporary housing for them there. On the eve of her departure, she wrote to her sister that “I am to leave tomorrow this home, made so beautiful and comfortable for us by my darling husband, and I may not have courage to write again soon. It is a great trial to desert this home. I feel as if I were still near him here, tho’ I listen in vain for his steps, his voice, and miss oh so much those little hourly attentions—a flower, a beautiful cherry.”54 With the status of her husband’s estate in limbo, the family struggled to survive the war’s final year in Greenville, a struggle than continued well after the war’s conclusion as Mary Johnstone fought to assert her claim to her husband’s property. In 1868 the former plantation mistress was reduced to teaching school in order to support herself and her children.
Most South Carolina refugee planters remained in Flat Rock after Andrew Johnstone’s murder, albeit with significantly increased concerns for their own security. C. G. Memminger, who had recently joined his family in Flat Rock after resigning as the Confederate secretary of the treasury, fortified his house against possible attacks. Because of the threat posed by “a gang of deserters from the Confederate Army,” Memminger removed the steps from the front of the house, barricaded the ground floor windows with sandbags and wooden spikes, and cut gun ports in doors and walls in case the house were sieged. From within his fortified domicile, Memminger wrote to Jefferson Davis that a “state of anarchy” prevailed in Flat Rock. “The condition of this corner of North Carolina is exceptional. Its loyal population is all in the army. The mountains here afford strongholds to the deserters and outlaws from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. They have already organized two bands and have driven away some of the inhabitants, and they seem to proceed only against the low country people and the families of soldiers who are absent in the army.” Memminger implored Davis to step up the military presence in the area and to take draconian measures against deserters. Given how thinly spread the Confederate forces were at the end of 1864, Davis’s response was unsurprising. While “the outrages and depredations enumerated call for means of repression,” additional resources were unavailable.55
Unbeknownst to Memminger, at least one of these bands spent the night in an outbuilding on his estate. At approximately the same time that Memminger wrote his letter to Jefferson Davis, four Union soldiers who had escaped from a POW camp in South Carolina followed the same route that refugee planters had taken to Flat Rock, hoping to reach Union lines in Tennessee. They entered Flat Rock at night, slipping past a sleeping watchman guarding the bridge into the hamlet. In the heart of the refugee planter enclave, however, the four Union soldiers were discovered by an armed patrol of four men, the leader of which burnished a sword. After a failed attempt to persuade the patrol that they were Confederate soldiers on leave, the fugitives fled into the woods and took shelter at the summit of Glassy Mountain, less than a mile from Memminger’s home.56
Fearing that they would be tracked during daylight by dogs, the fugitive Union soldiers plotted to leave Flat Rock as soon as they could. They knew, however, that traveling during the daytime would be suicidal. Hungry, tired, and scared, their misery was compounded when the morning rains turned to sleet, and by noon into snow. It grew much colder as the day progressed, and heavy winds froze the poorly dressed soldiers, who hid under rocky outcroppings as they tried to preserve their body heat. From this vantage point, they noticed a small patch of cultivated land at the base of the mountain. Overcome by hunger, they descended from their rocky shelter, only to discover that the cabbages were frozen solid to the ground and could not be removed without great effort. While bent over prying the frozen cabbages from the frozen ground, they were discovered by four grown women. When they attempted their usual ruse of pretending to be Confederate soldiers, they discovered that the women were Unionists, “boldly asserting their full sympathy with the Federal arms.” After a thorough interrogation by the women, they revealed their identity as Union soldiers and their intention to escape to Union lines at Knoxville. Feasting on corn bread and apples, the men rejoiced at meeting the rumored “‘good Union people’ of North Carolina” in the mountains.57
After feeding the hungry soldiers, the women offered them shelter in the garret of their house. The sisters revealed that they “lived in a rebel neighborhood and were tenants to a rebel landlord.” George Hadley, one of the four Union soldiers, who later chronicled their adventure, did not name the “rebel landlord” the women rented from, except to say that he was a former Confederate cabinet officer, undoubtedly a reference to Memminger.58 The sisters sheltered the men in a small hidden chamber in the upper story of their home that they had constructed to conceal their brother from Confederate conscription gangs. They also arranged for the fugitive Union soldiers to rendezvous with an outlaw gang headquartered near Flat Rock who would guide them to Knoxville. The sisters warned them that this gang “are bad men, at least they are so regarded by both rebels and Unionists; they have the reputation of killing many people and robbing many more; they have been declared outlaws by the proper authorities, and one thousand dollars reward offered for their arrest.”59
After several days in hiding, the men were led by the gang leader’s sister to their hideout in the Blue Ridge Mountains. According to John Hadley, the outlaws were dressed in coarse, threadbare clothes and armed with Springfield rifles. The leader, Jerry Vance, possessed long, dark hair that grew to his eyes, a dark beard, and a “wool hat so full of holes.” Vance’s gang looked “so much like rebel soldiers” that Hadley feared for their safety. After some tense negotiations, Jerry and his younger brother Jack agreed to lead Hadley and his men over the mountains to Knoxville in exchange for $400, “payable in gold and silver.” As they prepared for their journey to Knoxville, Hadley learned that Jerry and Jack Vance had both deserted from the Confederate army and Jack had also deserted from the Union army. They had lived as outlaws for the previous two years, living in rudimentary cabins, barns, and caves. Their band consisted of eight men in similar circumstances, who “expressed the most inveterate hate for rebels” and “regarded every man a rebel who had valuables.” The gang “now lived on spoils . . . sacking every ‘fine house.’” Their cave was furnished with silverware, jewelry, and other items plundered from nearby homes, including one of their more recent acquisitions, a life-sized portrait of George Washington, liberated from the “parlor of a rebel.”60
Given that John Hadley routinely employed pseudonyms in his narrative, the Vance brothers were probably the Kuykendall brothers, leaders of the Henderson County gang who were likely responsible for Andrew Johnstone’s murder. Although only one of several such bands in the region, the Vance-Kuykendall gang undoubtedly perpetrated much of the violence and robbery committed against Low Country refugee planters in Flat Rock. According to Hadley, their “depredations were so notorious that the rebel authorities had published a solemn proclamation of outlawry against them.” In the month prior to Hadley’s arrival in Flat Rock, the homes of several refugee planters in Flat Rock had been burglarized, including “five men [who] robbed Mrs. Singleton’s house in broad daylight,” and “Burrell’s and Mr. Pringle’s houses being both robbed twice.”61 Even more shocking was the attack on the home of Col. Joseph Bryson, not far from Flat Rock. Colonel Bryson had gone to bed early, when eight men arrived at his house, asking to see him. When his wife, two daughters, and a slave stepped out on the porch to greet the visitors, “the men at the gate fired on them, killing Mrs. Bryson instantly, and inflicting painful and dangerous wounds upon the young ladies.” The Asheville News attributed the murder to Colonel Bryson’s identification as “an active Southern man.” Bryson had been active during the previous two years in attempting to reduce the presence of outlaws and deserters in Henderson County. In June 1863 he had led a failed expedition to round up deserters. Bryson claimed that the “outlaws are a terror to the citizens, and especially to the soldiers wives who are alone” and that they had threated his life and the life of any Confederate officer who would attempt to conscript them. The death of Bryson’s wife, surmised one Flat Rock refugee, was no accident but “deliberate, intentional murder.”62
Prior to escorting Hadley and his men to Knoxville, the Vance-Kuykendall brothers insisted on one final robbery, of a refugee doctor in Flat Rock. Initially the Vance-Kuykendall brothers demanded that the fugitive Union soldiers join them; however, after pleading that they “felt no desire for the romance of robbing, and probably, murdering,” and that they “could not wish to punish and rob a man who has done us no harm,” the Vance-Kuykendall brothers relented, allowing Hadley and his men to stay at their hideout under guard. Although he did not witness the attack in person, Hadley gathered from subsequent conversations that when the Vance-Kuykendall gang arrived at the house, they found the doctor and his family sitting around the fireplace.63 They fired a volley at them and then rushed into the house. The doctor fled immediately out the back door into the woods, leaving his wife and three children in the hands of the Vance-Kuykendall gang. The gang ransacked the house in search of valuables, tying a noose around the doctor’s wife’s neck, threatening to hang her. Under beds in the house, they found three black men hiding, who were made to dance for their amusement. The Vance-Kuykendall gang left the house largely empty-handed after three hours and promptly left with Hadley and his men for Knoxville, fearing that they would be pursued.
Hadley does not give the name of the doctor, although circumstantial evidence suggests that it may have been Dr. Thomas Means, a refugee planter from South Carolina. According to records from the 1860 census, Dr. Means owned more than sixty slaves on his St. Helena plantation. He had come with his family to Flat Rock in early 1862, bringing several slaves with him. In September 1862 he had his wife had been arrested and detained for the assault of Mrs. Corn, until they were liberated through Andrew Johnstone and Henry Farmer’s intervention. Just prior to the Vance-Kuykendall gang’s attack, Dr. Means had been warned via message left with a slave on a neighboring estate that were he not to leave the area, “he would be put in his coffin.”64
During the final year of the war, Flat Rock remained almost entirely cut off from the rest of the Confederacy. Mail delivery essentially stopped and travel in and out of the mountains became more difficult. Mary Johnstone claimed that “the annoyances of travelling now a days are enough to deter all voluntary locomotion.” With deserter gangs a ubiquitous threat, planter refugees spent the final months of the war bunkered in their mountain estates. Nine years old in 1865, Edward Memminger, son of C. G. Memminger, later remembered that the Confederate surrender did not bring about an end to hostilities in the mountains, as “after the surrender at Appomattox, the Union troops came through Flat Rock and . . . pillaged some of the houses and took whatever they wanted. In the day the men of the family ‘took to the woods’ to escape the soldiers and had to come back at night to defend the house from a gang of deserters from the Confederate Army, who had turned bandits and terrorized the community with their burglaries and other offences.”65
Many Low Country planters who took refuge in the North Carolina mountains emerged from the war bankrupt. While their Low Country estates were sacked by Union armies, refugee planters “found no better treatment in the interior; the mountaineers hated them as cordially as did the Yankees, and visited their places with like vengeance. Many of their residences were burned down, the flocks and cattle destroyed, they themselves driven away by threats, violence and assassination. It was a wheel within a wheel, and none pitied them, for they were mainly instrumental in putting the first in motion. Unaccustomed to labor, and raised in luxury and affluence, they were reduced to great wretchedness and poverty.”66
The slaves taken to the North Carolina mountains were among the last of those east of the Mississippi to be liberated. George Robertson, a refugee in Asheville, remembered a “great negro hegira immediately after their realization of the fact they were free.” Numbering in the “hundreds and hundreds,” newly emancipated freedmen and freedwomen celebrated by leaving their former owners. Robertson was struck by the fact that, rather than march southeast, where most of the refugeed slaves had lived prior to the Civil War, “they moved almost en masse towards Tennessee,” following the Union army. For refugeed slaves, emancipation gave them the opportunity to relocate on their own terms. Among the crowd of “negroes, freedmen of all sorts and sizes,” one figure stood out to Robertson: “A rather boney horse on whose back were piled sundry and divers bundles, sacks packed with clothing. On top of this pile sat an elderly negro woman of generous proportions, her bonnet hanging over her back, held there by ribbons. She was astride the sacks, holding the reins in hands that were swinging with the motions of riding, and she was shouting at the top of her voice. ‘Glory, glory! We’s free, we’s free. Glory, Halleluia!’”67
Compared to other North Carolina refugees, the refugee planters of the North Carolina mountains did not suffer the same threats of disease, overcrowding, and famine that menaced refugees on the coast and in the Piedmont. Although they complained about shortages, their material wealth allowed them to live in conditions not too dissimilar to their accustomed antebellum luxury. Their greatest fear turned out to be not the Union army or starvation but the hostility of the local populace, who had come to view their presence as a threat to their economic well-being and as an embodiment of the class divisions within the Confederacy. Committed secessionists and slave owners, the refugee planters sought sanctuary in a corner of the Confederacy with comparatively little investment in either secession or slavery. For some, like the murdered Andrew Johnstone, this sanctuary proved to be anything but.