WALTER FELL IN LOVE WITH HIS MOUNTAIN FARM, WHICH he came to see as “perhaps the prettiest place in all the wild mountains.” Part of its appeal to him was its solitude, the sense of isolation he craved as he sought to prove to himself and others that his crippling wound had not robbed him of his manly independence.
Crab Orchard, as Walter called his farm, was a few miles above Tom and Lizzie’s place on the East Fork of the Pigeon River. He set up house in a drafty, windowless, one-room cabin infested with vermin. Trying to make it habitable, he spent the first two weeks daubing cracks in the siding, setting the floor of the cabin closer to the ground, and making a bedstead so he would not have to sleep on the floor. His nine slaves were packed into an even smaller cabin, which also served as a kitchen. The outbuildings consisted of a dilapidated corncrib and a chicken coop that Walter converted into a smokehouse. No lots had been fenced for livestock and the ditching and fencing were badly in need of repair.
While he was supervising his slaves’ work on the furniture for his simple cabin, Walter could spend evenings thinking about how the war had brought him to where he was now. In the months and years ahead, he would spend much time thinking about why he had fought—why they all had—and whether the sacrifice would prove worth it. Although he never put it so starkly, he was deciding on the history he needed to understand his world after the war. As he tried to square his present world with the one he had known before the war, it would have been hard for him to avoid a sense of self-righteousness—a sort of sanctimonious smugness—in knowing that he had faced up to and survived the carnage on the battlefields. As a result, he was incapable of imagining that his sacrifices and those of other Confederates had been in vain. The more he thought, the holier the war became, and he was incapable—indeed refused—to remember what had caused the war and the hideous side of how it was fought. In short, his survivor’s memory of the war was a self-biased one. But for now, his thoughts returned to his farm and all the dreams he had invested in it.
Even with two good legs, Walter would have faced a challenge in turning the site into a flourishing stock farm. As it was, he was utterly dependent on his slaves. “I will do a little if my negroes prove industrious and honest,” he wrote Rufus. “If they turn out badly, I may find myself going down hill so fast that I will have to give up them and my land and put myself out to board with somebody, but I will not write myself a cypher till I find that I am.”
Only three of Walter’s slaves—Uriah and Andy and his wife Maria—were adults. On them rested the entire burden of feeding Walter, putting in and tending his crops, and caring for the livestock. No white hands were available as day laborers. The draft had taken off the adult men who had not volunteered, and Walter’s tenants were by now mostly women and children who unavoidably were falling behind in their rental payments of corn. Tom tried to help out with provisions of bacon, but there was a limit to what he could set aside for Walter and destitute families once Confederate officers began scouring the mountains seizing supplies for the army in a policy known as impressment.
This was the wooden leg Walter favored.
(Source: North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.)
While Walter was slowly and painfully learning how to get around on his Montgomery leg, he entrusted everything to Andy and Maria, including his only lock, one used for the corncrib. Andy did the plowing for the first crop of corn, oats, and Irish potatoes (common white potatoes as opposed to the typical Southern crop of sweet potatoes). Maria was in charge of the meat and a flock of chickens that kept Walter supplied with eggs. Turnip greens from the slaves’ garden patch, along with milk from their cow, were welcome additions to the cornbread and bacon diet. When not needed by Tom, Uriah helped out with the farm chores. On the rare nights that Walter spent down at Tom and Lizzie’s, Uriah stayed in Walter’s cabin, guarding it against neighbors noted for their stealing. Walter’s main contribution to the farm consisted of planting some grafts of apple, plum, and pear stocks. The one day he spent in the fields helping Andy plant the corn left his stump so sore that he was nearly ready to give up using his Montgomery leg.
Measured by his tax assessment, Uriah was Walter’s most valuable slave and, along with Andy, he was indispensable to any plan for improvements. Not wanting to alienate such a valuable slave, Walter grudgingly consented to Uriah’s marriage to Delia, one of Tom’s slaves whom Walter considered “of little account.” The marriage was part of a double ceremony for two slave couples held on the night of May 16 at the Den, Tom’s name for his Haywood home. Lewis Welsh, a black preacher, performed the ceremony. In Walter’s mocking words, the preacher had been “duly authorized by the law (Ethiopian) to celebrate the bans of matrimony, and also to hear and determine actions of debt and pleas of assault and battery and other breaches of the peace [among the slaves] and to pronounce judgment and issue execution.” Although Walter dismissed as pretentious the preacher’s claim to wield real authority, the slaves acknowledged his power and relied on his rulings to settle disputes among themselves. In helping maintain the slaves’ morale and thereby their productivity, the preacher was ultimately Walter’s ally.
With the exception of an occasional newspaper from Asheville, Walter relied on letters from relatives in Caldwell and from his nephew Tom Norwood in Virginia for information on the war outside of the mountains of North Carolina. Most of the news in the spring of 1863 was discouraging. Norwood, who was ordered back to the North Carolina 37th in the spring after his foot had healed, reported that “our company has disgraced itself by desertion,” six men while Tom was home recuperating, and another thirty soon after Norwood’s return, including four who had served under Walter. Tom Lenoir was kept busy that spring leading scouting parties in a fruitless attempt to round up the Haywood deserters. Back in Caldwell, Rufus was convinced that his enemies on the tax assessing board had overvalued his property in hopes of forcing him to pay more than his fair share in war taxes. Brother-in-law James Gwyn had also quarreled with a prominent Unionist over the issue of accepting Confederate paper money in payment of prewar debts. When the Unionist taunted the secessionist Gwyn with the argument that he ought to take the money of the government that he and the other secessionists had clamored for, Gwyn replied that he’d be damned if he would accept currency worth only a quarter of the money he had loaned out in 1858.
Increasing numbers of deserters hid out in the mountains of North Carolina.
(Source: Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.)
As spring turned into summer and casualty lists spiked upward, the first signs of an inner civil war appeared in the mountain counties. Most of the troops raised in these counties served in Lee’s army. After suffering high casualties in the Seven Days Battles, they incurred even heavier losses at Gettysburg in July 1863. The one bright spot was news that Tom Norwood, listed as missing for over a week, not only survived the battle but emerged as a war hero. Taken prisoner after being wounded thirty yards from the Union batteries, Tom escaped from a building at Gettysburg College, made his way through Federal pickets, fell in with Confederate sympathizers, and eventually enjoyed a breakfast with General Lee at which he passed on valuable information about the Union lines he had circled around as he escaped. Tom’s cousin and a female friend were so excited on hearing of Tom’s escape that they “had a mind to retreat to the woods and just holler our very ravingest until our emotions subsided.”
Tom’s story brought joy to the Norwoods, but most mountain families received the news from Gettysburg with growing despair. The men they had sent off to the army were overwhelmingly non-slaveholders whose labor was essential to their mountain farms. Their absence left more and more families impoverished and desperately hungry. As the war dragged into its third year, despair turned into open resistance to Confederate authorities and their hated draft and impressment policies. From the ranks of these mountain farmers came most of the deserters and the outliers, men trying to avoid the draft by fleeing from their homes and lying out the war. Numbering between 200 and 300, they roamed Caldwell County in the summer of 1863 pillaging for supplies, especially from prominent secessionist families. Larger bands swept through neighboring Wilkes and Yadkin counties.
Linking up with diehard Unionists, the deserter bands were most defiant in the small community of Trap Hill in northern Wilkes, not far from the Green Hill plantation of James and Mary Ann Gwyn in Ronda. They shocked local Confederates by organizing a Union militia and raising a U.S. flag—that “old dirty United States rag,” as Mary Ann’s daughter, Julia, put it. After dismissing the Unionists as “poor fools” acting out of “ignorance,” Mary Ann admitted that “our neighbors here have nearly all deserted who were in the army—some who fought bravely too!” In the spring of 1861 Southern women had urged their men to do their duty and return as heroes from the war. Now, Julia reported, “the women write to their husbands to leave the army and come home and that’s the reason so many of them are deserting.” She added with disgust that “some of the people about here are actually rejoiced at the death of Genl. Jackson! … I wish the Yankees had the last one of them.”
Stonewall Jackson, accidentally wounded by his own troops soon after spearheading a stunning Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, Virginia, had died on May 10 from an infection that set in after his left arm was amputated. His loss was the first in a series of blows sustained by the Confederacy in the spring and summer of 1863. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg resulted in 28,000 casualties, a staggering one-third of his effective force. A day later, on July 4, the Confederacy lost Vicksburg, its main fortress on the Mississippi River, and surrendered its defending army of 30,000 men. Four days later, the secondary river fortress of Port Hudson, Louisiana, fell. Before the month was out, the Union gained control of middle Tennessee, one of the prime sources of food for Confederate armies. On the home front many questioned whether the Confederacy would ever be able to mobilize all of its resources to support its armies. “In the meantime,” a despondent Joe Norwood wrote Walter, “desertion is rife, the men regard their money as worthless & the government is unable to remedy the evil.”
Through this summer of discontent, Walter’s faith remained that of a zealot who had converted to a new religion. He reduced the war to a struggle between absolute good and evil and spoke increasingly of the war in religious terms. Lee was not just a skilled general, but “a noble hearted Christian soldier.” Walter expressed “love and admiration” for Southern soldiers, convinced that Lee’s soldiers had, with a few regrettable but understandable exceptions, treated the people of Pennsylvania with kindness and restraint. Their behavior would “shine out forever in bright contrast with the infamous conduct of our enemies.”
While he did not dismiss the recent Confederate setbacks, he insisted that these defeats were more symbolic than substantive. It was remarkable, he wrote Joe Norwood, that Vicksburg had held out so long. To be sure, the Yankees now controlled the Mississippi and were in a position to isolate the trans-Mississippi West; yet the West “was already virtually isolated” before Vicksburg fell. The worst that could happen now would be more Yankee raids east of the river. “The war will move on, pretty much as it has done,” he assured Norwood, “and we will finally discomfit them.”
Rufus was less sure, especially after Lincoln announced that his Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on January 1, 1863. In a move designed to break the two-year military stalemate, Lincoln called for the freeing of all slaves in areas still under Confederate control as of the beginning of 1863 and announced that the Union would accept freed slaves in military service. Walter knew well that Rufus’s darkest forebodings centered on a war that unleashed scenes of “assassination and general massacre” in which the slaves would rise up to exact revenge from their masters. He wrote Rufus a long letter in late July attempting to soothe his fears that Lincoln’s proclamation was a call for a bloody slave insurrection.
The Yankees had been freeing slaves since the start of the war, he reassured Rufus. In practical terms their conduct now was simply a continuation of earlier policy. More disturbing was the Union’s enlistment of black troops beginning in the spring of 1863. Initially, Walter had thought that the number of black troops would be small, just enough “to keep the South in a state of excitement.” After all, white Union soldiers would hardly wish to serve with them. Besides, like most Southern whites, and many Northerners as well, he could never envision blacks developing into competent soldiers. He imagined that they would run under the pressure of battle and, once captured, would be executed along with their white officers as criminals guilty of inciting a slave insurrection. He clearly had been mistaken. The Union was raising more black troops than he expected, Confederates were taking them as prisoners of war, not shooting them on the spot when captured, and, as he conceded to Rufus, “it is so natural to man to fight that it is possible that even the negro disciplined and led by white men may stand fire better than we of the South have supposed.” Nonetheless, he continued to believe that the Yankees would sharply limit the combat use of its black troops.
As for emancipation, Walter had at first ruled out any possibility because he could not bring himself to believe that an all-merciful God would allow the Yankees “to perpetrate so great a crime as that against us and their species.” Forced emancipation, he assumed, would result in “horrid massacre and butchery” as enraged slaves, their passions inflamed by the abolitionists, rose up to slay whites. Acting out of self-defense, the whites would be compelled to slaughter their former slaves in the ensuing race war. Such a nightmarish vision had been a staple of Southern thought since the massive and violent slave revolt on the Caribbean island of St. Domingue in the 1790s. Of course, as Walter acknowledged, mere mortals could hardly fathom the workings of divine will. By the summer of 1863, the Yankees were indeed freeing significant numbers of slaves, forcing Walter to consider whether God’s will might be that “our enemies may succeed in this.” If so, they would do so “without any massacres except such as are now taking place on the battle field … Bad as the Yankees are they would not wish the whites of the South to be massacred by the negroes and would not permit it.”
In support of this extraordinary shift in his thinking, Walter reminded Rufus that Yankee emancipation in southern Louisiana had proceeded peacefully after the Confederacy lost New Orleans in the spring of 1862. The orderly transition had occurred even with Louisiana’s high concentration of slaves ruled by sugar planters notorious for treating their slaves harshly. Surely, Walter argued, if these slaves had not retaliated against whites in an orgy of violence, there was little chance of it happening elsewhere in the South.
Jamaica provided another hopeful example in the Caribbean. In marked contrast to St. Domingue, emancipation in Jamaica and the other British sugar islands in the 1830s was an orderly process that preserved the plantation economy. To be sure, Jamaica’s sugar output declined as freed slaves abandoned the plantations to become a poor peasantry, and the South might suffer a similar fate, Walter conceded, if it lost the war. But there would be no horrific scenes of black vengeance against whites. “If the Yankees are strong enough to put down our fierce and strong fight of independence,” Walter concluded, “they will be strong enough to govern the negroes afterwards.”
Walter assured Rufus that he thought the Union effort would bog down once its armies tried to penetrate into the Confederate interior. Its major victories in taking New Orleans, Memphis, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson resulted from its unmatched naval superiority. But sooner or later the Union would have to turn its campaigns inward away from the coast and rivers, and then Confederate armies would turn the invaders back with heavy losses. Pointing to the growing strength of a Northern peace party, Walter was confident that Confederate resistance would cost Lincoln his reelection bid in 1864 and force him “to hand over the job unfinished to his successor.” With a Democrat in the presidency, the Confederacy could expect recognition of its independence.
For all his confidence, Walter could not ignore the mounting evidence of unrest on the home front. In August he heard from Joe Norwood of “a terrible state of things upon the Tennessee line, particularly in Watauga.” Roving bands of bushwhackers were pillaging at will, and one of their raids resulted in the death of Thomas Farthing, a friend of the Lenoirs’ and a well-known secessionist. Tom Norwood, home on medical leave recuperating from his wound at Gettysburg, was sent out to Ashe, another mountain county, to bring back thirty-one deserters from his company.
What most concerned Walter was the rising public demand to end the war, a demand that did not always insist on Southern independence as a precondition for peace. Leading the call for a negotiated end to the war was William W. Holden, the maverick editor of the Raleigh North Carolina Standard. A reluctant secessionist and a lukewarm Confederate early in the war, Holden emerged in the summer of 1863 as North Carolina’s most prominent critic of the Confederate government. His editorials charged Richmond with erecting a military despotism that was trampling the Southern liberties it was formed to uphold. Especially after the terrible casualties suffered by North Carolina regiments at Gettysburg, Holden’s call for a speedy peace served as a rallying call for disenchanted Confederates. Peace meetings were held across the state in the summer of 1863, nine of them in the mountain counties close to Haywood.
Worried that Rufus was on the verge of becoming a craven submissionist willing to forfeit his rights in a Yankee-dictated peace, Walter redoubled his efforts to shore up his brother’s faltering patriotism. In the late summer and fall he accused Rufus of all but wishing for further Confederate defeats, an attitude he called “sinful.” Rufus’s complaints over the lack of salt for preserving meat were curtly dismissed with the observation that “meat is a luxury. The Roman soldiers who conquered the world [ate] little or no flesh.” Hoping to shame Rufus out of being “so incorrigibly blue,” he asked, “Who that deserves to be free would not rather wander forty years in the wilderness and live on bread alone rather than return to the flesh pots and be a slave?” Their French Huguenot ancestors, after being driven out of their country for their religious beliefs, had sired a “long race of Lenoirs” who prospered in the South as the “best farmers” who got the “best lands and the best wives.” Rufus should face the future with the same resolution they had shown. God nurtured his chosen people with tribulations; he laid “the heaviest afflictions on those who have most need of his love and favor.”
“Cheer up then,” he concluded. “Look the worst squarely in the face if you will, and still be a man.” Walter stressed that Rufus owed nothing less to himself, his family, and the Confederate soldiers who were valiantly defending Southern freedoms.
If the unthinkable happened and the Confederacy were defeated, Walter had made up his mind to leave the South and live in exile before subjecting himself to the “hell on earth that the South would become.” When the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, led many to openly talk of what terms the South might be able to get from the North, he reflected on the course “it might be my duty to take.” If he still “had two legs,” he would have been fighting as a soldier and his choice would have been made for him. “But I was no longer able to give battle, I could not even promise myself the poor consolation which I intended to have of killing the first Yankee or traitor who should come into possession of my dwelling.” After three days meditating on his proper duty, his spirits lifted with the realization that “I had but to bring the proposition before my mind to be convinced that I could never submit to Yankee rule.”
What made the thought of remaining in the defeated South intolerable to Walter was his assumption that the racial and class privileges he and his family had enjoyed as members of North Carolina’s white elite would be swept aside in a radically transformed social order. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he understood peace advocates who talked of trying to reconstruct the old Union not as loyal Southerners who had grown weary of the war and its sacrifices but as covert abolitionist sympathizers who lusted after the planters’ lands and female slaves. “I believe that every reconstructionist is an abolitionist at heart, and likes Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation,” he wrote Rufus. “I would suspect on very slight grounds that he was an amalgamationist and had some notion of taking a negro wife.” The thought of living to see the power relations of his prewar world turned upside down filled him with a visceral hatred. Rather than “become the fellow citizen” of poor whites, “liable to be elbowed out of the road by them or to see my mother or my sisters insulted by the wenches who would flank the highway with them, I would rather lose all my property, loathe in a dungeon, die.” He might be “too poor and weak and helpless to get away,” but the goal of escaping from such a hellhole along with the “best people of the South” would give him something to live for after the collapse of the Confederacy.
Part of Walter seems to have welcomed the prospect of martyrdom in a life of exile. He was happier in his “lonely life” than he ever could have anticipated. His mountain farm grew “more and more beautiful to my eyes every day.” But earthly happiness turned poor sinners away from their spiritual duties, he recognized. Despite the pleadings of his mother, he had not joined a church, a failure for which he had “no excuse but sin.” “It may well be,” he concluded, “that it would prove a great blessing for me to have to give up this life of comparative ease and enjoyment in this delightful place and enter upon a life of hard work and discomfort in some distant region, where I would feel like a mere sojourner.” If affliction was good for the soul, Walter was ready to embrace it.
In the fall of 1863 Walter grew more optimistic over the Confederacy’s prospects. A show of military force in September quelled the worst of the disturbances in the disaffected regions of central and western North Carolina. Governor Zebulon Vance, who had left the army in the summer of 1862 to run for the governorship, pleaded with the War Department for a regiment of Confederate troops once it was clear that the Home Guard, older men and teenagers ineligible for the draft, was incapable of restoring order. Richmond dispatched troops under General Robert F. Hoke, a native North Carolinian, to intimidate supporters of the peace movement and capture deserters and conscripts. Hoke rounded up 3,000 men, he claimed, but his rough methods did damage too. He forced deserters out of their hiding places by holding their farm property as ransom until the men turned themselves in. Meanwhile, Hoke’s troops helped themselves to whatever they could carry off and destroyed the crops of those accused of sheltering deserters. Even a Confederate as loyal as James Gwyn felt that Hoke’s men had gone too far and would “ruin the most of the people” who defied the Confederacy; “their crops were very poor anyway I understand & what they will make will be destroyed.” The hard times they faced come winter and spring would worsen the very conditions that had fueled discontent in the first place.
While Hoke was punishing the dissidents in North Carolina, Tom Norwood rounded up over fifteen deserters from his company. The deserters were contrite after being brought back to Virginia and witnessing the stepped-up pace of executions for desertion in Lee’s army. “I think the execution system is producing a fine effect on the men generally,” Tom commented. He felt sure now that the Union army would never be able “to conquer us in the field.”
News of the Confederate victory in September at Chickamauga in northern Georgia heartened Walter. He was cheered, too, by the increasingly defiant opposition to Lincoln’s government led by the Peace Democrats, or the Copperheads as the Republicans called them. Most promising, he heard talk of powerful, blockade-busting rams that were being built in England for the Confederacy. Those ships, he predicted, “will open the blockade on sight and turn the besiegers of our coasts into the besieged.” Unknown to Walter, the British Foreign Office had given in to Union demands and detained the rams in England.
By early November Walter was boldly proclaiming to Joe Norwood that “our military situation, apart from the currency, is as hopeful as it ever has been.” But the Confederate paper dollar had lost 90 percent of its purchasing power as measured in gold. Walter could only wish that early on the Confederate Congress had levied a tax on land and slaves, which comprised in value two-thirds of all the property in the Confederacy. The slaveholding elite who dominated the Congress had not wanted to tax their own property to pay for the war. Prodded by President Davis, Congress passed a direct tax on land and slaves in February 1864, but it was riddled with exemptions and valued land and slaves at their preinflated prices of 1860. The tax fell far short of raising the revenue needed to bolster the value of the currency.
Walter’s hopes were clearly more wishful than realistic. The Confederate military effort in the fall of 1863 was at best buying time while the Union continued to draw on seemingly limitless resources of men and matériel. Despite intimations that they would recognize the Confederacy, the British held back from openly antagonizing the Union government. The successful Union campaigns in the summer of 1863 stiffened Northern resolve, and the Republicans won important fall elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania. After the elections Tom Norwood advised Walter to give up any hope that the Northern public would tire of trying to subjugate the South. Most significantly, Braxton Bragg failed to follow through on his victory at Chickamauga, allowing a Union army seemingly trapped in Chattanooga to turn the tables on him in November, rout his army, and send it retreating into northern Georgia.
Joe Norwood had every reason to feel “very much depressed about our national affairs” when he wrote Walter on November 17. Walter’s cousins in East Tennessee had borne the full brunt of Union raids after the Yankees occupied Knoxville and much of the surrounding region. The Lenoirs there “suffered severely, it being understood through the country that all of the name were good friends to the Confederate States or as the Yanks call us secessionists.” The next targets “to be overrun,” Norwood feared, were the prominent Confederates in Caldwell and neighboring mountain counties.
Haywood was in easiest reach of Union raiders. In reporting to his sister Sarah on the “feeling of insecurity” that hung over Haywood, Walter noted that the Yankees “do their work of plunder pretty thoroughly now-a-days, sometimes not even leaving a change of clothes for the little girls.” Gone was the optimism he had exuded a month earlier, replaced by the fear “that a more desperate struggle than ever is still before us, and the peace that must some day end it seems more distant than ever.” Regardless of how the war turned out, he was pretty certain he would not be seeing additional service as a military judge. Back in the summer, his friends in the army and in the Vance administration had secured a judgeship for him in the Virginia military courts, but his maimed condition made it difficult for him to move around with the army hearing cases. Although he never admitted it directly, he had too much pride to run the risk of being pitied by his fellow officers.
The woolen clothes Sarah made for Walter and sent to Haywood helped him get through his first winter in the mountains. He had anticipated the cold weather but not the killing frost in September that cut into his harvest. Supplies of food were tight throughout the winter, especially after Confederates hunting for deserters and stray cattle lodged with him on several nights in February and helped themselves to his small stockpile of corn and bacon. Tom and Lizzie shared what little they had, and Walter looked the other way when his slaves supplemented their meager rations with food they bartered for in illicit trade with local whites. Still, the situation would have been critical had Yankee raiders swept through Haywood. Walter attributed their absence to the poor roads and poverty in the region.
As hard as the winter was, Walter’s slaves enjoyed more comfortable living quarters in a new and larger cabin. The prohibitive cost of hauling cut lumber into the mountains had forestalled making improvements until he had a sawmill up and running in the fall. His slaves had worked hard enough to produce what would have been a decent harvest before the September frost, and they had tended the hogs well enough to put away 1,400 pounds of pork for the winter. Even so, Walter was convinced that they were shirking, especially the women. “Though I always considered she negroes a pest,” he complained to his mother, “mine are dirtier and lazier than even I counted on.” Blinded by his disdain, he simply could not understand why Maria, who was suffering from poor health after the birth of her last child in December, wanted to avoid work in the fields and had fallen behind in her spinning for the slaves’ winter clothing. Having lacked the nerve to undertake “the very disagreeable task of instituting and keeping up a strict discipline,” he blamed himself for his slaves’ lackadaisical attitude. He had put off this “hard piece of work” half hoping that the Yankees would be “kind enough to take them off my hands.” But if the Yankees stayed away, he vowed, his slaves would have “to make a great change soon, or have another master.”
Apart from his brief and uncomfortable experience with Cyrus back in 1858, Walter had avoided the responsibility of managing slaves. For standards on provisions and labor demands for his slaves at Crab Orchard, he relied on detailed guidelines furnished by his mother. In March his sister Laura advised that it was “not worthwhile to expect much from negroes in a moral point of view, or in any other point of view. I think we ought to do what we reasonably can to make them do right, and not worry our lives out because we succeed very imperfectly.” Walter conceded that he probably had set his standards too high. He had begun farming at Crab Orchard with the hope that his “system” for managing slaves “could make them a great deal better,” but he now realized that his plans were “impracticable” and likely would result in “pecuniary sacrifice rather than profit.” However, he urged Laura not to be concerned by his frustration; the ties that bound him to owning slaves were “so slight that my slaves can’t habitually trouble me much.” He was prepared at any time to be rid of them and was only awaiting “the dreary progress of this war before knowing how to decide these things.”
Unfortunately for Rufus Lenoir that “dreary progress” had resulted in an encampment of Georgia troops on his land. General James Longstreet’s troops were impressing supplies for an expected campaign in the spring of 1864 to push the Federals out of East Tennessee. Since early in the war the Confederate army had been seizing private property for government use whenever farmers were reluctant to sell goods whose price was constantly rising due to inflation. Longstreet’s men seized 100 bushels of Rufus’s corn, 100 pounds of bacon, and several wagonloads of hay. At night they simply took what they wanted—chickens, garden vegetables, and the seed potatoes needed for the next year’s crop. Sarah felt that the officers treated the family with proper respect, but she was appalled by the behavior of their men, especially after “two of them were found making themselves comfortable and agreeable in our negro cabins.” Supplies of corn were already low; now she worried whether there would be enough left to distribute to the poor. The situation would become even more dire if, as reported, Longstreet impressed all the horses and mules before he departed. “I tell you it is getting to be a reality that we are in danger of having what we have taken,” reported Sarah, “and no chance to make half a crop next year.” Rufus was spitting up blood from a lung condition, but at least that ensured he would not be drafted into the army.
In the end, President Davis ordered Longstreet back to Virginia on April 7 to reinforce Lee’s army to meet the Union’s spring offensive. Rufus had fared better than Sarah feared. Although impressment agents had taken his oxen, nine horses, and a mule, he was left with most of the farm animals he needed to put in his crops. Still, Walter’s mother was relieved to see the troops go. They were a law unto themselves, she wrote Walter, “who pressed corn, bacon, horses, &c &c, without proper authority, and stole and cut up considerably.”
The most heartening news Walter received in the spring of 1864 came from his nephew Tom Norwood. Stationed on the front lines of Lee’s army waiting for Grant’s long anticipated offensive, Tom assured Walter that “Grant will be whipped. Set that down.” The spirit of the army had never been higher. Even the men in Walter’s old Company A had reenlisted “with a zest” so that they could “blot out the big black mark against them (for desertion).” That “zest” may have been encouraged by the execution of two men for desertion only two weeks earlier. Privates George Black and Jeremiah Blackburn, the two men executed on April 14, were repeat offenders. The fact that each was married with a family gained them no leniency from the court-martial board. Blackburn had not even been seeing combat duty. After he shot off a finger in the summer of 1863 to avoid duty, he was detailed to serve at a Richmond hospital. He might have succeeded in sitting out the war had he not forged furlough papers for the absurdly long period of “1000 days.”
From May 4 through late June, Grant’s offensive pounded Lee’s army almost daily, and the fighting spirit in Tom’s regiment cooled considerably. Many in the 37th Regiment were now supporting William W. Holden for governor in the August election. Appealing to all who had supported the peace movement in 1863, Holden called for a state convention to open separate peace negotiations with the North. Walter had denounced Holden’s plan as a “wild absurd blind delusion” in a letter to Governor Vance in April urging him to wage an all-out campaign against Holden, his opponent. Most North Carolina soldiers were even harsher in their assessment, attacking Holden as a traitorous defeatist who should be hanged for encouraging brave men to desert their posts of duty. The men of the 37th were a decided exception in their favorable view of Holden, hailing as they did from the western mountain counties, what Tom called “a sort of cool country.” In his opinion they were never “very hot-blooded southerners any way.” Their position, as he outlined it to Walter, was, “We admit the necessity of fighting now while they invade our country; but we were cheated into it at the start; had no primary interest in it, never to the latest generations expected to be benefited by it.”
As Tom predicted, the men in the 37th cast a majority of their ballots for Holden. However, Vance swept to victory with 88 percent of the soldiers’ vote and 77 percent of the civilian vote. As popular as Vance undoubtedly was, a heavy dose of intimidation against Holden’s supporters, especially in the army, padded his huge majorities.
For Walter, as well as Tom Norwood and others in the shrinking but fanatical core of Confederate diehards, every loss of a friend or relative deepened the need to see the war through. In responding to the combat deaths of his cousins Mouton and William Waightstill Avery, Tom declared that “every day of my life I feel my love for our pure banner of Southern independence grow stronger & stronger, and my detestation of everything Yankee more & more intense. Oh it isn’t hatred, it’s abhorrence! Self defense urges us on to indefinite resistance & our wrongs cry for eternal vengeance!” Walter reacted with a similar fury when he heard that James Reagan, a Tennessee relative, had died in Yankee captivity in East Tennessee. Reagan’s death, Walter wrote Rufus, was “willful murder,” additional evidence that the Yankees offered Southerners only “subjugation or extermination.”
The death Walter felt most deeply was his mother’s. She died at Fort Defiance on September 23, 1864, never having seen Walter again after he left for Crab Orchard in the spring of 1862. As Walter knew only too well, she had viewed his departure as an abandonment of the family. She implored him to return repeatedly, and the longer he stayed away the more reproachful she became. Four months before her death, she bluntly asked him in a letter, “Was such a mind as yours bestowed to live the life of a Hermit? And will not its long continuance be detrimental in some ways, producing indifference, even selfishness[?]” Aside from trying to assure his mother that he would return for a visit as soon as he felt he could, Walter ignored her pleas. Selina’s tone was often hurtful because she sensed what Walter never openly acknowledged: his newfound identity as a Confederate had eclipsed his ties to his family. To have stayed with his mother in his boyhood home in his crippled condition would have been a devastating blow to the independence he had so proudly forged as a Confederate soldier. Faced with dependency on his slaves at Crab Orchard or on his mother and sister at Fort Defiance, he chose a solitary life with his slaves.
Having vowed never to submit to Yankee rule, Walter could hardly allow himself to feel that his slaves ruled him. In November he reached a crisis. It probably was more than coincidental that his anger focused on Delia, the same young slave whose saucy back talk to their mother had so enraged Rufus two years earlier. For weeks she had been “uncontrollably sulky and sullen,” he told his sister Sarah, “and to have submitted to [her conduct] would have been in effect to have resigned my position as head of the family, and have reduced myself to a plaything in the hands of my slaves.” He avoided such humiliation by severely whipping Delia. He could not risk alienating the hard-working Uriah, Delia’s husband, by selling off Delia, and he could not sell them as a couple since Uriah was owned by his brother William’s estate. He resolved the problem by hiring them out to a neighbor. Before they left, he called on his brother Tom’s assistance when he “whipped Delia till she humbled herself a little, which was not till she was well punished, for she tried very hard to ‘stout it out.’” Echoing the language Tom used when he had had a similar experience with a slave, he concluded, “I did my duty; I can see it in no other light; and the effect on my other negroes seems so far and will I have no doubt continue to be very good.” The effect was also doubtless “good” for Walter once he had projected onto the unfortunate Delia the anger he felt toward himself for abandoning his mother as she lay on her deathbed.
Of course, the Yankees could not be humbled so easily. The major Union offensives surged forward in the late summer and fall and ensured that Lincoln would easily be reelected in November. While Lee’s dwindling army was immobilized in the trenches of Petersburg, the Confederacy lost Atlanta on September 1, and two months later William Tecumseh Sherman began the march that carried his unstoppable army into North Carolina by March 1865. Closer to home for the Lenoirs, Union cavalry rode out of secure bases in East Tennessee and harassed western North Carolinians in a series of major raids. Outlaw Unionists and mountain outliers compounded the misery as they pillaged at will.
As the boundary between the battlefield and home front broke down, the war for civilians became a matter of defending home and property. “The robbers & bushwhackers in Wilkes & Caldwell are becoming more insolent & aggressive,” an alarmed Rufus reported to Walter in early November. “We never go to bed without thinking they may come before morning.” A week later, James Gwyn up in Wilkes County was also afraid to go to bed at night, “for they are committing robberies on some nearly every night & we are expecting them upon us constantly.” The home guards were no match for the marauding bands, and regular Confederate troops could not be spared.
Anxiously, Rufus sounded out Walter on moving all but his essential farm stock out to Haywood. He would even be willing to dispense with the hogs that provided the slaves with most of their meat rations. Led by Erwin, the same slave who had given Tom so much trouble when he had taken over his father’s plantation in Haywood, Rufus’s slaves had been “very dishonest” and increasingly open in their pilfering from the plantation. If the war brought an end to slavery, Rufus would be glad to see his slaves go.
Walter replied that he had all the farm animals he needed and advised Rufus to sell off his livestock at the highest price he could get. What he left unsaid was that conditions in Haywood were no better than in Caldwell. Tom had just lost five sides of leather to thieves, and armed robbers were hitting homes all along the East Fork of the Pigeon. Walter tried to console himself by taking in the delights of his wilderness that he loved so deeply. “We have charming weather,” he wrote Rufus in December. “This is a soft lovely moonlight night, as pleasant to stroll in as if it were June, and peace were made, and I had two legs, and some one here to love. The moon is as bright and the clouds as flitting and fantastic, as if the fierce conflicts and evil passions of this mighty war were only a merry revel or gay maskerade. The mood and clouds cannot think; but they seem to think it is all vanity.”
By early 1865, the Confederate war effort might as well have been called a masquerade, one that could no longer conceal the impending collapse of the Confederacy. By March Union troops were occupying Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major port still open to blockade runners. A mounted regiment led by George Kirk, a Tennessee Unionist, terrorized mountain residents as it laid waste to farms and property in Haywood County, just bypassing the homes of Tom and Walter. On March 7, Sherman’s fearsome army entered the state and headed toward Fayetteville.
As Union forces struck at will, political divisions deepened among the state’s leaders. A peace-at-any-price faction in the legislature defiantly introduced resolutions calling for a state convention to take North Carolina out of the Confederacy. Opponents cried treason and blamed such talk for emboldening the Yankees. Desperately, the Confederate Congress enacted legislation permitting slaves to join the army as combat soldiers. Although such a policy was tantamount to emancipation, President Jefferson Davis urged it, leaving many slaveholders aghast.
Whether raiding government supplies or helping feed deserters among their kinfolk, women in the mountains increasingly turned against the Confederate war effort.
(Source: From J. Madison, Fast and Loose in Dixie (1880).)
The political debates were made all the more bitter by the unchecked spread of violence and desertion across the state. In Yadkin County women desperate for food raided Confederate granaries in January. Lizzie Lenoir described the raids to her aunt Sarah with the disapproval of one who was not facing starvation. The raiders were “women” she noted with disbelief. Armed with axes, they hoped to haul off the corn in the warehouses with wagons. While a guard at the Jamesville warehouse held them at bay, “an old drunk man” scared their horses into bolting. Lizzie was happy to report that “they didn’t get any of the corn.” Women raiding the Hamptonville warehouse were able to take away all the corn they wanted. Lizzie could explain their “unbecoming behavior” only by insisting that cowardly men, “deserters perhaps or distillers,” put them up to it. She sadly concluded that “the degeneracy of the times is truly alarming.”
Areas that avoided the worst of this “degeneracy” did so by resorting to the pragmatic expedient of arranging a truce between the warring factions. Word went out to the deserters around Caldwell County that they could return to their homes unmolested, provided they lived quietly and made an effort at restitution for the property they had pillaged.
Before the Caldwell County court finalized the truce, General George Stoneman’s raiders tore through the county in the largest and most sustained Federal attack on western North Carolina. The 6,000 Union cavalry left East Tennessee in late March for a monthlong raid aimed at disrupting Confederate communications, destroying military resources, and liberating the 10,000 Federal prisoners held in Salisbury, North Carolina. Under tight discipline when they entered Wilkes and Caldwell counties, the troops inflicted less damage on civilian property than had been feared. They “were not allowed to plunder to any great extent or commit any acts of violence,” Joe Norwood reported. Still, the raid caught local residents by surprise and few had time to hide and guard their slaves and livestock in the surrounding woods. Once they knew that Federal troops were in the vicinity, many slaves had all the incentive they needed to escape. As Norwood wrote to Walter, “about two days before [Stoneman’s men arrived] a considerable number of negro men left for Tennessee & have not been heard from since.” Among those who made a bid for freedom were five of Norwood’s and four of Rufus’s from Fort Defiance.
The presence of Federal troops unleashed class tensions among whites as well as the latent conflicts between masters and slaves. For weeks, Norwood and other slaveholders had been “under constant apprehension about tory or robber bands & I have been serving on guard every third night & have been as much as two weeks without taking off my clothes,” he wrote. Ironically, Norwood’s property was more secure when Federal troops were in the neighborhood commanded by officers who looked to the local elite as their natural allies in maintaining social order and restoring political allegiance to the Union. That became apparent in the aftermath of the second occupation of the town of Lenoir in mid-April, when Stoneman stopped for two days in Lenoir to set up a temporary prison in Saint James Episcopal Church. During the brief occupation guards were detailed to protect local homes, including Norwood’s. Soon after the Federals pulled out, local marauders descended on the town, ransacking property the Federals had protected.
Not all of Stoneman’s officers shared his concern for the property rights of Confederates. Many of the men serving under him, especially Southerners who had enlisted in the Union army after fleeing from their mountain homes, were thirsting for revenge against the elite whom they blamed for the war. In exacting it, they often had the assistance of slaves. According to Selina Norwood, Stoneman’s men “tore everything to pieces at Uncle Avery’s, put pistols to the ladies’ heads, drove them out of the house and took what they liked, guided by a negro.”
Little news from Tom and Walter out in Haywood reached Fort Defiance in the last months of the war. The constant threat of attack by pillaging deserters prevented Tom from making his regular mail runs to the post office in Asheville. While Tom stood guard, Walter was able to get away for a brief visit to Fort Defiance. On the way back, he began composing a series of anti-Yankee poems and patriotic Confederate songs that he passed on to friends and sent off to newspapers for publication. Even as Confederate defenses collapsed and the mountain society around him fragmented into rival kinship groupings intent only on survival, he never gave in to defeatism. “Don’t suffer yourself to get blue” in those Petersburg trenches, he wrote his nephew Tom Norwood in March. “It is a Yankee color and does not become a Confederate soldier.”
There was much to be blue about. In early May 1865, Tom and Walter got a taste of what their Avery relatives had endured two weeks earlier. In the backwash of the war Union cavalry came to Crab Orchard. Their visit hardened Walter’s hatred of Yankees and his determination to remain an unreconstructed Confederate in the postwar period.
Tom Norwood’s reports to Walter of desertion in Lee’s army touched on a growing problem in the Confederate military that is fully analyzed in Mark A. Weitz, More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 59–84, surveys the rising anti-Confederate sentiment in North Carolina that so concerned the Gwyns. John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997) explore in depth the breakdown of community and the outbreak of guerrilla warfare that wracked much of western North Carolina. For a well-balanced account of the divisions in one mountain community, see Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).The burdens of the war fell most heavily on workingwomen, and Victoria Bynum relates part of their story in Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For a sensitive and harrowing fictional depiction of the turmoil in the Carolina mountains, see Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).
That North Carolina supplied men and material to the Confederacy until the very end was largely attributable to the astute wartime leadership of Governor Zebulon Vance. For Vance’s governorship and the deft way in which he turned back the peace movement led by William W. Holden, see Gordon B. McKinney, Zeb Vance: North Carolina’s Civil War Governor and Gilded Age Political Leader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Despite savage beatings of slaves from masters such as the one Walter inflicted on Delia, African Americans were able to take advantage of the divisions among whites on the home front by slackening off the pace of their work, widening the boundaries of their autonomy, and fleeing behind Union lines whenever the opportunity beckoned. For the changing patterns of race relations unleashed by the war, Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986) remains unsurpassed. The broadest treatment of how slavery and the Confederate war effort were intertwined can be found in Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).
The evolving Union policy toward slaves that Walter to his surprise came to accept is traced out in Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). These essays drew on the material in the same editors’ magnificently descriptive series Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982-), an indispensable source on the role of African Americans in the war.
