JUST AS WALTER WAS DECIDING TO GO INTO DEBT AND EMBARK on a new career as a land promoter, the Radical Republicans in Congress seized control of postwar policy. Provoked when the former Confederate states rejected the Fourteenth Amendment (only Tennessee ratified it), Congress in March 1867 required that black suffrage be included in new state constitutions. The vote of the freedmen, coupled with the temporary disfranchisement of those Confederates barred from holding office (by the Fourteenth Amendment), allowed Republican parties to spring up throughout the former Confederacy. Swept into office by the vote of the freedmen and poor whites, especially in mountainous areas that had turned against Confederate policies, these new parties accepted the terms set down by Congress and were in power when their states were readmitted to the Union.
Most whites greeted black suffrage with stunned anger. Writing to Tom from Fort Defiance on March 31, Walter reported that the whites seemed “to bear their political fate with the dignified calmness appropriate to the circumstances.” Two days later, a Union army officer mounted the courthouse steps in Wilkesboro to announce the congressional demands. “He told us all we had to submit to the acts of Congress,” reported James Gwyn, “& a heap of stuff about who carried on the war.” It was, Gwyn added, “a great time for the tories & negroes.”
Undeterred by the new political environment, Walter pushed ahead with his plans for William’s land. After arranging with the other heirs for new deeds to be drawn up assigning him ownership of their shares, he spent most of the spring and summer on surveying expeditions. He began with the Beech Creek lands in Watauga that lay close to the Tennessee border. The soil here was poor and the tract was steep and heavily timbered. To expedite its sale, he created seventeen small lots priced at slightly under a dollar per acre. He had no wish to return to the area anytime soon. Not only was it remote, most of its settlers were poor Unionists, some of whom were trespassing on Walter’s land. Not wanting to stir up trouble, he did his best to ingratiate himself with the local landowners, even though they were “a rough set, and some of them behaved very badly during the war, robbing even their poorest neighbors, and of course are still radicals.” Many had “a bountiful supply of body lice, which have never been disbanded since the war,” which, to Walter’s dismay, were soon tormenting him too. He and his surveyor, A. C. Farthing, were more successful in fending off what Walter referred to as the “local body guard” of lice when they moved south in Watauga to survey a 500-acre tract adjoining the lands of Phillip Shull. By June, Walter was back in Caldwell County subdividing William’s lands near Lenoir. Energized by his plans, he was hiking on his wooden leg up to ten miles a day over rough terrain and was not “atall broken down.” He was beginning to think, as he wrote Tom, that he had made “a very good trade, perhaps too good a one, to buy the land at $18,000.”
Walter remained optimistic even as political power in North Carolina was about to shift to the new Republican coalition of freedmen, disaffected white Unionists, and the handful of the white elite who had decided to cooperate with the Republicans in order to protect their property interests. Although he had made no land sales, he was certain his low prices would attract buyers. If he could borrow enough money to tide him over, he was “not afraid to wait awhile with the main bulk of the land.” However, he had to admit that it seemed “as if the whole country were for sale; and the spirit of emigration from the state is one of the worst signs for us.”
Gwyn needed no convincing that hard times were ahead. After observing the voting in November 1867 for the constitutional convention, he noted that “all the trash & negroes voted the radical ticket . . . what we are coming to, time will tell. Nothing good I fear.” The Republicans carried almost every county and elected all but thirteen of the 120 convention delegates. When it assembled in Raleigh in January, the convention drafted the most democratic constitution North Carolina had ever known. It guaranteed manhood suffrage, eliminated property qualifications for state office, provided for the popular election of judges, and replaced the old county courts controlled by local elites with popularly elected commissioners. Gwyn was so discouraged over his future prospects that he planned to do little more with his plantation than “make enough to live on.” He expected nothing but “a great deal of harm” to come out of the convention. “The South is ruined indeed I think,” he concluded.
The elite’s gloomy view of the future came close to being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Men such as Gwyn had no intention of promoting economic recovery as long as the Republicans were in power and in a position to claim credit for it. After Holden was elected the state’s first Republican governor in the spring of 1868, a united conservative bloc of former Whig Unionists and Democratic secessionists did all in their power to undermine the Republican administration. With most of the state’s newspapers, landed wealth, and educated class arrayed against them, the Republicans made little headway in righting an economy reeling under wartime losses, crop failures in 1866 and 1867, and a severe shortage of investment capital.
As economic conditions remained dismal, Walter’s decision to go into debt to buy his brother’s land increasingly seemed like a reckless gamble. His friends cautioned him to prepare for the worst. “The demand for real estate is now so little,” noted Walter Steele, “that I fear you will find it to turn out not so well as you have been led to believe. A debt now makes me tremble, and you may find that you have taken upon yourself a load which will be quite cumbersome to you.” Isaac Lenoir, a cousin from Sweetwater, Tennessee, pointed out that settlers could purchase land comparable to Walter’s at lower prices from the government or in the Tennessee mountains. Feeling that Walter would never be able to repay his debts “under the negro government which will weigh upon us of the South for years,” he proposed that Walter seek a release from his contract to purchase all of William’s estate. For William Bingham, Walter’s plans for his lands would have to be put on hold “till the negro incubus is removed.” In a fantasy common to many whites after the war, Bingham argued that African Americans would not be able to survive in freedom and would die off. “The negro is doomed,” he wrote Walter in early 1868, “and unless a merciful Providence interferes, I don’t see how a war of the races is to be avoided.” Once the deadening weight of the black presence was finally removed, he foresaw a wave of new settlement and capital that would bring about “the glowing future” that Walter had predicted.
During the winter at Crab Orchard sales remained at a trickle, primarily because money was “very scarce.” Walter blamed the latest credit squeeze on the sharp drop in cotton prices in 1867 that had depressed markets in the Lower South for bacon and livestock, the chief sources of cash for mountain farmers. He was discouraged but determined not to give the Yankees the satisfaction of admitting failure: “I must stand it, & I think that I can do so as long as the Yankees can.” As for his vows during the war to leave the South before submitting to Yankee rule, he now conceded that “Brazil & other comparatively stable & free honestly conducted governments are too far off for an old man to hop to on one leg.”
Walter left Crab Orchard in the fall of 1868 to resume his surveying in Watauga and to begin laying out town lots at Hickory Tavern in Catawba County. His 565 acres there lay within a mile of a railroad depot and, he believed, were easily worth $5,500 if sold in a single block. Knowing that no buyers would step forward at that price, he decided to lay off lots on each side of a broad avenue and donate alternate lots “to persons who would improve them respectably.” He would also enhance the moral character of what he envisioned as a growing commercial center by donating at least ten acres to any religious denomination or philanthropic organization that would build a college or high school. Moreover, as he noted to James Gwyn, “if such a thing could be started, it would greatly enhance the value of the land.”
In Watauga, Walter set aside for the family a large tract of land along the Boone Fork that he deemed too valuable to be sold at the current depressed prices. Since he could not afford with his pressing debts to carry this land himself, he offered it as an investment to his brother-in-law James Gwyn. He also tried to interest Gwyn in a tract of the Beech Creek lands that possibly contained valuable deposits of silver. A prospective buyer had backed out of a sale, and Walter was desperate to reduce his debts. Although reluctant to divert capital from his mercantile business and skeptical from the start of Walter’s land venture, Gwyn felt an obligation to assist his wife’s brother. He agreed to reduce Walter’s debt to him by $2,000 in exchange for the Beech Creek property. With even greater reluctance, Rufus agreed to buy 400 acres that adjoined the Boone Fork tract of 1,000 acres in Watauga that Walter, after Gwyn’s refusal, now hoped his sister Sarah would take as payment for the $3,000 he owed her. For himself, Walter reserved a tract of land at the head of the Linville Gorge, a parcel that struck him as richer than the Boone Fork tract and “exceedingly beautiful in its scenery.” It was here that he planned to retire.
By the summer of 1868, Walter was resigned to realizing little from his land sales “for a long time.” However, he still believed that they would be “lively when radicalism is once thoroughly defeated.” In the meantime, he began preparing for a permanent move to Watauga that would place him closer than Haywood to his main landholdings. He still had a lot of surveying to finish, and he had to be physically present to show the land and draw up contracts for purchasers and renters. He expected to spend the next two winters at Crab Orchard looking after his cattle and sheep and would then move his livestock to Watauga once his new home was ready.
Walter and his friends fared better in the first year of Republican rule than they had expected. To be sure, no economic recovery was in sight, but conditions had stabilized. After two abysmal years, the harvest was good, and despite dire warnings in the conservative press of racial violence and Republican schemes to confiscate land, the wealthy were left undisturbed in their property holdings and the freedmen peacefully signed labor contracts. From Orange County in the central Piedmont, William Bingham reported that “the general impression in these parts is that we have touched bottom” and that the freedmen were “quiet & do but little stealing.” Having had no problems with his black hands at Crab Orchard, Walter pretty much agreed. He had been temporarily shaken by the news of a minor race riot in Asheville on the day of the presidential election in November 1868. A mob of young white males went on a rampage after a freedman protested being denied the right to vote by a white election clerk. The mob shot and killed one African American and injured eighteen others. Walter, and nearly all other whites, blamed the disturbance on the blacks and felt they had received a well-deserved lesson. He assured James Gwyn in December that “the negroes here are very quiet & orderly since their riot at the election.” He was even happier to note that “their number here is said to be diminishing, the mortality among them being very great.” Then, in a bitter swipe at Republican efforts to annex the Dominican Republic, he added, “What does the president want with St. Domingo? To bury them in?”
These African Americans registering to vote in Asheville in 1867 eagerly took part in a political revolution that stamped Reconstruction as unacceptably radical for most Southern whites.
(Source: Harper’s Weekly, September 28, 1867.)
In 1869 conservatives counterattacked in a well-coordinated campaign against the Republicans. Taxes, traditionally very low in North Carolina, had increased sharply under the Republicans, in large measure to fund new social programs such as public education for both races. Conservatives successfully accused Republicans of reckless fiscal extravagance. Exploiting the weakest link in the Republican coalition—the biracial alliance of the rural poor—they appealed to white pride and called for the restoration of white supremacy. To hasten that restoration and demoralize Republicans, respected local conservatives used the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups to intimidate blacks into submission. Charging that the Republican program of state-supported railroads was riddled with corruption, conservatives forced the state to default on some of its railroad bonds. The Republicans had been guilty of just enough dishonesty and incompetence for the charges of corruption to stick.
The state’s mounting fiscal problems came as no surprise to Walter. He had always viewed the Republican leaders as greedy thieves, indistinguishable from the corrupt political rings he believed set policy in Washington. By the winter of 1869 he was expecting that the state would soon have to repudiate its railroad bonds, and he derived a perverse satisfaction from the prospect. What would trigger a default, or as he put it in a letter to James Gwyn in February 1869, “the big vomit of repudiation [which] relieves the stomach of the body politic,” would be the political backlash that set in when the Republicans tried to cover the deficit in the state treasury by raising taxes to an “intolerable” level. At that point the Republicans would repudiate the state’s debt and find support for such an irresponsible act from “the landless laboring classes, the simple dupes whom they are now leading by the nose,” who would eagerly free themselves from the burden of taxation. To survive “the pretty hard struggle to come,” the Lenoirs and their friends must “prepare to live in the simplest manner, to be industrious & economical, to work without trying to make all we can, & to be strictly frugal in all our expenditures.”
Walter gave Gwyn the same advice he had been giving his family since the end of the war. Rufus did his best to follow it but still found himself squeezed by rising taxes and declining income from his plantation. When he received his bill for county taxes in August 1869, he was short of the funds to pay it. “There is less money & more taxes than I ever heard of before,” he wrote Tom. “I see no chance to pay such taxes by farming.”
Rufus eventually came up with the money, but many white farmers did not. Sinking ever deeper into debt, some fled their creditors and headed west, with Texas being a favorite destination. Others with more substantial property holdings migrated out of fear that their property would not be secure once the Republicans assumed control of the county governments. In a panicky tone, Bingham informed Walter in the summer of 1869 that “radicalism is prevailing generally in our township elections, and bringing on its inevitable consequences. Property in the region is growing more insecure, and violence is taking the place of law.” A rash of barn burnings, presumably by angry black tenants who had been evicted, brought out the Ku Klux Klan, and Bingham was concerned that mob law was about to be imposed. Still, he could not condemn the vigilantes: “Property must be protected, and it is simply impossible to do this with carpet-bag judges and legislators elected by negroes.” Unwilling to accept the rule of those they deemed incapable of governing responsibly, many of Bingham’s wealthier neighbors pulled up stakes and left in the fall of 1869. They were among “our best people,” he told Walter, and they were so anxious to get out that they sold their personal property “at great sacrifice” and left with their lands unsold.
For Walter the news from Bingham confirmed that the South had “reached the philosophical stage of drowning which comes on after the struggle is over.” He resolved to take no interest in the disgusting spectacle “except as matter of polite curiosity.” Instead he would stick to his self-imposed hardship and isolation for however many years it took to settle his land matters “so that they would be in no danger of breaking any one else down.” In the fall of 1869 he explained to Archie Christian, his brother-in-law in Virginia, that he could not break free to pay him a visit because “I have no hopes of escaping for several years to come at least, from the confining business which now occupies me. But the dream is too pleasant & I am of too hopeful a disposition to abandon it entirely.”
Walter was working himself to exhaustion in pursuit of his dream. In addition to traveling to remote sites for field surveys, arranging meetings with prospective buyers, and attending court to file land papers, he was spending his winters working at Crab Orchard. Too tired to read or write after his evening meal, he retired for a few hours of fitful sleep only to work half the night at his desk. He knew he was stretched too thin but refused to slow down. Part of what drove him, he told Gwyn, was his conviction that it was “a blessed thing for a Southern gentleman in these days of our political degradation to be worked hard all the time, especially if he can work with any reasonable hope of making both ends meet in a business point of view.” Having lost political power at the hands of the Yankees, self-respecting Southern whites were honor bound to establish a record of business success.
In the winter of 1870, Walter and Tom completed surveying their lands in Haywood. Between them they owned over 10,000 acres, and the growing problem of trespassers left them anxious to record an airtight title to it. One of the trespassers, in Walter’s eyes at least, was Thomas Crawford, a tenant of his for fifteen years. Crawford had claimed a right of possession to sixty acres of Walter’s Crab Orchard property and refused to leave. After bringing suit in Superior Court, Walter backed off and accepted the loss of what he deemed as “not very valuable” land. In addition to his other work that winter, he contracted with a builder for a house and mill on his property at Shulls Mill in Watauga.
Walter finished surveying his land in Watauga in the summer of 1870 and made a promising start on a settlement there. But he soon realized that his ambitious building plans called for more cash than the sale of his lands could provide, and “the money does not come in fast enough to pay my current expenses.” Reluctantly he concluded that he would have to sell his Haywood lands. Not only did he need money, but his land business required his presence in Watauga nearly year-round. He first offered his Haywood property to Gwyn, who expressed no interest. So he listed the holdings with the North Carolina Land Company for a year with instructions to sell it for a minimum of $5,750. He still hoped to retain for the family what he referred to as “the cream of my Watauga lands,” the 1,200-acre tract along the Boone Fork he had set aside for Sarah that adjoined land Rufus had already purchased from Walter. However, Rufus felt he had overpaid Walter for his land, and Sarah made no business decisions without Rufus’s approval, so nothing was done, leaving Walter angry and hurt.
As Walter was exploring options to raise cash and reduce his debt, the Republican administration under Governor Holden was fighting for its survival in the wake of an upsurge in Klan terrorism in the spring of 1870. The troubles climaxed with the killing of two prominent Republican politicians in Alamance and Caswell counties. Formerly reluctant to act, Holden now sent white militia units raised in the western counties into Alamance and Caswell. Under the command of George W. Kirk, the Union officer notorious for his wartime raids into western North Carolina, the troops arrested about 100 men, including some of Holden’s most outspoken political critics. Bypassing the local courts, which were controlled by the Klan, Holden ordered the suspects tried before a military commission. He was forced to turn them over to Federal authorities when outraged Democrats jumped on his highhanded tactics and obtained writs for their release under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, legislation intended to protect the rights of the very blacks and white Unionists the Klan had been terrorizing. Raising the cry of endangered white liberties, the Democrats carried both houses of the state legislature in the August elections and impeached Holden the following February.
Despite their legislative victory in 1870, the Democrats were forced to share power with the Republicans for the next six years. The issues of reform and equal rights championed by the Republicans still won the support of the poorer voters of both races. Even after Holden’s ouster, the Republicans had enough strength to vote down a Democratic-sponsored attempt in 1871 to call another constitutional convention and to carry the elections for president and governor in 1872. Meanwhile, the Democrats remained in firm control of the legislature.
For Walter and other white conservatives, the Democrats’ partial comeback was no panacea. Republicans continued to dominate many county governments where they set policies on schools and tax rates and adjudicated most legal disputes. William Bingham was hoping for a Democratic victory in the presidential election of 1872 if no other reason than to free the South from protective tariffs and “New England monopolies.” He expected the radicals to triumph, however, for “radicalism is omnipotent in America, & it is manipulated by the money power, which is in the hands of the monopolists.” The Republicans, he predicted, would spread enough lies about the Ku Klux Klan “to blind the North to the oppression the poor are suffering for the benefit of the rich.”
Walter’s financial situation grew increasingly desperate. On into the 1870s, there were few takers for his lands in Watauga. The only person offering to buy was one Henry Moore, an African American. Inquiring whether Walter would sell to a “negro,” Walter’s land agent hastened to note that “Henry is a very good Negro and minds his own business and he can pay you fore it.” Walter went ahead with the sale. Rather than buying land from Walter, whites in Watauga were more intent on poaching his timber. Sales of land were little better in Hickory Tavern. Despite a pickup in the summer of 1871, Walter soon admitted to Tom that “the growth of the place so far is not substantial and under bad management.”
In the fall of 1871, still anxious to sell his Haywood lands, Walter subdivided some of them to market to local buyers. He felt good about his prospects “of selling them to good neighbors and at much better prices in proportion to their real value than I could get for my Hickory tavern & Linville lands.” But by the spring, Walter realized that he had miscalculated: no one would buy his Haywood lands for cash. He was in “a death struggle,” he told his niece Laura; “I can only sell land on a credit and can get no money on the notes. I have to compound the interest of the notes that I owe, and do not see how I can raise money any longer to pay taxes.” The corrupt Republican “army of tax gathers” was draining the South of its productive wealth and destroying all forms of enterprise save for “official stealing.” Had it not been for those taxes, Walter was certain that the postwar Southern economy would have prospered with an infusion of emigrants and outside capital. The mountains of North Carolina, he insisted, were “certainly by nature one of the most valuable and desirable portions of the U.S.” and “radical misrule” had prevented honest men from making a decent living and impoverished all those who had debts to pay.
Out of money in the spring of 1872, Walter focused entirely on his land sales. However, he had put too much work into improving his stock farm at Crab Orchard to abandon it completely. Instead, he arranged with Jesse Anderson, the tenant with whom he had boarded since the war, to feed his livestock in the winter after they were brought down from the summer pastures. Anderson would also maintain the hay meadows and monitor the work of the other tenants.
Walter had additional plans at Crab Orchard to build stables, a workshop for his tools, shelters for his wagons and lumber, a springhouse, and an apple house for storing the fruit from his maturing young orchards. But none of the proposed purchasers for his Haywood lands were able to raise funds for the required down payment. Lacking the funds to finish what he had begun at Crab Orchard, he turned over management of his beloved farm to Anderson.
Walter fully grasped his predicament. “I am rich enough to feel how poor I am,” he told Gwyn, “rich enough in land to be very poor till I get rid of it or have the means to improve it.” The solution to his dilemma seemed simple enough: sell most of the land, clear his debts, and improve one piece with the proceeds from the sale of the remainder. But that was just what he had been trying to do for the past five years. Even after giving up hope of finding cash buyers for large tracts, he was unable to sell small tracts on long-term credit to meet his expenses. Most of his purchasers had been landless poor whites anxious to secure a homestead for their families. Few could afford to put any cash down, and many had fallen behind in their credit payments. Still, as Walter emphasized to Gwyn, “no other class of persons seem now to care to buy lands,” and money was so scarce that offering his land at a third of his asking price would likely not attract many new buyers. As long as his delinquent families were working hard to enhance the value of their land, Walter was willing to be indulgent with them. Indeed, improving mountain lands had always been one of his main goals. Had he been out of debt, he would have been satisfied with his sales to date.
His debts, however, continued to rise. A speculative bubble in railroad securities broke in 1873, setting off shock waves in financial markets that triggered a national depression. Prices for the South’s major agricultural commodities plunged and the region’s already inadequate credit supply tightened up even further. Only Gwyn’s timely assistance kept Walter out of bankruptcy. After first assuring Walter that he was content with interest-only payments on what Walter owed him, he in effect cancelled the entire debt when he agreed in 1873 to purchase the Haywood lands that Walter had been unable to sell. Relieved of that large debt and free of the expenses he had been incurring at Crab Orchard, Walter was able to survive the long depression that persisted until 1878, but just barely.
He closed the gap between expenses and income by selling his lands piecemeal, as needed. Whenever he had any surplus cash, he plowed it back into his land in the form of improvements. The surpluses, however, were few and far between. As he confessed to Rufus, “I can barely live & make a few scratches towards preparing my land for nephews & nieces who have none of it in the wild state I will leave it in when I die. The fault will be in them, not in the land.” Or rather, he added, the fault should rest with the government which “so burdens us with debt & mad extravagance that it is no longer easy to live by farming.”
Walter’s lament over the future of farmers was a common one in North Carolina by the 1870s. The recovery of the agricultural economy from wartime losses had been, at best, slow and halting, and Walter’s nephews were among the many sons of the prewar farmers and planters who had no intention of following in the footsteps of their parents. All James Norwood, Joe and Laura’s son, wanted to do was “to make my escape while I am young.” “Things at home look gloomy,” he wrote Walter in 1875. “Parents growing old and feeble—going down into old age in debt and poverty and the sisters growing old with so little to make life happy and desirable and I too poor to help them any and wanting to marry a delicate girl.” After saving some money working for his cousins in Tennessee, Norwood planned on heading to Texas where he hoped to find “enough rich land to make me independent.” Walter Gwyn, Walter’s namesake and James’s son, opened a law practice in Asheville where he handled some of Walter’s land business. Gwyn Lenoir, Rufus’s eldest son, left home as a teenager. Although Rufus was disappointed, he understood his son’s decision. After all, he noted, Gwyn was obliged to see farming as “a slow business the way we manage it—Not much good stock—behind in farming utensils—lands not improving—no money making—No mules to sell—seasons too short for cotton—& too dry for grass.”
Like Rufus, Walter understood the reluctance of the sons in the Lenoir clan to go into farming in their native state. Whatever they did, he urged them to avoid the entrapment of debt and to live like free men. “He who doesn’t pay his way as he goes is some body’s pauper [and] will end in having the soul of a slave,” he counseled Wat (Walter) Gwyn, while he who pays his own way is “the freest of the free.” Of course Walter was speaking from bitter experience. For over a decade, he had felt smothered by debts that in his mind reduced him to the abject dependency of the slaves who had always served for whites as a frightful model of what not to become. To free himself of this sense of defilement, he would continue to accept whatever hardships he would have to endure to regain his financial independence.
At least the election results of 1876 brought some satisfaction. A campaign to restore white supremacy returned conservative Democrats to power in North Carolina. They ran up large majorities in the legislature, elected the popular wartime leader Zebulon Vance as governor, and won popular approval of amendments proposed by a constitutional convention of 1875 dominated by the Democrats. The most important of these amendments put power back into the hands of local elites by granting the legislature control over county governments. Elsewhere in the former Confederate South, the remnants of Radical rule collapsed when the Republicans bargained for Southern support in order to secure the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes in the aftermath of the disputed Hayes-Tilden election.
James Norwood expressed the joy of most Southern whites when he exclaimed to Walter in December that he was as “happy as ever a shouting Methodist was at camp meeting—& tho I now believe that Hayes will be inaugurated, I believe that we have a solid South, & that the time is now at hand that the place of the carpet-bagger will know no more for ever.” Concerned that Southern honor was once again being impugned by reports in the Northern press that hotheaded Southerners would resort to violence to prevent an electoral vote in favor of Hayes, Walter felt compelled to write to a Northern editor setting the record straight. Adopting a magnanimous tone befitting an honorable Southern gentleman and Confederate veteran, he offered assurances that the South would peacefully accept Hayes’s election. No one in the South wanted more bloodshed, he insisted, least of all former Confederate soldiers.
Contrary to the expectations of many whites, the overthrow of Reconstruction did not produce an immediate economic upturn in North Carolina or elsewhere in the South. That would have to await the end of the national depression in the late 1870s and the willingness of Northerners by the 1880s to invest in a South they finally deemed to be politically stable. When the economy did pick up, those who benefited the most were manufacturers, town developers, and farmers who made a successful transition to the new cash crop of tobacco. Crop prices, however, continued to fall and small farmers sank deeper in debt. What prosperity there was largely bypassed rural areas.
The flow of capital into manufacturing and towns that could tap into an expanding network of railroads produced the first sizable sales that Walter realized from his Hickory Tavern properties. “Hickory (incorporated as a city in 1870) is growing more rapidly than ever before in population and business,” he happily informed Rufus in the winter of 1880. The new growth industry of tobacco was key. The light, sandy soils on the piney ridges across the Carolina piedmont, considered almost worthless before the war, were ideally suited for the bright-leaf variety of tobacco used in the manufacture of cigarettes, a relatively new product aggressively promoted after the war by North Carolina entrepreneurs like James Duke. Two large tobacco warehouses had recently opened in Hickory, and five tobacco factories were slated to begin operations soon.
Walter used the income from the sale of his lots in Hickory to pay the interest on his debts and finance his milling business close to his new home in Shulls Mill in Watauga, but the money went out as fast as it came in. In building a new dam for his gristmill in 1881, he had been forced to tear down his old sawmill and now had no money to pay for a new one. He pleaded with his contractor, C. J. Cilley, to build the mill on credit. He explained that he could expect no help from any of his other debtors and described himself as “a beggar” in “trying to build a mill & conquer a small stock farm from the Watauga forests in order that I might make my own living, I have worked hard, lived hard, worn rags, & banished myself from society, &, perhaps in my case harder still, from my books.” Won over by this heartfelt argument, Cilley built the mill.
Relieved that he had survived what he called his “time of greatest need,” Walter was decidedly more cheerful when he wrote his niece Laura Gwyn that fall with news of all that he hoped to accomplish. He was starting two grass farms for his cattle and sheep and was expanding his milling business at Shulls Mill, but most of all he was looking forward to the day when he could retire at Linville. His favorite spot there lay at the foot of Grandfather Mountain, the highest peak in the Blue Ridge range. He referred to it as Under the Pinnacle and pronounced it “one of the loveliest places in all the mountains.” “I am in love with it,” he told Laura, “& want, when I can get it sufficiently improved, to make my home on it.” He found the site all the more appealing because the South Atlantic & Ohio Railroad was about to reach Cranberry, just twelve miles away. The coming of the railroad, he predicted, would open up the scenic wonders of Watauga to outside visitors and promote the economic development he had long wished to see. In his mind none of this would have been possible under Republican rule. As he put it to Laura, “Truly we are making wonderful progress at the South since we have escaped from the grip of the carpetbaggers.”
In the winter of 1882–1883 Walter cut his remaining ties to Haywood. His brother Tom died in January, having struggled constantly to make a living after the war. Like most Southern farmers, he never had enough money. What he did earn he insisted on using to pay off his debts even though he was able to collect little from his debtors. As his farm languished and his wife Lizzie suffered from chronic poor health, he took pride in honoring his obligations, including paying a $4,000 debt for some slaves bought just before the war. It took more than ten years to clear the debt, but in doing so he felt “more like a free man than if I had withheld what justly belonged to [his creditors].” Two weeks after Tom’s death, Walter Gwyn reported from Asheville that he had found a buyer for Walter’s last tract of land in Haywood.
An article that appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer in the spring of 1882 so upset Walter that for the first time in his life he ran for political office. The article named Walter as one of a number of prominent North Carolinians who had recently “embraced the knees of the President [the Republican Chester A. Arthur] and besought his smiles on their efforts to obtain office.” Walter denounced the charge as “slanderous” with a card (or printed announcement) in the local press. As an honorable Southerner, he protested, he had always shunned the Republicans and “their high crimes against the life of liberty.” Like many true Southerners, he had fought the war, he declared, “to defend a few abstract doctrines of States rights against the usurpations of the Federal government.” Unlike some former patriots, he would never shame his native land by seeking office at the hands of a party committed only to the “mad and revolutionary exercise of power.” He warned that if the Republicans succeeded in luring enough Democrats to restore the popular election of county officials, the eastern counties with large black populations would elect corrupt and incompetent governments. Economic paralysis would once again grip the state. He chided the News and Observer for even thinking that he would cooperate with the Republicans. His honor was at stake.
Walter’s family name and his stature as a war hero ensured a wide reading for his card. Encouraged by a show of public support and still anxious to vindicate his name, he announced his candidacy for the legislature as a representative from Watauga. Easily elected, he went to Raleigh in December to serve in the legislative session of 1882–1883. Like many Southern Democrats representing upcountry farming districts, Walter defended the interests of debt-ridden farmers who wanted relief from tight money and scarce credit in more flexible money that was not tied to a gold standard. For these farmers, the tyranny of the Federal government after the war had taken the form of revenue agents whose efforts to collect a national tax on whiskey provoked a violent response in mountain districts where backwoods distilleries were a source of both profit and pleasure. Walter saw himself as the farmers’ spokesman when he introduced resolutions in January 1883 that called for an end to the Internal Revenue Service, a reduction in the protective tariff, and greater economy in the Federal government.
Although flattered when the legislature voted to send his resolutions on to North Carolina’s congressional delegation, Walter had no intention of seeking a career in politics. Reporting to his sister Sarah from Raleigh in February 1883, he indicated that after having “hid away so long in my semi-hermitage among the wild mountains,” he doubted whether he would be able to match wits, “as warriors of old were wont to measure swords,” with the state’s “most accomplished sons.” He had worked hard, shunned no responsibility, and was astonished to note that he had been “listened to with greater attention in the august presence of the House of Representatives, than when I was trying to talk to the little gatherings of my constituents in Watauga.” With a sense of pride in a job well done, he was ready “to gladly retire at the end of the session.”
Walter left Raleigh in the spring with a cold and a bad case of indigestion and was complaining a year later that his health had not yet fully recovered. Ignoring the advice of friends and family, he continued to push himself with a grueling routine of work. “I find my business here badly in need of me as might have been expected,” he wrote Rufus from Shulls Mill upon his return in late March. Terrible weather took a toll on his health. “I have been a close prisoner this winter, walled in by snow & ice, rain & mud,” he wrote Rufus in March 1884. “I never took so little exercise for so long a time together, when able to go; & that, & care about my affairs has made me more puny than usual.” He was especially frustrated at not being able to walk on the ice or snow without falling. During the periodic thaws, he had to stop frequently to pull his “wooden leg, sometimes with the aid of both hands, from deep mud.” He felt that his health and strength improved when he was able to work outside and “stump around” after his farm hands, but he had to admit that “the symptoms of old age seem to be growing me rapidly on me of late.” What most lifted his spirits that winter was a report in the newspaper that explained the bad weather and the strange atmospheric conditions at Shulls Mill that produced a veil around the sun and incredibly vivid red sunsets. They were part of the global fallout from the momentous volcanic explosion that blew up most of the island of Krakatoa near Java on August 23, 1883.
Never permitting himself a break from self-imposed burdens, Walter suffered a mild stroke the following August. Still weak ten days after the attack, he asked Sarah to come out and look after him for a while. All he remembered was that he had felt dizzy when his vision blurred with a “glimmer before my eyes” and he suddenly fell and sprained his hip. Adding to his problems that fall was a cash squeeze that forced him to borrow another $300 to get through the year. Interpreting his stroke as a warning that he was running out of time to settle his scattered land business, he wrote his debtors in early 1885 that he was prepared to sue them if they did not make a good-faith effort to repay at least part of what they owed him. Wat Gwyn, whose Western Carolina Land Agency was now providing Walter with legal advice and promotional services for his land business, was able to collect $400 from two debtors that spring. Enough trickled in from his other debtors to alleviate the worst of his cash problems.
Walter’s family reacted to his brush with death by redoubling efforts to convince him that he had to join a church to have any hope for eternal salvation. Walter thanked his niece Mary Ann for her concern over his “spiritual welfare” and confessed that he could give her “no good reason” why he was not a member of the Reformed Episcopal Church of his parents and other family members. He certainly felt an affinity for their creed and often thought of joining but had habitually hung back. As to why, he could only repeat what he had often told his mother: “My strongest hindrance, I will not call it reason & you need not tell me that it is utterly illogical & inconsistent if presented as a reason, is my sense of utter personal unworthiness, which helps to reconcile me here to a life on the outskirts of society.” Unworthy in his mind of fellowship either with God or human society, he continued in his self-inflicted banishment.
When Mary Ann urged her brother in the spring of 1885 to come to Green Hill and recuperate under her care, Walter answered that “I am in the tread mill, & I do not know when I can get out of it long enough for such a visit.” He needed a long rest, but he refused to take it out of fear that any time away from his land business would result in the sacrifice of all that he had worked so long to achieve. Sensing that he had little time left, he pushed himself even harder. Although reading and writing became difficult as his eyesight began to fail, he still spent countless hours keeping up with his business correspondence, copying and ordering the field notes of his various land surveys, and poring over numerous newspapers. As he raced against the clock to finish all he had dreamed of accomplishing, the death notices in the newspapers left him feeling even lonelier. As he reflected in a letter to James Gwyn in 1885, “How fast they are departing this summer who belong to the generation who were mostly youths with you, & those a little younger with me. The fast recurring news of their departure makes me feel more lonesome here, even here in my remote Watauga solitude.”
The only release he found from his work was in his dreams. He grew closer to his nieces in his declining years and shared with them his reveries of escape from the burdens that exhausted him. One dream transported him to the warmth of Florida, where he could spend his winters under the watchful eye of a good physician and nurses. Another lifted him above the frozen ruts and the deep mud and slush that were so treacherous for his wooden leg, to soar through the sky with the flocks of pigeons he never tired of watching from his home in Shulls Mill. How much he enjoyed tracing the daily flight of the pigeons as they departed at dawn from their roost on the Blue Ridge in Surry on their way to “an early breakfast” in Caldwell and Burke—and then seeing them return at sunset “in swift flight back after supper to that same distant roost.” As he watched “this wonderful phenomenon, morn & eve, day after day,” he found himself “dreaming that human angels might yet do the same.”
The dream that kept him tied to his work was, of course, his plans for his land and his visions of what western North Carolina might become. Although it took longer than he ever imagined, that dream began to approach reality in the 1880s when the completion of long delayed railroad projects opened up the region to tourists and outside investors. Walter first noticed a change in 1885 with the opening of the Watauga Hotel at Blowing Rock. For Walter, the hotel’s instant success as a fashionable summer resort heralded an end to the county’s isolation and the beginning of sustained growth. He could barely contain his enthusiasm when he wrote James Gwyn that Watauga would soon be “spoken of as a favored land, destined ere long to become a delightful region, the home of wealth & culture & progress. Behold the realization of my idyl!”
Lumbering also expanded in the mountain counties with the coming of the railroad as Northern concerns were drawn to the region’s magnificent hardwoods. A company headed by the Smart brothers of Boston approached Walter in 1885 with an offer to mill the lumber on some of his tracts. Walter granted them an option until the end of the year to purchase both the trees and the land that he owned in Linville, but the Smart brothers were unable to follow through on their offer.
Walter now considered selling only his cherry trees, his most valuable timber, at $6 per 1,000 feet. He estimated that he had about a million feet of cherry and would realize close to $6,000 from the sale. Before he found a buyer for the cherry trees, however, Samuel T. Kelsey, a developer of resort properties in western North Carolina, offered to buy 8,090 acres of Walter’s lands in Linville and on Grandfather Mountain for $28,000. The offer was a godsend. Kelsey agreed to pay $10,000 down and had up to eight years to pay the remainder. To preserve the scenic beauty of the site, Walter stipulated in the agreement that the head springs of the Linville River, as well as the springs and streams on the side of Grandfather Mountain that flow into the Linville, “shall be protected and secured from contamination in future.” Additional conservation safeguards called for the preservation of a “broad belt of timber” on the side of the mountain and the setting aside “forever” of a free public access to the highest peaks of the mountain by a carriage road and foot and bridle paths. But Kelsey lacked the clout to follow through on his plans, and in 1888 he sold his option to Hugh McRae, an industrialist and developer.
By the 1880s railroads were carrying tourists to new resort hotels in the mountains of western North Carolina.
(Source: North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, North Carolina.)
Golfers prepare to tee off on the course of the Hot Springs Hotel northwest of Asheville.
(Source: North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, North Carolina.)
Walter viewed his sale as yet another sign that the South was finally achieving the economic progress he had envisioned for it once slavery ended. One of Rufus’s sons, another namesake by the name of Walter, had left home and was working at odd jobs in California and Texas. When he sought his uncle’s advice in the fall of 1887 on whether he should seek his fortune in Argentina, Walter replied that his prospects would be brighter in his native South. Sounding like a booster, Walter touted the “Sunny South” as having a better climate, population, and government than any country in South America and credited its rapid economic development for “fast making it the richest country in the world.” Stay in the South, he advised, and become a carpenter or brick mason in one of our mushrooming cities. He had no doubt that “fortunes were awaiting builders all over the South”—builders like Hugh McRae.
Paradoxically, the pending sale resulted in Walter working harder than ever, to prepare the deed and mortgage and convey payment title in fee simple for all of the parcels of land. In addition to the ongoing demands of collecting rent from his tenants and attending to his milling and livestock at Shulls Mill, he now had the time-consuming chore of combing through and organizing his field notes for the thousands of acres involved in the Linville sale. Despite feeling tired all the time, he refused to take the rest he so desperately needed.
To the surprise of no one in his family, he suffered a second stroke in May 1889, which left him partially paralyzed on his left side. He was weak but in no pain and this time also he almost welcomed the sense of calm that overcame him. “I was not afraid then to die,” he wrote Rufus, “almost wanted to die as I lay there so calm & free from pain, feeling that I was taking a good rest from which I did not want to be disturbed.” Although he had no fear of death, he wanted to keep living because he still had so much to do: “I want very much to get my papers & property arranged so that they will be less trouble to the family when I am dead, & the sale of my Linville lands will soon put me out of debt & in easy circumstances, & enable me to realize some of the good results of my patience in holding on so long to my apparently unprofitable lands.”
After making out his will on May 30, 1889, naming Tommie Lenoir, one of Rufus’s sons, as his executor, he recuperated for six weeks at Fort Defiance. Attended by a nurse, he was back at Shulls Mill in the summer of 1889. Ignoring the pleas of his sister Mary Ann to “just let it go!” he immersed himself in his Linville papers. Hampered by his difficulty in writing legibly and his inability to read more than four hours a day, his progress was agonizingly slow. He had no illusions that he would ever regain his health. Still, he no regrets and he refused to complain. Rather, as he wrote his niece Laura Gwyn, he chose to accept his afflictions as the will of his “loving heavenly Father” whose just chastisements had made him “an humbler & a better man.” Now, finally, he felt worthy enough to accept baptism in his parents’ church.
The onset of cold weather drove him first to a room at an inn in Hickory and then over to Fort Defiance in March 1890. On Easter Day, April 6, he joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. When Rufus’s son Tommie accompanied him back to Shulls Mill in June, Walter was still rushing to finalize all the details for a meeting with the directors of McRae’s land company on July 16. He was “running on the midnight meal schedule once more,” as Tommie put it in a letter to his mother, and subsisting primarily on a diet of milk. In late June, at Walter’s request, his nieces Selina Norwood and Sallie Gwyn came out to assist Tommie in nursing Walter and to prepare his meals. His spirits picked up with their arrival and his appetite improved. He enjoyed their company, especially their daily readings of the Bible in the morning and evening. The next two weeks were the happiest he had experienced in years.
The meeting in July with McRae’s associates went fine and Selina recalled that Walter was “cheerful & bright” when they returned on July 17. At long last, it seemed clear that the venture would be successful—a “crown of glory” to his old age, as Wat Gwyn had put it, which would handsomely benefit the seven family heirs in his will.
Four days later, Walter suddenly changed his daily routine. As Selina recalled, everything Walter did that day was out of the ordinary. After insisting on accompanying Tommie to the post office at Blowing Rock on a raw, damp morning, he returned around noon and for the first time ate a meal outside his room. He laughed and joked through the meal and entered a mock protest when his nieces reminded him that he should follow his doctor’s orders and avoid certain foods. Upon finishing the meal, he sent Tommie off on an errand to pay some field hands about four miles away, a trip that would take most of the afternoon. As Tommie was about to leave, Walter called him back and “tenderly took his hand and told him good bye.” Tommie was surprised, for he expected to see Walter again in a few hours. Then it was Selina and Sallie’s turn to be surprised. For the first time, Walter did not ask them to sit down with him and read from the Bible. Instead, he asked to remain alone in his room. After placing a bell next to him so that he could ring for assistance, his nieces were struck by the “tender loving tone” with which he thanked them. When a neighbor dropped by with a request for honey, Selina and Sallie knocked on Walter’s door, saying that they needed the key to the storeroom. After asking them who the neighbor was, Walter fell silent. Rather than disturbing him, his nieces returned to their sewing. They soon heard noises: he had moved into the lounge. Increasingly concerned by Walter’s strange behavior, Selina waited about a half hour and then called to him. No answer. When she looked in, she “saw in an instant that he was stricken, never to rise again.” His only response when she begged him to speak was a trembling of his lips.
Shown here in 1904, Rufus outlived all his Lenoir siblings.
(Source: North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.)
He was carried to his bed, where he remained unconscious for the next five days as friends and family stayed at his side. Rufus and his wife arrived the day after Walter’s attack, and Hugh McRae and Samuel Kelsey came over from Linville. Walter was aware of their presence. His eyes teared when Selina spoke to him, and he slowly rubbed his fingers over her palm.
When Walter seemingly decided on that July Monday to welcome the long rest he had for so long denied himself, it was the middle of summer, his favorite season in the mountains he so loved. It was then, as he once wrote to a niece, that “Watauga dons her summer costume [and becomes] the fairest of the daughters of the land of the sky.” His troubled soul had always found solace in the beauty of the mountains, and it was only fitting that he departed when that beauty was at its loveliest. He died the evening of July 26, 1890. As he wished, he was buried in the family cemetery at Fort Defiance next to his wife Nealy and infant daughter Anna. In his heart, he had never left them.
For the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and the struggle between President Johnson and Congress for control of Reconstruction policy, see W. R. Brock, An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction, 1865–1867 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1966). Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) is a comprehensive, modern treatment of Reconstruction as a whole, but no comparable study exists for North Carolina. Although still useful, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914) is marred by its racist assumptions and anti-Republican bias and should be offset with Otto H. Olsen, “North Carolina: An Incongruous Presence,” in Reconstruction and Redemption in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) and the firsthand account presented in Albion W. Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction, ed. George M. Frederickson (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). The rise and fall of the Republican party in the mountain South is covered in Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978).
On the formative role of African Americans in Reconstruction, see W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: World 1935); and Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003). Violence, especially against black activists, played a larger role in overturning Reconstruction than Walter ever acknowledged. Allen W. Trelease, Klan White Terror: The Ku Klux Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) tell the story of white terrorism and include much material on North Carolina.
The economic problems of the South after the war, which doomed Walter’s efforts to quickly sell off the land he had gone into debt to purchase, are covered in Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). C. Vann Woodward’s classic Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951) offers the best analysis of the new political economy that emerged in the South after the end of Reconstruction.
Economic conditions in western North Carolina and the coming of industrialization are treated in Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982). On the railroads that served as an agent of change and opened up more of Walter’s land to timber interests and tourists, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For the rise of the tourism that would bring Walter’s economic salvation, see Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
One of the delights in research is the unexpected discovery. After I had given up hope of learning much about the circumstances of Walter’s death, I was going through the James Gwyn papers in the Southern Historical Collection, a wonderful source for the evocative letters that Walter wrote his nieces as his health was declining in the 1880s. There I found Selina Louisa Norwood’s letter of July 31, 1890, to her Aunt Mary Gwyn that detailed Walter’s unusual activities on the day of his fatal stroke.
