Chapter Three: Great Time for the Tories and Negroes

Loyalty, Race, and Power, 1865–1868

“You have been a happy people in the old North State,” mused Mira Brown of Columbia, Tennessee, in a letter to a western North Carolina relative during the summer of 1865. There was no trace of humor or irony in her writing. Blue- and gray-clad armies had fought over her middle Tennessee community for four years during the American Civil War, inflicting hardship and suffering upon all segments of society. Her fear that she might never recover from the ordeal made her grief condescending at times. Only those directly touched by the regular armies, she implied to her friends and family in the North Carolina mountains, truly understood the horrors of war. Brown felt certain that the military occupation, racial turmoil, and loss of property that she experienced were the real war and that western North Carolina’s experience was both different and easier. Believing herself a member of an exclusive club initiated by Yankee-induced misery, she blatantly ignored the economic privations, internal divisions, guerrilla violence, and regular military incursions experienced by North Carolina’s mountaineers. None of this mattered to the war-weary Brown, who claimed, “You have all been very much blessed in North Carolina; you dont [sic] know a thing about distress and trouble.”¹

The Civil War brought privation, loss of life, and governmental power to western Carolinians’ doorsteps to an unprecedented degree. Conscription officers, tax collectors, Home Guard militiamen, and regular soldiers became commonplace in the region during the war. One suspects that Leander Sams Gash’s wartime experiences would have humbled Mira Brown. An old-line Whig, Gash backed Zebulon B. Vance for governor in 1862 before becoming disenchanted with the war and an advocate for peace in 1863. That same year, Joseph Y. Bryson physically assaulted Gash for his pro-Union stance. In war-torn western North Carolina, such neighbor-versus-neighbor violence based on one’s wartime loyalty was commonplace. Here was a war that Brown could not imagine: one where one’s friends and enemies looked frightfully similar and frequently familiar.²

It would take time—more perhaps than people expected—to heal those wounds. Two years after the Confederacy’s collapse, tensions remained high. Unionists gained a temporary hold on power following Confederate surrender, but Conservatives had grown stronger in state elections in the winter of 1865 and spring of 1866. After congressional Republicans passed a series of laws collectively known as the Reconstruction Acts in March 1867, the state senator from the westernmost part of the state, Leander Sams Gash, grew bitter as the national legislators declared “our state governments null and void [by] directing a convention to be Elected by negroes and Radicals” to reconstitute North Carolina’s government. The new Reconstruction measures barred from political service anyone who had held public office prior to secession and then served the Confederate government. Gash noted dryly, “That cuts me out.” Still, Gash’s reaction was mild compared to that of many North Carolina lawmakers. News from Washington filtered throughout the legislative offices on February 28, leading the state House and Senate to adjourn early that afternoon. Shortly thereafter, many of Gash’s colleagues “got a drunk on.”³

Reconstruction could not be escaped by a stiff drink. Southern Appalachia’s civil war had been messy and intensely personal. A close examination of the postwar conflict between a white Unionist-led anti-Confederate faction and the Conservative Party, which had led the state through the war, reveals that postwar politics in western North Carolina was no less chaotic. The battle between the anti-Confederates and the Conservatives destroyed an antebellum political culture that privileged local elites, placing wartime loyalty above all other considerations. In the war’s immediate aftermath, mountain whites battled for control based on one’s claim of Unionism—broadly derived from either the secession crisis or the war. These initial clashes featured white mountaineers battling over the terms of loyalty, since the idea of African Americans’ involvement seemed impossible to them.⁴ Wartime loyalty trumped all other claims in the year following Appomattox. When many of the same men who led their communities and state through the war regained power in elections held under President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policy, they did so through reassertions of a conditional loyalty that put the local and state above all else. Losing ground again on the basis of their wartime loyalty, anti-Confederates grew desperate for some edge over their opponents. Congressional Reconstruction’s promise of vigorous federal support reinvigorated anti-Confederates and Unionists. In order to gain the aid of the federal government, white politicians who had previously campaigned or editorialized that the United States was a white man’s country now embraced African American political participation. When Unionists and anti-Confederates embraced Congressional Reconstruction, they effectively shunted aside this localized and regional political world and aligned themselves with the only entity capable of defeating the aristocracy. They placed an opposition to the former Confederate elite above all else, even adopting the mantle of the Republican Party—complete with that party’s national stance on issues of race and civil rights. A bitter contest for local control had truly created a new political alignment for western North Carolinians.

Lingering tensions from western North Carolina’s brutal and personalized Civil War enhanced the sense of disorientation that accompanied the redrawing of political lines in the war’s wake. Politics had always acted as a lifeline between the rugged mountain region and the rest of North Carolina, the South, and the nation. Confederate defeat left as the state’s only regular political organization the Conservative Party, composed mostly of former Unionist-Whigs whose Unionism collapsed beneath the weight of secession in 1861. Even that party, however, was relatively new to state politics. Formed in 1862, the Conservatives gained an immediate victory when Buncombe County native and colonel of the Twenty-Sixth North Carolina Infantry Zebulon B. Vance ascended to the governorship that year. His election marked a turning point in the war for North Carolinians, many of whom viewed Vance as a moderate or even an antiwar alternative. As it became clear that Vance was a committed Confederate, his 1862 victory and 1864 reelection cemented the former Whigs’ domination of that party.⁵

But the Conservative Party that survived the war was not the same as it was in 1862. Frustration with central Confederate policies and war weariness fractured its ranks by the war’s third year. Some members joined outspoken newspaper editor William W. Holden’s peace movement, while others shared Governor Vance’s determination to see the war to its conclusion. Once the war ended, however, the Conservatives scrambled to resurrect their pro-Union position from the secession crisis.⁶ Secession had forced Unionist-Whigs to choose between the Union and their state, and they had felt that refusal to serve their state would shame them and their families. With the Confederacy beaten, Conservatives returned to their Whiggish roots: law and order, due process of law, the preservation of tradition, and economic development. For those reasons, they also drew some support from the state’s Democrats, whose party all but collapsed under the weight of secession and the war.⁷ Still, the party lay firmly in the hands of its wartime leaders, who remained somewhat skeptical of Democrats. One Conservative, Allen T. Davidson, a delegate to the state secession convention and a Confederate congressman, expressed a sense of continuity between 1861 and 1865. According to Davidson, there were two groups, the secessionists or “Destructives,” and the Conservatives who “had always been for the Union and was for the most cautious and deliberate measures.”⁸

Many Unionists undoubtedly recoiled in disbelief at Davidson’s description of himself and his Conservative colleagues as “always” for the Union. Outspoken newspaper editor William W. Holden fell before the Vance political juggernaut in the 1864 gubernatorial election, but after President Johnson appointed him provisional governor on May 29, 1865, he moved to legitimize his peace faction and challenge Conservative rule. Holden’s efforts for peace garnered him significant influence in western North Carolina. He needed that strength to hold together an “anti-Confederate” coalition composed of “prewar opponents of secession, consistent Unionists and wartime peace advocates, reform-minded yeomen and artisans, upper-class moderates and realists, regional representatives seeking some shift in state policy and power, and whites especially receptive to some degree of racial equality, nationalism, or the principles of free labor capitalism.” Each of these disparate elements agreed that accepting federal demands was the surest means to achieve a speedy reunification. Each of these classes of citizens lived in western North Carolina, but the mountain counties’ strong Unionist contingent enhanced its power in the west.⁹

Holden was not without help. Following the war’s end, the Department of North Carolina commander, General John M. Schofield, distributed his forty-six thousand troops across the state to “disperce [sic] or capture all bands of guerrillas and marauders, and collect all military arms.” William C. Stevens and one hundred men from the Ninth Michigan Cavalry arrived in Henderson County on June 6 after a long, 127-mile journey from Concord. Stevens dubbed Hendersonville “a very nice town ... upwards of 2200 feet above the level of the ocean” with a healthy and cool climate. Stevens encountered a warm reception from the townsfolk, whom he described as “greatly pleased” by his troops’ arrival. Chief among his new friends was Alexander H. Jones, who welcomed Stevens into his home. Perhaps it amazed the veteran of Sherman’s campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas that a Union soldier might be so well received in a former Confederate state. “I have numerous invitations to call upon the citizens here and remain to Dinner or Tea,” he wrote his worried family, “so I do not expect to go hungry just at present.” Two weeks later, a local Unionist presented Stevens with a U.S. flag during a large public gathering. During the presentation, the flag was held by daughters of Leander Sams Gash and Alexander H. Jones. A modest Stevens “thanked [the ladies] as well as I could.”¹⁰

It was not all pomp and circumstance for the region’s federal occupiers. Complaints of wartime assaults and abuse gave the Union troops plenty to do. No doubt, Stevens anticipated trouble with the defeated Confederates, but conditions in western North Carolina confounded him. “My situation is rather a peculiar one,” the young officer informed his father; “first I am called upon by Rebel citizens who state their grievances and mention the names of those who have lately committed depridations [sic] and then by Union men who were wronged six months or a year ago in some cases by those whose friends were killed by home guards for their disloyalty to the so called confederate government.” Unionists likely expected the officer who slept under their roofs and drank their tea to support their efforts to address past wrongs, but Stevens’s sympathy extended only so far. “For four years ... the Union people ... have indeed suffered greatly,” he conceded, “but now the tide has turned and those who have been wronged so greatly by Rebels are not willing to wait till the establishment of civil law but are taking the matter in their own hands.”¹¹

Union veterans returning to their mountain homes accentuated the problems confronting U.S. forces. It was feared that soldiers from East Tennessean George W. Kirk’s Second and Third North Carolina Mounted Infantry regiments, who to local Confederates constituted veritable boogiemen lurking out of sight but never out of mind, thirsted for revenge. Just a week after the first of Kirk’s veterans returned home, the federal officer commanding in Morganton, Colonel R. K. Miller, received reports of their “behaving very badly.” In Yancey County, it was reported that the Union veterans had “instituted the reign of terror which exists in Tennessee, and already several citizens have reported themselves to me as having been beaten and warned to leave the county or be shot.” Alphonso Calhoun Avery, who had commanded a Confederate battalion in western North Carolina, was one former Confederate with a legitimate reason to be afraid. During the war, Avery’s men arrested Austin Coffey, an aged Unionist, “on suspicion of harboring deserters ... and escaped prisoners of war” in the winter of 1864–65. His captors kept the old man under guard all night, exposed him to brutal winter conditions, and then in the morning, when he was too weak to stand, they shot him in the back and threw his lifeless body into the field. Rumors circulated that several Union veterans, including Coffey’s stepson, Keith Blalock, one of the most notorious Unionist guerrillas in the region, planned to avenge his stepfather’s death.¹²

Matters deteriorated further when citizens gathered that August to take the amnesty oath in Hendersonville. An older Unionist provided the spark that ignited this explosive political environment. Observing the assembled onlookers, Daniel Case said, “There is a Reb; give him a licking.” That simple declaration ignited a powder keg of suppressed frustration and anger. Three men descended upon a former Confederate, S. M. Fletcher, striking him repeatedly with their walking sticks. Fletcher’s refusal to submit passively to this chastisement sparked a general melee. A few rioters entered private homes, including the room of a bedridden woman whose husband they threatened to kill. Intimidated local officials—including Unionist Alexander H. Jones—adopted the better part of valor and chose to fight another day; they did nothing.¹³

Alerted to problems in the western counties, General Thomas Heath traveled west to inspect matters for himself. Heath quickly ascertained that his troops contributed to the lawlessness and growing anxiety in the mountains. The night that the Fortieth Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry arrived in Morganton from Greeneville, Tennessee, they “scattered through the town committing outrages, entering houses, demanding supplies cooked for them, and in two cases threatening to shoot respectable Ladies for not complying with their demands.” Ordered to return to Tennessee two days later, men from the Fortieth Infantry descended upon former Confederate colonel Thomas George Walton’s home, where, under the direction of their lieutenant, they destroyed his fences and fruit trees. Cursing and threatening their old foe, two soldiers punctuated their message by firing directly into the house.¹⁴ Burke County Unionist Tod R. Caldwell added that the soldiers “are riding all over the county by day & night robbing and plundering both white and black” of clothing, animals, and food. “If some measures are not immediately adopted to put an ending to this marauding,” Caldwell warned provisional governor Holden, “our people will have to resort to bushwhacking for self protection.” The commissioners formalized Caldwell’s request by asking a local lawyer to draft a resolution calling for Colonel Miller’s aid “in enforcing the ordinances that civil law may be preserved among the soldiers of his command.”¹⁵

Charged with reorganizing the state government, the provisional governor sifted through this muddled political situation for men suitable for local office. In particular, he solicited recommendations of “respectable” lawyers, merchants, and successful farmers, who had expressed at least ambivalence toward the war. For the western counties, Holden solicited names from three men: Augustus Merrimon, Ceburne Harris, and Calvin Cowles. In Buncombe County, Augustus Merrimon, a former-Whig-turned-Conservative-lawyer, attempted to prosecute the Confederate officers responsible for the Shelton Laurel massacre and opposed some of the Richmond government’s excesses during the war. Harris was a large landholder near Chimney Rock in Rutherford County who had served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Home Guard before becoming disillusioned with the war and joining his brother-in-law, known Unionist George W. Logan, in the peace movement. Unionist Calvin Cowles of Wilkes County was a merchant and Holden’s future son-in-law. Each man briefed the governor on conditions in their portion of the west and suggested local officials, but they held no formal office of their own.¹⁶

Complaints reached the governor’s desk soon after the ink dried on his new magistrates’ bonds of office. One Buncombe County magistrate, William Pickens, a sixty-two-year-old farmer from Flat Creek, expressed his outrage in letters to Holden in mid-August 1865: “Some considerable confution [sic], have & will be Experienced on the Subject of disloyal magistrates in the Co. of Buncombe,” Pickens informed Holden. He fumed that “Reason & good Sense dictate to us those who Abandoned this Union for which we Fought cannot Reconstruct it.” In particular, Pickens singled out Augustus Merrimon. Whereas Davidson and Merrimon saw no contradiction in restoring conditional Unionists to power after the war, such a policy was tantamount to treason for Pickens. A number of men such as Merrimon “claim to be Loyal now but have been willing Aiders & Abeters of the Rebellion.” Pickens accused Merrimon of prosecuting true Union men, even those who read Holden’s North Carolina Daily Standard, so that he could “walk by the Iron Cage in Asheville Jaild, & taunt Loyal prisners [sic] Saying it is good Enough for Lincoln men.” “Such we understand to be the conduct,” groused Pickens, “of Marymon the Loyal.”¹⁷

In the summer and fall of 1865, Calvin Cowles worked to reorganize northwestern county governments. Watauga County Unionists approved of Holden’s magistrates with one exception: they deemed James W. Council’s selection a “great mistake.” They contended that Council had promoted secession and volunteered for the Confederate army only to resign his commission and “shuttered himself in a Shoe Shop” once “the strife became bloody.” A Union veteran from Maple Springs in Wilkes County, Martin Lipps, informed Cowles in August 1865 that two of his appointments were unacceptable. Lipps accepted several of the new officers, but he described one magistrate, Samuel Welch, as “a secessionist from the first of the rebellion ... to the presente [sic] time.” Lipps condemned another appointee, William Church, as a “strong Rebel.” Although Church could not serve in the regular Confederate forces during the war because of his advanced age, he did not sit at home and passively wait out the war. According to Lipps, Church participated in an irregular effort to “pursecute [sic] his poore but Loyal Neighbours.” How could Church “a gain [sic] be put in power over us who sacrificed all we had for the union,” questioned Lipps. “Not 5 Men in this Region,” he warned, would allow Church to take office. He promised to petition an even higher authority if necessary to stop Church.¹⁸

Such controversy threatened Holden’s friends in local elections. Calvin Cowles worried that he might not win a seat in the pending state constitutional convention. He had tried to follow a middle course consistent with the governor’s policy. “I exclaimed in a short speech,” Cowles wrote in September 1865, “that you were not simply the Governor of a party but of the whole people & that it would hinder a speedy return to prosperity if the strings were drawn too tight.” But it was difficult to convince Unionists that unpardoned Confederates like Burke County’s George Thomas Walton, the Home Guard colonel who also served on a vigilance committee targeting Union men during the war, would reconstruct the state on a firm basis of loyalty. In Caldwell County, Holden’s magistrates refused to administer the loyalty oath to roughly fifty eligible citizens, without any explanation for their actions. A McDowell County justice of the peace allegedly threatened to murder returning Union soldiers if they failed to leave the county.¹⁹

Once the war ended, Conservatives rushed to reaffirm their Unionist credentials. To mountain Unionists, the real issue was how loyal one needed to be to govern. Writing from pro-Confederate Buncombe County, justice of the peace William Pickens implored Holden to define loyalty as “original” rather than the product of a “new Birth, by virtue of the Amnesty Oath.” He was appalled that an oath rendered former Confederates equal to Unionists who “Faught [sic] that Tigar Secession from his first Angry growl, I who Refused to bow my head in Submition to the Requisitions, of Confederative Authorities, & yield my comonition [sic] as a Justice of the peace, of which Several of us were proud to believe that when Uncle Sam Returned we would Honerably Resume & Act in our devotion to our countrys good.” To Pickens, sacrifice and struggle proved one’s loyalty and right to govern.²⁰

Although modern eyes may see conflicts over terms such as “loyal,” “Union,” and “Tory” as semantics, to western North Carolinians they mattered a great deal. The varied terms and language of loyalty betrayed rifts and divisions within the governor’s allies during a time when the anti-Confederates needed unity. Conflict over the depth of one’s loyalty—identified by how one used these labels—threatened to divide Union soldiers from those Unionists who stayed at home. It jeopardized the cooperation of men who were consistent in their support for the Union from those who later joined the peace movement or genuinely wished for cooperation after the Confederacy fell. Surgeon Marion Roberts joined the Third North Carolina Mounted Infantry on September 1, 1864, and he warned his fellow Union soldiers that peace had not ended the fight. Like Pickens, he lashed out against the “milk-and-cider-Zeb.-Vance Rebels ... who claim to be Union men” clamoring for office. And while Roberts expressed compassion for Confederate soldiers who fought honorably but lost, he reserved his most heated comments for a group he dubbed “Tories” and, in particular, William Pickens. Roberts confessed to being “forcibly struck with [Pickens’s] peculiar egotism” in claiming “that he has fought and bled and died for his country.” In Roberts’s eyes, Pickens was a “Tory,” who despite enlisting and serving a few months in the Union army, “got a discharge and then went back and submitted to the Rebel authorities, and lived a quiet and peacable [sic] citizen of the Confederacy until the last dollar and last day of the ‘bogus’ government was gone.” Such criticism echoed the secession crisis rhetoric of submission and manliness with Roberts now claiming the mantle of masculinity for the “loyal men,” meaning those who actually fought the Confederacy rather than those men who submitted to Rebel rule. Somehow William Holden had to find unity of action from a faction that was far from united in spirit.²¹

The Unionists’ challenge was to craft a political faction out of this fractious and unclear political environment that would be capable of defeating the Conservatives. Wartime suffering had led many lower-class whites to resent the war, and the anti-Confederates counted on their support once the war ended. Alexander H. Jones, a consistent Unionist from Hendersonville, reprinted a wartime pamphlet that decried “these cotton lords of creation, who own fifty, a hundred, or perhaps five hundred slaves” who “look upon a white man who has to labor for an honest living as no better than one of their negroes.”²² In order to succeed, however, Jones and other anti-Confederate leaders knew they needed “respectable” white men to join them or else they would remain saddled with the perception of having betrayed their state and section. They hoped to win over the more conservative members of Holden’s peace movement, like Leander Sams Gash, who were unsure of the future and indisputably part of the upper echelon of western North Carolina’s white society.²³

Petitions for presidential amnesty pouring into Holden’s office gave him reason for optimism regarding his standing among wealthy former Confederates in the mountains. Ladson Arthur Mills of Rutherford County was indisputably a man of means. Prior to the war he had served in the state legislature as a Democrat because he “honestly believed the best interests of the whole country would be best protected and promoted by the success” of that party. As staunch a Confederate as he was, Mills confessed, “the battle has been fought and the South has lost the wager” and he and his fellow Confederates were “morally bound to recognize the supreme authority of the United States.” Men like Mills swore that they now considered the matter settled and wished “to render the [U.S.] authorities ... a cheerful and hearty support.”²⁴ Other petitioners spoke of the overwhelming riptide of secession that pulled many lukewarm supporters—even some outright opponents—toward disunion. In newly formed Transylvania County, John C. Duckworth admitted that the excitement of the crisis overwhelmed him. As Confederate policies and the “impropriety of the rebelion [sic]” mounted, Duckworth testified that he returned to the “union party and has promptly acted with it ever since.”²⁵

Following the president’s instructions, North Carolinians across the state went to the polls in September 1865 to select delegates to revise the state constitution. It was the first time since the war that North Carolinians partook in an organized political contest. Conservatives tried to prevent a convention by not voting—and therefore denying it the quorum necessary to convene—but they succeeded solely in creating a tremendous anti-Confederate opportunity. Voters supported a convention, and it opened in Raleigh on October 2. Among western North Carolina’s delegates were three prominent Union men. Tod R. Caldwell of Burke had supported the peace movement, George W. Logan of Rutherford had represented that peace faction in the Confederate Congress, and Alexander H. Jones of Henderson had preached resistance to the Confederacy in his community and served in the Union army. A second representative from Rutherford County, Ceburn L. Harris, assisted Holden in the reorganization of his county’s local government after the war. The remainder of the mountain delegation spread across the ideological spectrum with most favoring the anti-Confederates. Not all western delegates were anti-Confederates, however, as James R. Love, a former Confederate officer and member of a prominent family, represented the Democratic Party stronghold of Jackson County.²⁶

Secession was the first issue discussed, and after much debate, the delegates rescinded the ordinance. With secession repealed, the members turned to emancipation. During the roll call vote on abolition, William Baker voiced his disapproval, but the delegate from Ashe and Alleghany Counties got in line once he realized his was a singular voice of dissent.²⁷ Mountain representatives overwhelmingly supported the repeal of secession, the repudiation of the debt, and slavery’s abolition, which they understood as President Johnson’s preconditions to reunion, and they played prominent roles in accomplishing these goals. Caldwell County representative Rufus L. Patterson and George W. Logan of Rutherford served on the committee that drafted the ordinance to rescind secession, and Reverend L. L. Stewart from Buncombe County helped draft the initial resolution abolishing slavery.²⁸

After the body approved both secession’s revocation and emancipation, the delegates suspended their session until 1866 and arranged a special election so that the people could weigh in on these issues. Western Carolina voters approved both measures overwhelmingly. Only one mountain county posted less than 90 percent in favor of repealing secession, Madison County, which still cast a strong majority of 81.7 percent. Abolition’s electoral victory hid the complexity of the contest in the western counties—where there appeared to be little correlation between slave population and the results. Each of the largest slaveholding counties approved the measure by strong majorities. Some interesting patterns emerge after factoring wartime loyalties into the equation. Black freedom received a less-than-ringing endorsement in Unionist Cherokee County, where emancipation received a mere sixteen-vote edge. Another southwestern county, Macon, garnered only a 60.5 percent majority for abolition. Most surprising was the Unionist stronghold of Wilkes County, whose residents ratified by a 70–30 percent majority. In the process, however, Wilkes voters tallied nearly one-tenth of the entire state’s negative vote. No other county came close to those totals, as Alleghany had the next lowest majority at 88.9 percent. Whether Unionists in these counties believed their loyalty exempted them from emancipation or they simply resented African American freedom is unclear. Most mountaineers expressed their opinions—or apathy—by not participating at all. Only 5,175 western residents participated in the referendum as opposed to the 10,711 ballots cast in the 1864 gubernatorial election. With less than half the number of voters participating, these totals represent far from a popular mandate. The passage of emancipation showed mountaineers’ acceptance, or perhaps more accurately their acquiescence.²⁹

Fresh from the convention, the people transitioned into a campaign for state legislators, national representatives, and governor during the fall of 1865. In the Forty-Ninth Senatorial District, one anti-Confederate candidate, W. W. Rollins of Madison County, published a broadside detailing his position on the issues of the day. Rollins undoubtedly elicited a variety of reactions. Having risen to the rank of captain in the Twenty-Ninth North Carolina Infantry, he deserted the Confederate army and joined the Union’s Third North Carolina Mounted Infantry. Many committed Conservatives and Unionists probably judged Rollins solely on his wartime service. Other mountaineers weighed his policies in their decision. One thing is clear: Rollins placed great importance on loyalty. He placed the onus for the war squarely on the Conservatives’ shoulders. “Had it not been for the selfishness of your commanders,” he added, “the struggle would have passed away and western North Carolina have never felt the realities of the war.” For that reason, he agreed with the president’s Reconstruction policy, which Rollins interpreted as “protect the masses and punish the leaders.”³⁰

The anti-Confederate platform—if it could be called such—appeared to be solidifying in the fall of 1865. Regarding the future of the former slaves, appropriations for internal improvements, and repudiation of the state’s war debt, Rollins expounded relatively typical anti-Confederate ideas. There was no equivocation in his belief that the United States and western Carolina were “to be a white man’s government ... and that it would be dangerous to the white race to elevate the freedman to be his political equal.” Like many white mountain southerners, Rollins recommended the freedpeople’s colonization to Africa as the best response to emancipation. Colonization complemented his stance on the region’s development. Repudiating the war debt prevented money from being wasted on the Confederacy’s failures and used to finance the mountain section’s future. If that were the case, Rollins felt that “in less than two years the iron horse [railroad] would be a welcome visitor to our mountain village.” The final piece to Rollins’s plan was immigration. Bringing outsiders with “capital and enterprise” to develop the region’s resources would facilitate African Americans’ removal. “As white immigration comes in,” he hypothesized, “the colored population will naturally recede before it, which will continue until an outlet will be an absolute necessity, and the idea of colonization will be renewed.” Such arguments failed to win a plurality from his constituents, however, as they favored moderate anti-Confederate Leander Sams Gash of Henderson County instead.³¹

The gubernatorial contest pitted provisional governor Holden against Conservative Party candidate Jonathan Worth, with the meaning of Unionism and loyalty in the new postwar order at stake. Holden’s leadership of the wartime peace movement appealed to anti-Confederates, but he did not possess a monopoly on wartime dissent. Worth possessed his own brand of Unionism, for as wartime state treasurer he had the credentials of a loyal Confederate, but he had also cooperated with Holden’s peace movement. This made Worth appear moderate with ties to both the former conditional Unionist Whigs and the anti-Confederates. Moderate though he was, Worth was unable to overcome the concerns of many mountain Conservatives who believed that only Holden would satisfy the federal government. A disheartened Allen T. Davidson wrote from Franklin that Conservatives would likely “be kept under the ban until Holden and his friends are well provided for.” Such apathy did not capture the depth of Conservatives’ frustrations and anger. As Davidson stated, “I say nothing, but lick my chops, and grit my teeth and long to get at them [the anti-Confederates].”³²

When the election finally came on November 9, 1865, the anti-Confederates in the mountains achieved a pyrrhic victory. The mountainous Seventh Congressional District elected Henderson County Unionist Alexander H. Jones to Congress, and Holden carried most mountain counties in his bid for governor. The state as a whole, however, gave Worth a decisive victory.³³ Although Worth’s election revealed the Conservatives’ resurgent strength across North Carolina, Holden’s 65.6 percent of the western counties’ vote confirmed the strength of the anti-Confederates in the mountainous west. They had favored both Holden and Jones, the state’s only Congressman-elect able to take the ironclad loyalty oath to the United States and the only mountain resident sent to Washington. Despite Worth’s triumph, the election proved the anti-Confederates a force to be reckoned with in the mountains. The governor-elect captured only two mountain counties, Macon and Watauga. During the 1864 gubernatorial campaign, Holden collected 2,612 votes in the highland counties. One year later, he won 6,557 mountaineers’ votes. While it is impossible to tell how many of those voters were former Democrats, Whigs, or men resigned to Holden’s election, his totals suggest the growing strength of the Unionist-led anti-Confederate faction in the west.³⁴

Beaten within the state, many western Unionists, who constituted the ideological core of the anti-Confederate faction, looked to the North and the federal government to offset the Conservatives’ gains. Worth’s defeat in the mountains also intensified local Conservatives’ belief in their opponents’ disloyalty to their communities and state. Anti-Confederates’ wartime opposition to the Confederacy and their willingness to cooperate with Congress convinced Conservatives that the most ardent Unionists possessed bad character and were undeserving of respect. A prewar political culture that stressed local relationships and a sort of patron-client relationship between the wealthier mountaineers and their poorer white neighbors broke down, as Unionists rallied lower-class support and looked outward for help. In Conservative eyes, a clear distinction emerged between Unionists—a small group of men who were loyal to the Union for the whole war as a matter of principle—and deserters—scoundrels regardless of whether they wore Union blue or not. Conservatives denied any claim to Unionism, legal protection, or respect to men like Rollins who abandoned the Confederacy and joined the federal military. As J. C. L. Gudger of McDowell County put it, “There are scores and hundreds of good conservative men” in the mountain counties “who are loyal to the government of the United States but at the same time are Southern men and are not ashamed that they were in the ‘Army of Northern Virginia’ or of the part they acted under that glorious old veteran who led them.” Such stiff resistance limited anti-Confederates’ local options. No longer willing to work with the former governing elite, the mountain Unionists looked for new patrons and asserted their own power. The logical choice was William W. Holden, but his defeat pushed mountain Unionists toward national figures such as Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, and others.³⁵

Mountain Unionists felt the sting of the Conservatives’ resurgence acutely. Despite shared political beliefs, especially regarding internal improvements, Unionists found little mercy from the resurgent Conservatives. Marion Roberts, a Union veteran from Buncombe County hoping to raise northern Republicans’ awareness of conditions in the former Confederacy, informed Thaddeus Stevens in May 1866 that the former Confederates heaped “the most inhumane treatment and unpardonable insults” upon mountain Unionists who exercised “a great deal of magnanimity and respect toward the Confederate Soldiers and Citizens of this Country.” Eight white Henderson County women went to the Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Asheville, Lieutenant Patrick E. Murphy, at the end of the month seeking protection. Although Congress designed the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves and white southerners adjust to a world without slavery, the bureau’s Asheville agent represented their nearest access to federal power. They informed him that Confederate partisans had burned their homes and threatened their lives because their husbands had fought for the Union. Lieutenant Murphy was an understanding but powerless friend. Following the dramatic reduction of the military force in the state at the end of 1865, Murphy informed his superiors, “I cannot give them that protection I would like.” He sent letters chastising the offending parties, but Murphy was not naïve. Without troops to back him, he felt little confidence in his ability to preserve order.³⁶

Residents of Buncombe and Burke Counties at least had a federal presence nearby. Freedmen’s Bureau agents and federal military stations gave anti-Confederates in those counties a sympathetic ear, an advocate, or even a protector. Without such local support, Unionists and anti-Confederates in the more remote northwestern counties took matters into their own hands. Just as they had during the war, Unionists banded together in order to protect and promote their interests. Union men in Wilkes County’s Trap Hill community again took up arms that summer. Approximately one hundred anti-Confederates in Alleghany County formed a cavalry company in order to assert their local authority. Meanwhile, a Conservative light horse company roamed the county “blustering and Cutting up Generally” and “Defying Any Union man to interfere.” The local police captain informed the commanding general in Raleigh that these horsemen constituted “the worst kind of raiders and murderers during the war.” “They refuse to Muster under the stars and stripes,” the unsettled policeman reported, “and say they are Rebels yet.”³⁷

A federal judge advocate, Major Francis E. Wolcott, twice toured western North Carolina to investigate Union men’s claims of injustice during the summer of 1866. His findings convinced him that peace had done nothing to secure mountain Unionists’ lives or property. In his opinion, “the same malicious prosecutions which drove them from their homes” continued after the war. Keith Blalock’s case stood out to Wolcott. According to the judge advocate, Blalock, who stood accused of theft, forcible trespass, and murder among other charges, was “a regularly authorized recruiting officer” who “bears the scars of honorable service.” He further advocated dropping the trespass charge because the property taken was to supply Union recruits, while the murder case was a “justifiable homicide.” For his part, Blalock headlined a petition on behalf of Union men asserting “secession is still rampant in this section of the State and although its authors have been whipped they still seem determined to Rule.” Grand jurors in the counties of Watauga, Mitchell, and Caldwell, Blalock reported, had boasted that they had acted properly in indicting Union men while acquitting Confederates because “the Rebels did nothing but their duty while the union men were traiters [sic] to the land of their birth and deserved the heaviest punishment that could be inflicted upon them.”³⁸

The “Heroes of America” or “Red Strings” as they were known, a secret wartime organization that originated in North Carolina’s piedmont “Quaker Belt,” reorganized after the war to defend Unionists in northwestern North Carolina. On a second investigative trip late in the summer of 1866, Wolcott found Red Strings in Rowan, Alleghany, Surry, Ashe, and Wilkes Counties. “Its members were with hardly an exception men loyal to the Government,” he informed General John C. Robinson, “and a large majority of them of the poorer Classes of people.” Conservatives were deeply alarmed by the Red Strings’ vows to support the U.S. Constitution, to warn each other of approaching danger, and to bring to justice men who wronged their fellow Heroes. Former Confederates considered arming to resist this secret organization, and Wolcott heard several pro-Confederate ministers denounce the Red Strings in their sermons and threaten its members with expulsion from their congregations. When the Gap Civil community in Alleghany County chose a Unionist to captain their reconstituted militia, Conservative residents angrily formed their own unit. If unchecked, Wolcott felt certain that these former Confederate cavalrymen would soon precipitate violence.³⁹

Conditions in the northwestern counties resonated in Raleigh. Governor Worth concluded that “the secret organization commonly called ‘Red Strings’ is being generally revised in this state to favor the Radical Congress and frustrate the policy of the President.”⁴⁰ This issue became an obsession for Worth, who was convinced that his opponents would use affairs in western North Carolina to restore military control over the state. The Red Strings evoked a visceral disdain from Conservatives, who charged that they shielded “bad men” who “only joined the society to cloak their acts of wrong and violence.” This alliance between local Unionists, whom many Conservatives perceived as traitors to their state, and violent guerrillas underscored the anti-Confederates’ continued disloyalty. Early in the summer of 1866, Judge Augustus Merrimon categorized the Red Strings as a lawless element composed of deserters and vengeful Unionists siding with the northern Radical Republicans.⁴¹

The proposed state constitution of 1866 offered a chance for the anti-Confederates to regroup. Their domination of the constitutional convention allowed them to include the concessions demanded by President Johnson while also revamping the state’s political structure. A change to the white basis of representation—as opposed to the federal ratio counting slaves as three-fifths of a person—for the lower legislative house favored western North Carolina. Sought by up-country delegates throughout the South in the postwar period, the white basis meant that the white population alone would determine representation in the state’s lower legislative house. Westerners of both political persuasions favored this change. Former Confederate colonel James R. Love of Jackson County endorsed the white population as the basis of apportionment in a speech lasting roughly one hour.⁴² The exclusion of the large number of African Americans in the central and eastern parts of the state from the basis of representation frightened state Conservatives. To avoid such a shift, eastern delegates proposed an alternate form of representation based on aristocratic privilege. Based on the self-aggrandizing assumption that freedpeople needed legislators familiar with their needs, this countermeasure counted the African Americans toward the distribution of offices in the lower house, despite barring them from voting or holding office. The anti-Confederates defeated this measure.⁴³

On August 2, 1866, over forty thousand North Carolinians went to the polls to voice their opinion on the new constitution and to elect a new governor. More than 85 percent of mountain voters approved the constitution, reflecting both the strength of the anti-Confederates and the bipartisan support for democratic reform in the mountains. With its overwhelmingly white population and comparatively remote location, Cherokee County gave the constitution 99.8 percent affirmation. Buncombe and Burke Counties gave majorities of 58.4 and 57.9, respectively, which seem especially low given that no other mountain county dipped lower than 85 percent. In addition to the white basis, the new constitution also made a majority of governmental offices, including powerful local positions, elective and helped lay the groundwork for future changes. Since the anti-Confederates played such a prominent role in drafting the constitution, it seems logical that their mountain supporters contributed a large proportion of the positive vote. In fact, the number of positive votes for the constitution paralleled the totals Holden earned in the 1865 gubernatorial election. Several prominent mountain Conservatives, sensing a way to increase their own power, also endorsed the constitution.⁴⁴

Both sides realized the high stakes heading into the elections. Frustrated in their efforts to gain political control, the anti-Confederate Rutherford Star branded Worth “the great stumbling block to restoration” and expressed hope that he would refrain from seeking reelection to an office “he cannot fill to the advantage of the State.” Alexander H. Jones’s Henderson Pioneer reprinted these sentiments approvingly in Henderson County as well. The part of the Star’s editorial that undoubtedly pleased Jones was its criticism of the former Unionist-Whigs. Both Jones and the anti-Confederates in Rutherford resented the resumption of power by Worth’s party of “Secessionists and latter day Saints.” These men embodied the fears expressed by mountain anti-Confederates when reorganizing county governments in 1865; Conservatives who espoused conditional Unionist positions had reverted to their secession crisis Unionism in a sort of born-again loyalty, and the public—especially in the central and eastern counties—put them back in office. Hardcore mountain Unionists denounced these men, whose “thirst for office is so great that all sense of duty to the people and the State has fled before their eyes.” Such men lived by the “motto rule or ruin, and it seems at present they are determined on doing both.”⁴⁵

Conservatives expressed equally strong concerns over the coming elections. Augustus Merrimon confessed that the stakes were higher in this election. “If the ‘radicals’ succeed in the fall elections,” he wrote in midsummer, “we can’t imagine what may result in the end.” Until his state regained its place in Congress, he feared that they would continue to face continuous harassment from “‘radicals’ north & south.” It proved to be the Conservatives who had reason to celebrate after the voters cast their ballots. Worth won an even more decisive victory in 1866 than he had the previous winter. He crushed his opponent, Alfred Dockery of Richmond County, and nearly swept the mountain counties in the process. Only four counties favored Dockery, as Worth captured over 66 percent of the region’s votes. The message of this election could not have been any clearer to the anti-Confederates. They were losing the support of moderates, making the election results an expression of the Unionist presence in the mountains.⁴⁶

Recoiling from Worth’s reelection, Henderson County Unionists called a mass meeting to vent their frustration. Like the Red Strings in the northwestern counties, Henderson County Unionists recognized that they had lost the postwar power struggles at the local and state levels. A letter to Alexander H. Jones’s Pioneer sarcastically noted in September 1866 that Conservatives lived by one governing principle: “Give us (who have spent five years in trying to destroy the Government) the reins of Government and the keys to the public crib, [and] then we will sing Union ... all over the land.” Since loyalty was the core of the Unionists’ claims for respect and power within the region, they resented that they had “saved the country from anarchy and eternal ruin; but everything that adheres to this party now, is called radical.” Such frustration was eerily familiar. During the secession crisis, disunionists and their allies painted Unionists as “submissionists” unworthy of respect. After the war, they again branded their opponents as dangerous and undeserving of respect. Backed into a political corner, the Unionists in Henderson County embraced the radical label as their own. “I care not what they call me,” one Unionist declared in a letter to the editor, who then exhorted “the Radicals, or Republicans, or true Union men, stand together and watch, and when the time comes move.” Hold “true Union men,” the letter writer advised, and do “not be deceived by the honeyed words, or fine party names of this intriguing, wire-working, liberty-destroying party.” An alliance between northern Republicans and southern Unionists seemed all but formalized in western North Carolina.⁴⁷

The last best hope of the state’s Unionists was the Fourteenth Amendment. Anti-Confederates championed the amendment because it was the surest path to reunion. Echoing arguments from across the South and the state, mountain anti-Confederates asserted that the amendment, no matter how odious, would prove better than the future terms that its rejection may prompt. Congress would impose racial equality and black suffrage upon North Carolina from above, the Henderson Pioneer warned, unless the amendment succeeded. Jones wanted the people to show their leaders that their paramount hope was reunion because the Conservatives seemed to prefer remaining outside of it. Knowing that his fellow mountaineers opposed the political equality of black men, he warned that opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment would make such a result inevitable. “Unless the people ... vote only for such men as are willing and anxious to return to the Union,” Jones warned, “we will have to stay out, until the very conditions predicted by those who will not move a peg in that direction, are forced upon the people of the State.”⁴⁸

Conservative state officials dug in their heels against the Unionists and the Fourteenth Amendment. As the state’s Unionists drifted closer to the national Republican Party, mountain Conservatives wasted little time branding their opponents with that party’s racial policy and negative popular image in the South. Jackson County Conservative Thaddeus D. Bryson announced his candidacy for reelection to the state assembly based on resistance to “the Radical doctrine of Negro equality and oppression.”⁴⁹ Such staunch opposition among the Conservatives convinced Leander Sams Gash that the amendment would find little fertile ground in North Carolina. In the unlikely prospect that tensions between the United States and England escalated rapidly, Gash believed that Congress would resort to “the most extreme radical measures.” While that would certainly be a problem, the bigger threat posed by the amendment was its growing support among Unionists. Gash’s letter to his wife betrayed his intensifying disdain for these men. Gash had reached his breaking point. Southern Radicals in his opinion were “worse than the radicals North,” and he held that there was a conspiracy to “annul the acts of the President and appoint Military Governors for all the rebel states.”⁵⁰

North Carolina’s legislators—with near unanimity—defeated the Fourteenth Amendment in December 1866. Only one western state senator, Ceburne Harris, the Rutherford County Unionist who helped reorganize the county government for Holden in 1865, voted for it. Forty-three other state senators rejected it. Reception in the state House of Representatives was little better. The amendment’s defeat spelled trouble for the southern states, and all North Carolinians watched national news closely. The passage of the Reconstruction Acts, collectively remanding the states back to near-territorial status with an overseeing military presence, marked the fulfillment of their fears. For his family and constituents seeking comfort, Gash had little advice. All he could think of was for the people “to go [to] work, mind their own business and let Politicks go to thunder.” Congress’s vindictiveness overwhelmed Gash’s earlier moderation on racial matters as well. With the Reconstruction Acts, Gash felt it would be best to send “negroes to Congress hereafter and Keep them there until [the North] get their fill of them.” When the Supreme Court failed to come to the rescue of the South, Gash resigned himself to Congressional Reconstruction much as he resigned himself to secession. For the second time in less than a decade, Gash braced himself against a “political storm of fanaticism ... sweeping over the land.”⁵¹

As the winter of disappointment gave way to spring’s new hope, the remnants of the anti-Confederate coalition held a convention in Raleigh on March 27. Observers originally thought that this assembly would discuss the state constitutional convention and confer with the state’s black leadership; however, Congress’s recent actions shifted the focus toward solidifying state-level Republican organizations across the South. William Holden encapsulated both Unionists’ frustrations and their new purpose when he said that “the Union people of this State ... have borne as much and as long as they intend to bear” and that “traitors must now take back seats or retire and remain quiet.”⁵² Passing under a banner proclaiming “Union, Liberty, Equality” into the state capitol’s Commons Hall, the assembled men organized themselves under the standard of the Republican Party. The prominent role granted to African Americans made the transformation of state politics even clearer. Anti-Confederates previously held that politics must remain a white man’s domain; the convention, however, opened with a prayer led by a black minister, and African Americans played a highly visible role throughout the meeting. Holden and his fellow white attendees hoped to use the Republican name and African Americans’ new political power to form a tight bond with the growing northern Republican presence in the state and its black population. All in all, the convention convinced the New York Tribune that North Carolina’s white Republicans were open “to unite with the colored men on terms of absolute equality.”⁵³

With battle lines clearly drawn in the political arena, one of the largest and most symbolic political riots occurred in Wilkesboro, a small valley town surrounded by forested hills separated by a quiet mountain stream.⁵⁴ Violence erupted at a Republican meeting in the courthouse on the night of July 4, 1867. Local Republicans Samuel Smith and J. Q. A. Bryan spoke first. Tempers flared after a speech by Alfred Stokes, a local African American minister who had represented the county in the 1866 Freedmen’s convention in Raleigh. Accounts differ as to Stokes’s precise message, but it was enough to provoke earnest responses from both Smith and Bryan.⁵⁵ While the meeting was ostensibly a Republican one, Stokes, who had risen from slavery to become a member of the state Republican committee, had addressed a Conservative assembly two weeks earlier. Stokes, it seems, had received his invitation from Robert F. Armfield, so he returned the favor by asking Armfield to the Republican gathering.⁵⁶

After the Republican speakers finished, the Conservatives demanded to hear from Armfield. Reverend Samuel Smith shouted that Armfield had no place at their “union meeting,” but another Conservative, John Peden, flaunting his pistol, ominously vowed that Armfield would speak. Determined to carry the day for the Conservatives, Peden climbed onto a table and shouted that his party was entitled to at least one speaker after four Republicans. They needed just one Conservative, he jeered, to best four Republicans. Climbing down from the table, Peden went to the back of the room and began waving his pistol and yelling that Armfield should speak. Standing nearby was Joe Peden, John’s brother, who held a pair of nail grabs in his hands. The elder Republican Smith and his son, R. M. Smith, whose knife was concealed in his sleeve, moved to accept the Pedens’ challenge. Perhaps wanting to stave off bloodshed, the presiding officer of the session decried the protests as shameful and vowed to report them all to General Daniel E. Sickles, commanding the Second Military District.⁵⁷

Hoping to cool tempers, the assemblage decided that Armfield would speak outside from the courthouse steps. But Armfield’s speech never took place, as the rancor from the courthouse spilled into the streets. An elderly African American man, Jackson Brown, ran from the courthouse with a foot-long gash in the back of his coat and blood flowing from his face. The fight was on. John Peden, claiming that someone had snuck up behind him in the courthouse with a knife, thirsted for blood. Grabbing a rock, Peden charged Wesley Ball, who dodged the attack and threw Peden to the ground. Peden’s brother, Joe, dashed forward and smashed a rock against Ball’s head. William Ball witnessed the attack on his father but could do little to help, as he was soon blindsided with three successive blows from another attacker’s stick. Battered but not beaten, a desperate John Peden threw two rocks at Ball, one striking Andrew Porter, whose son John promptly received three shots from the cane of Lee Gilreath, who declared this chaotic mess a fight of principle.⁵⁸

Predictably, politicians from each side interpreted the Wilkesboro riot differently. State Republican leader William Holden’s Raleigh-based North Carolina Daily Standard blamed the Conservatives. According to the Standard, Alfred Stokes’s “short speech” preceded calls by the “disloyal party” for Armfield. The Republicans’ peaceful protests that it was a “union meeting” supposedly prompted the Conservatives’ “drawing pistols and raving like a parcel of mad men.” Holden praised the Republicans’ principled and manly stand against the Conservatives’ malice and weapons. The Republican editor argued that the riot was premeditated; the Conservatives went home and grabbed sticks, knives, and guns before returning to the town square determined to inflict harm. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Union men fled Wilkesboro for their lives. Holden lamented, “There is no chance for registration or an election to be held here unless something is done.”⁵⁹

Armfield replied in the state’s leading Conservative newspaper, the Raleigh Sentinel. Explaining the nature of the Conservative meeting held in the latter half of June, Armfield asserted that it was open to all Wilkes County residents—white and black—in order to clarify the people’s rights in the wake of the Reconstruction Acts. That meeting was peaceful and included Republican speakers Alfred Stokes and Calvin J. Cowles, who both announced the upcoming Republican meeting and invited Armfield to speak.⁶⁰ After the events in Wilkesboro, Armfield denounced his opponents as base, slanderous, and corrupt. Such men could not help but behave poorly and lawlessly. As he attempted to speak from the courthouse steps, he accused some of the Republicans—whom he identified as members of the Heroes of America—of singing, stomping, and dancing loudly inside in an attempt to disrupt him. The political landscape had shifted with the onset of the Reconstruction Acts, and federal authority in blue uniforms had found welcoming arms in the form of white Republicans. By embracing military Reconstruction, western Republicans had moved their region to the center of the state’s political fight. Since his defeat in 1865, it was Holden’s goal, Armfield charged, to convince the national authorities that North Carolina’s white Conservatives were “disloyal, oppress Union men, and have no regard for order.” For that reason, he “seized upon every little fist fight ... to swell the false cry” of lawlessness and injustice. With a stronger military role in state affairs, Armfield believed that Holden and the Republicans were finally going to have their “sweet revenge.”⁶¹

Whether he believed these charges to be true or not, Governor Worth held that the Republicans plotted against his administration and the mountain Unionists would be the means of their revenge. Soon after assuming the governor’s chair, a tidal wave of Unionist pleas for relief, many of them from lower-class white mountaineers, flooded Worth’s office. Like many white Unionists, Jonas Ramsey claimed that former Confederates continued harassing him after the war. He wrote President Andrew Johnson in January 1867 that former Rebels came to his Burke County home roughly a month after the war’s conclusion and demanded money. His protests resulted in them putting two guns to his breast in sight of his wife and others. Ramsey begged the president for relief from the abuse and curses heaped upon his family by the Confederates. “If you don’t do something to relieve the suffering Union people,” he pleaded, “they will have to leave this Country.” At that point, he turned up the heat on Johnson. Former Confederates had indicted Ramsey in several different cases on “suspicion,” which Ramsey hoped would alert the president to the former Confederates’ vindictiveness. He painted a dim view of local courts under Conservative control. According to him, former Confederates could “gather up their Rebel crew, and prove anything they please, the Rebels Can do anything they please to a Union man and not be hurt for it.” Johnson must act or else, Ramsey argued, “the Rebels will rise and mob the Union men.”⁶²

Under scrutiny from President Johnson, Worth sought information on the treatment of Unionists from two trusted Burke County Conservatives, Burgess Gaither and T. George Walton. The two men reviewed the superior court records and interviewed several local officials, and they determined that whatever wrongdoing took place was Ramsey’s fault. In the spring term, they found that Ramsey faced assault and battery charges as well as accusations of larceny. The next superior court found Ramsey in trouble again, this time for forcible trespass. “In all these cases,” reported Worth’s agents, “the prosecutors and witnesses belong to that class of our population known as Union people and none of them give any aid in assistance to the Confederate cause.” Not content to stop there, Gaither and Walton denounced Ramsey as a deserter “who organized ... a band of Robbers and Thieves and made various raids upon the women and children and unprotected and defenseless inhabitants of the surrounding country and stole and plundered generally.” They dubbed Ramsey a coward and crook, and dismissed his claims out of hand. They surmised that perhaps his charges were fabrications and that the “ignorant and illiterate” Ramseys were pawns in a larger plot to mislead and sway the president, but there is no evidence to prove their charge.⁶³

Military intervention offered new political and legal protections for mountain Republicans during Congressional Reconstruction. Buncombe County resident William Lankford, who served in the Union’s Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry, wasted little time in taking his case before the military in the spring of 1867. It seemed that the clergyman had unknowingly married a man and woman, one of whom was part African American, after the war. State law prohibited such marriages, and Lankford was fined $20,000 for his role in the “crime.” Clearly, Lankford pleaded, he was being made an example of because of his refusal to “worship at the confederate shrine.” Lankford had stood as a candidate against Leander Sams Gash for the state senate in 1866, supporting the Fourteenth Amendment as opposed to Gash’s growing distance from the anti-Confederate coalition, and Alexander H. Jones had hailed him “as good a Union man as the State affords.” Still, his simple act of marrying a couple after the war put him on the edge of total ruin. His back against the wall, Lankford asked General E. R. S. Canby to protect him and other Unionists from “trators and trators [sic] laws.” Major General Daniel Sickles stayed the judgment against Lankford on May 15, 1867. Nevertheless, Buncombe County sheriff Jeremiah Rich informed Lankford that the case would move forward in spite of Sickles’s order. In a clear example of the exercise of federal power over local affairs, Sickles’s successor put the matter to rest on December 22, 1867.⁶⁴

A far more troubling case arose out of Madison County, where a former Union soldier faced murder charges for an incident that occurred during the secession crisis. As Marshall residents prepared to vote for representatives to a state convention in May 1861, the secessionist sheriff, Ransom P. Merrill, paraded through the streets of the county seat bellowing “Hurra” for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. The sheriff was unwavering in his desire that “no Tory, Black Republican, or Lincolnite” would vote on his watch. One local Unionist, Elsey Frisby, took the bait, and met Merrill’s pro-Confederate cheers with a loud shout of approval for Washington and the Union. No sooner had the sound left his lips than Frisby found himself staring down the barrel of Merrill’s pistol. Convinced that Merrill meant to carry out his threat of violence, Frisby ran. Chastising the crowd as “Black Republicans” and “Tories,” Merrill focused his attention on Hockley Morton. Again, the sheriff flaunted his handgun and dared Morton to vote against the secession candidate. Perhaps it dawned on Merrill at that point that he could not simply threaten all the voters and would have to act, or maybe he panicked that the secessionists might actually lose, but for some reason, at that moment he turned toward Elisha Tweed, the son of Neely Tweed, and fired.⁶⁵

The younger Tweed crumpled to the ground with a grievous wound that onlookers judged fatal. His distraught father tracked Merrill through the streets to a house where concerned citizens had escorted the sheriff in the hope of staving off further bloodshed. Merrill did not help matters. Leaning out a second-floor window, he sneered at the onlookers, “Come up here all you Damn Black Republicans and take a shot about with me.” Merrill need not ask twice. Shots from Tweed’s double-barreled shotgun answered the sheriff’s taunts. Then, to make sure that he finished the job, Tweed pushed his way into the house and up the stairs to where Merrill lay wounded. Tweed fired again—inflicting a wound five inches deep and two inches wide in the sheriff’s abdomen. Merrill died instantly. Soon after North Carolina left the Union, Neely Tweed fled to East Tennessee to avoid arrest. Once there, he joined the Fourth Tennessee Infantry Regiment. Not long after his enrollment into the Federal army, he was joined by his son, who had survived Merrill’s attack. Both Tweeds served the Union, but only one made it home. Elisha recalled that his father looked forward to a trial by the “civil laws of his country” when he returned to Madison County. Instead, he fell among the Union dead at Flat Lick, Kentucky.⁶⁶

Soon after their return home in 1865, Elisha Tweed and several other Union soldiers faced charges for Ransom Merrill’s murder. It was, as James J. Gudger termed it, a suit “Brought against us as union men by Cecession Parties conducted by Cecession Laweye[rs] that the Laweye[rs] are promised half of what they can recover for the[i]r fees.” Nor was this case unique. Fellow Madison County resident W. W. Rollins, major of the Third North Carolina Mounted Infantry, informed the military authorities that Union men were routine targets of the former Confederates’ animosity in the war’s wake. Rollins himself faced charges for theft because he participated in Stoneman’s Raid “and captured horses taken forage &c,” and without an “appeal for asst from the military” he might have been convicted. One of Rollins’s former subordinates faced similar charges in Yancey County and likewise escaped punishment only as a result of military protection. Mountain Republican leader Alexander H. Jones lent his weight as a member of Congress to the Unionists’ petitions, despite knowing nothing personally of the Merrill-Tweed affair. He condemned Merrill as a “desperado” and urged a halt to the proceedings. In his opinion, “prejudices produced by the rebellion has so much embittered the feelings of many who have the administering of the laws, as to render it difficult for the Unionists to obtain justice in our courts, and further, that it is my opinion that this very action has been instigated by lawyers most bitter in their feelings against the United States Government and its friends.” Military authorities intervened and dropped the charges in the spring of 1868.⁶⁷

At the center of many such controversies was David Coleman, a Buncombe County resident and former Confederate colonel who won election as the solicitor for the mountainous Eighth Judicial District after the Conservatives regained control of the state in December 1865.⁶⁸ His duties as prosecutor brought Coleman into some of the smaller and more remote sections of western North Carolina. A veteran of the Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry, Solomon Mace, found himself beset upon by Coleman and the courts of Transylvania County. The difficulty arose out of a confrontation between Mace and M. S. Thomas in the war’s immediate aftermath. Mace had gone to Thomas’s farm to repossess a mule claimed by the U.S. government. Officials had sent Thomas an order claiming the mule for the government and announcing when the military would arrive to reclaim it, but Thomas left the animal in a nearby pasture and refused to relinquish it. In fact, Thomas informed a frustrated Mace that Mace would take the mule “at his peril.” It seems hard to fault Mace for interpreting that as a threat, despite Thomas’s claim under oath that it was not. Thomas and his family accused Mace of brandishing a pistol and insisting upon the animal’s delivery in menacing tones.⁶⁹

The issues involved in this case extended well beyond Transylvania County; at the heart of the proceedings was the authority of the U.S. government, particularly the military in western North Carolina. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders No. 3 in 1866 proclaiming amnesty for soldiers against civil prosecution for their actions in uniform. Mace presented the order during his defense, but the solicitor Coleman informed him that while he had “received the order referred to ... I disregard it.” In tortured logic, the judge instructed the jury that Mace “was a soldier of the United States, with lawful authority to take the mule, and that if resisted, he had a right to use such force as was necessary to execute his order and take the property, and if he merely did this he was not guilty.” The judge informed the jury that Mace “had no right to use any other force or for any other purpose, than executing his order and performing his duty under the circumstances.” Leaving the extent to which Mace could act under Federal authority to a jury disposed to resent that same power was little help to Mace. They found him guilty. Unable to find justice at Coleman’s hands, Mace’s case carried over until the following term of court commencing May 6, 1867. Local Conservatives, it seemed, were determined to make Mace pay for his Unionist beliefs, but the military finally stayed proceedings against him on September 16, 1867.⁷⁰

William G. and J. K. Ledford found themselves in Hayesville courtroom in Clay County on an equally complicated assault charge in 1866. Two visitors, identified in reports as Ray and Hix, engaged the Ledfords in conversation, and loudly denounced several leading Union figures. Already decried locally as “tories and traitors,” the Ledfords, both Union veterans, bristled at the visitors’ criticism of Union colonel George W. Kirk as a bushwhacker who “would not fight fare” and declaring that Abraham Lincoln should have met his end long before John Wilkes Booth’s bullet claimed his life. Neither did the two pro-Confederates stop there; they mocked the Union soldiers’ manhood. According to testimony, the two men opined that “Southern soldiers would die & go to Hell before Federal soldiers should run over them.” It would be better to live under a king, they taunted, than the restored United States.⁷¹

At the trial, Merrimon argued that there was no evidence that either Ray or Hix provoked the Ledfords. Without provocation, Merrimon proceeded to make the case against the Ledfords. According to the judge, one of the Ledfords took two potshots at Hix with a Navy pistol. For his part in the affair, Ray allegedly apologized before seeking safety in the rugged mountain landscape. More importantly, Merrimon was quick to accept the worst about the Ledfords and resorted to the rhetoric of class and wartime loyalties to steel fellow Conservative Jonathan Worth against the defendants. Western North Carolina experienced “many crimes of high and low degree” committed by “unprincipled and desperate men,” Merrimon informed Worth, but once the fighting concluded, the former Confederates had returned quietly to their communities. Those men who joined the Union army and fought for principle, the judge reported, had returned home and sought peace and quiet just as the former Rebels had done. The judge placed the Ledfords in a different class. He accused them of joining the Federal army after deserting the Confederate service, and routinely committing the “most outrageous crimes” while insisting that “because they happened to join the Federal Army, they have the right to commit these crimes with perfect immunity.” Merrimon had little patience for such white men who had what he judged to be fickle claims to Union loyalty, and he urged the governor not to yield to their “false cry of persecution.”⁷²

Merrimon’s dismissal of the Ledfords’ “false cry of persecution” had a much larger political meaning in western North Carolina. Whether or not the Ledfords were truly “desperate characters [who] volunteered at first to fight against the Union, and becoming tired of that service or seeing that the Confederate cause must fail,” deserted to the United States’ army was not the worst of it. In Merrimon’s estimation, their most egregious affront was that “four fifths ... of these men are radicals of the Sumner and Stevens School of politics, are hostile to the President and his policy of restoration, except in the matter of negro suffrage, and a few of them favor that.”⁷³ Judge Merrimon apparently shared district Solicitor Coleman’s animosity toward the Republican Party, but he expressed his opposition with greater tact. In Cherokee County, the scene of brutal guerrilla violence and home to a dangerously divided population during the war, Coleman allegedly opined that “the tail end of the Yankey Army was made up out of Deserters and negroes.” Of direct concern to the Ledfords was their prosecutor’s denunciation of their former commander George W. Kirk as “a sorry fellow ... only fit to go around and rob old women’s chickens [sic] roost.”⁷⁴ That those words captured Coleman’s opinion of Kirk, and by extension those who served under him, no one disputed. Merrimon admitted to Governor Worth that the prosecutor was an ardent Confederate and therefore unpopular with some westerners, but he defended Coleman as a man who shared a desire to restore the Union “and universal harmony among the American people.” Wartime loyalties continued to loom large in local political battles.⁷⁵

A petition possessing over fifty signatures from Cherokee County condemned Coleman’s conduct in cases involving Unionists. Cherokee resident Jesse Combs had property stolen during the summer of 1866, which was later found in the possession of John Roper. The justices of the peace ordered both Roper and his wife to appear in court, but Coleman “failed and still refuses to send any Bills of indictment before the Grand jury” and instead “sent in a bill against the prosecution in the case to harrass [sic] the good citizens of the country.” The petitioners demanded that the military authorities remove Coleman or compel him to perform his duty “without regard to political principles.”⁷⁶

Matters seemed little better in the rest of Coleman’s judicial circuit. Henderson County Unionists lent their voice to the anti-Coleman chorus. Their appeal deemed him “disloyal” to the United States and biased against Unionists. “The grand jury has presented numerous cases of murder, Larceny, Forcible Trespass, &C, against Rebel soldiers and Citizens,” they wrote, but Coleman refused to act on any of them for two consecutive terms of court. One Union widow, Harriet Dempsey, pursued her dead husband’s killers even after she remarried. She swore under oath that she had repeatedly pressed the solicitor to look into her husband’s death. Each successive effort to get justice for her slain husband, however, came to naught. Her pleas were met with what she deemed “contempt,” and on one occasion Coleman reportedly told her that “he had not prosecuted them nor never [sic] intended to because the amnesty act covered the case.” It was the same amnesty act, forgiving soldiers of civil crimes conducted while in the service of either army, that he ignored in the cases of Unionists whose actions he despised.⁷⁷

In neighboring Transylvania County, the chairman of the county’s first board of voter registration, Samuel Tracy, denounced Coleman as “extremely disloyal.” According to Tracy, Union men received no better treatment at the hands of the former Confederate colonel in Transylvania County than they did in Cherokee and Henderson Counties. Charges against former Rebels, including murder and robbery, Tracy complained, seemed to pass without Coleman taking any notice at all. Tracy believed that the solicitor’s actions had created a problem for both the Unionists and the small mountain county as well. He estimated that the financial burden put upon the county by Coleman’s prosecution of Unionists was $1,100 and that an equal, if not greater, burden fell upon pro-Union defendants in terms of legal fees.⁷⁸

Petitions clarifying some of the crimes to which Tracy alluded arrived just after the chairman’s letter. Two men were murdered in Henderson County, and the suspected killers, James Jones and Thomas Young, remained free. Both Jones and Young were Confederates, and they committed their crimes prior to the legislature’s amnesty act, yet Coleman’s decision not to prosecute was all the more bizarre to the Transylvania County Unionists when compared to his actions in the affair of John and William Allison. The latter was in the process of moving out of the state, but hesitated in case any pending action might require his attention. Coleman never reviewed witnesses or sent papers to a grand jury despite knowing of William Allison’s intentions, and then at the last moment the solicitor called Allison as a witness for the state. Unaware of being called to court, Allison missed his appearance. It struck the members of the Unionist community as perverse that Coleman assured everyone that nothing prohibited Allison’s departure, and then he called him as a witness without Allison’s knowledge. Unionists criticized Coleman for letting murders go unpunished while he prosecuted Allison for failing to appear in court when called.⁷⁹

If Transylvania and Cherokee Counties appeared to be the most divided and angry with Coleman, he also generated resentment from more populated counties like Buncombe and Burke. The common denominator in each complaint was the allegation that Union men received no justice at Coleman’s hands. Through the war’s final weeks, Elisha Cordell decided that he wanted to join the Federal ranks. He met up with a Union recruiting officer, and they set off together for East Tennessee in the spring of 1865. As they passed through Buncombe County, the officer inducted several of the local mules and horses into Federal service. Months later, local authorities arrested Cordell as an accomplice to theft. A witness testified that he saw Cordell and others with the stolen animals on April 1, 1865; Cordell confessed to riding the mule but denied any role in its robbery. More to the point, he asserted that the theft took place during the war under the authority of a Union officer. Coleman disagreed. In his version of events, Cordell took part in an armed robbery on June 11, 1866. It was after the war, and Coleman claimed amnesty did not apply in the case. The court convicted the Unionist during the fall term of Buncombe County’s superior court in 1866, and Cordell had to pay court costs.⁸⁰

Beset on all sides, David Coleman assembled a multilayered defense of his official conduct. On the one hand, he answered the charge of selectively prosecuting Unionists with an abstract description of a prosecuting attorney’s duties. Solicitors must be careful and discrete. A poor officer he would be, Coleman argued, if he yielded “to the exactions of influence, or to the vindictiveness of revengeful persons.” No doubt, Coleman assumed a difficult task when he took office in the war’s wake. He informed the military that he was sensitive to the issues associated with cases involving soldiers. Even then, the sort of class bias exercised by Conservatives like Coleman colored his decisions. When dealing with war-related crimes, such as the killing of a Union or Confederate soldier, Coleman wrote that his “first question has usually been were the offenders soldiers & was the deceased a deserter whom they were ordered to take.” If their superiors had ordered the southern soldiers to capture deserters and other such men, then the death seemed justified. It was for this reason that he declined to act in the matter of William Hensley and other Confederate soldiers in Madison County who murdered a deserter. The problem in Coleman’s thinking was that many of these deserters later joined the Union army, and as such merited protection under the amnesty law. Men like Coleman and Merrimon, however, denied that such actions may reflect Union loyalty or principle. All they saw was a deserter, a class of men that collectively terrorized the mountain region during the war.⁸¹

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Coleman cast himself in the role of neutral prosecutor amid a divided constituency. No one, Republican or Conservative, he argued, could have given complete satisfaction. “Among a people divided by strong political feeling as were those of this circuit,” he wrote in his defense, “the prosecuting officer of whichever political character he might be, & however just & honest he might be would be bitterly assailed.” The legislature appointed Coleman to his office in December 1865 after the Conservatives swept the elections against William Holden and his anti-Confederate coalition. Coleman’s support for the president’s Reconstruction policy was well known, and Coleman believed that if “a radical been elected in my stead however just & impartial might have been his course hundreds of conservative union men would doubtless have charged & many of them believed prosecution & favoritism for political opinion’s sake.” For his part, Coleman dismissed charges of disloyalty with an affirmation of his commitment “to the Constitution, the Union, the Government & its laws.”⁸²

Having presided as judge over Coleman’s district, Merrimon knew the challenges the solicitor faced, and he agreed that universal satisfaction was impossible in the divided mountains. Merrimon claimed that Coleman exhibited no bias and that he frequently witnessed the prosecutor offer amnesty to those who disagreed with him politically. But Merrimon pointed his finger at the lower-class white men who deserted or resisted the Confederate army. The solicitor was “a zealous Confederate,” and Merrimon was sure that the Unionists would have resented him regardless of the course he pursued as prosecutor. This resentment only grew when Coleman sought justice for Confederates who had lost property to deserter bands during the war. While Merrimon admitted that he and Coleman “have differed radically upon the character and powers of the Federal Government,” the solicitor was “a gentleman of great kindness of heart and uniformly polite and obliging to every body.”⁸³

Coleman’s fate rested with district commander General E. R. S. Canby, whose removal of the solicitor weakened the postwar order mountain Conservatives had constructed after their state electoral victories. Information passed along the military chain of command, with each officer offering their opinion on Coleman’s conduct. Colonel W. B. Royall, who commanded the post in Morganton, endorsed Coleman’s removal on October 31, 1867, stating that there were competent lawyers capable of taking the ironclad loyalty oath to replace him. As a result, Unionists, whom Conservatives like Coleman held in little regard, exercised greater power than before. Men like Samuel Tracy of Transylvania County were the sort of base, spiteful men who Coleman and the Conservatives believed made up the Republican ranks. Noting that Tracy had been “conspicuous in expressing fierce denunciations of me,” Coleman attributed Tracy’s vitriol to his having been convicted in the fall of 1866 and again in the spring of 1867 by Coleman for illegally selling liquor. Tracy accused Coleman of trying to bribe witnesses with alcohol—a charge that Tracy’s lawyer, James L. Henry, convinced his client to avoid making under oath. In his mind, all his critics and accusers were like Tracy: bitter, deluded, and devoid of credible evidence. But it was to no avail. Canby sided with the Republicans and removed Coleman from office.⁸⁴

One of the most prominent western Conservatives, Augustus Merrimon, found himself near the heart of many such controversies. Like Conservatives across North Carolina and the South, Merrimon argued that state law alone must guide a judge such as himself. His duty and oath dictated that he not “recognize or obey a Military order, for the laws forbid him to do so.” Merrimon swore to uphold and protect the state’s new constitution, and he considered it a violation of that vow to accommodate military interference with those laws. No doubt Merrimon intended his next action to be dramatic: he resigned. “I cannot therefore and will not while exercising my office as Judge,” he informed Governor Worth, “recognize or obey any Military order that may come to me in contravention of the laws of the State.” Even if he were inclined to stay on in his post, Merrimon concluded that the Unionists had succeeded in wooing the military and that the latter’s “power will be exercised to prevent any such action on my part and that power I cannot control.” The mountain judge avowed that his resignation drew from his “high sense of conscientious duty and not by any captious spirit or disposition to embarrass the public authorities, State or Federal, or to retard the reconstruction of the Union.”⁸⁵

Merrimon’s resignation proved that he could make a bold, calculated political statement—assuming, of course, that modern readers give him the benefit of the doubt. Augustus Merrimon hated being a circuit court judge and was prepared to resign his post in February 1866. Seeking counsel from George Swepson, Merrimon opined that the depressed condition of the western counties prohibited his making a good living, and he debated moving to Raleigh to practice law after the spring circuit concluded in August 1866. Later, Merrimon changed his mind—but not out of a “high sense of conscientious duty.” In July, he concluded that “the xtreme [sic] scarcity of money makes me doubt the propriety of an immediate resignation of my office,” so he opted to stay. His judge’s salary would “keep me even with the world until the country recuperates a little and the government becomes more settled in its policy toward” the South.⁸⁶

With Coleman and Merrimon no longer in office, Republican and military scrutiny fell upon other local Conservative officeholders. The wave of Unionist momentum rolled across the mountain counties’ political landscape before breaking upon Buncombe County sheriff Jackson Shipman. In Shipman’s case, the charges centered upon his actions involving a three-dollar debt. Around the middle of July, Shipman allegedly came to Alfred Garren’s farm to collect. Garren was in the fields plowing when Shipman arrived. To satisfy the small prewar debt, Garren offered his watch. That failed to satisfy Shipman, who demanded instead the mule pulling Garren’s plow. Garren testified that Shipman drew his knife and moved toward the mule. Sympathetic Conservatives backed Shipman in the matter and accused Garren of being a man of poor character. Shipman himself alleged that Garren gathered an armful of rocks and threatened the sheriff’s life, which prompted him to draw his knife. Agga Corpening testified that he saw Shipman cross Garren’s fence and walk after the mule, at which point Garren gathered up the rocks. According to Corpening, Shipman then threatened to cut out the man’s heart if he failed to yield.⁸⁷

Garren’s charges prompted another series of petitions and accusations that cast further doubt in the minds of the military authorities upon the ability of mountain Unionists to receive justice. Proving Shipman’s disloyalty was more important to the Unionists than demonstrating the abuse of one particular individual. Buncombe County resident Nathan Brown reduced the matter to Shipman’s status as an original secessionist and “disloyal man.” Another Buncombe County Unionist, John Taylor, informed the military officials that he had heard Shipman demean Yankees and pray for another war. According to Taylor, Shipman swore that if another war could get masters their slaves back he would fight until “his last drop of blood.” Fresh off his complaints against Coleman, Elisha Cordell said that Shipman had denounced Congress and challenged their right to wrest control over Reconstruction from Andrew Johnson. Regarding Unionists, Cordell declared that Shipman had blamed them for the Confederacy’s defeat.⁸⁸

Shipman responded in a manner similar to David Coleman. It was incomprehensible to them that they would be in danger of losing office and political standing to men who they felt were beneath them. Answering charges of targeting Unionists as “maliciously false,” Shipman asserted that he had taken the amnesty oath proscribed by President Johnson and obediently followed both Congress’s laws and the president’s proclamations. The incident with Garren, Shipman argued, was the military’s responsibility. He claimed that a Federal officer ordered him to collect Garren’s debts and that he drew his knife in self-defense after Garren reached for the rocks. Whether Shipman had received instruction to collect debts from the military proved irrelevant. Upon investigation, Captain Jeremiah C. Denney of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry found sufficient cause to remove Shipman from office. It was not Shipman’s official conduct that disqualified him, Denney noted, thus dismissing Shipman’s defense of following orders; it was “his violent language against the Government.” Again, perceptions of loyalty appeared paramount to other concerns in western North Carolina politics.⁸⁹

Both commanders of the Second Military District, Daniel Sickles and E. R. S. Canby, who succeeded the former in early September 1867, removed civil officials rarely. Compared to the heavy-handed tactics of Philip Sheridan in Louisiana, the generals in the Second Military District exercised great restraint in dealing with North Carolina’s civil officials. Sickles believed that the ability to dismiss civil officials was a key part of his authority, but he informed Ulysses S. Grant in June 1867 that he had removed only twelve men for “misconduct in office.” Most of these removals were in eastern North Carolina. Still, General E. R. S. Canby ousted both Coleman and Shipman from office in the hope of bringing justice to the mountains for Unionists. Where Shipman’s case differed from Coleman’s, however, was that in Shipman’s case, mountain Conservatives fought the decision. Canby had ordered Shipman’s removal, but his community had its own ideas. After Canby dismissed Shipman as justice of the peace, the people of the Bent Creek district reelected Shipman to the same office as soon as was possible. The message was clear: Shipman’s community wanted him as magistrate even if the military did not. Conservatives dug in against national power and the military in particular.⁹⁰

Military intervention did not always come to those who wanted it. The clearest distinction the military authorities made involved cases of institutional justice. A biased officer who persecuted Unionists not only punished men who previously wore Union blue; he undermined the basic functions of the reconstituted state governments as well. Equal justice, in the military authorities’ estimation, was not meted out in the mountains, so they leveled the field. In cases of indebtedness and economic relief, they backed away from interfering. In the case of Jackson Shipman and Alfred Garren, it was not Shipman’s collection of the debt that upset the military officials. Rather his harsh words regarding the government prompted his removal. But in cases of indebtedness, the military hesitated to act. For example, Edward Sevier, a Buncombe County farmer, struggled to provide for his family after the war. Because “his necessary articles of furniture, apparel, subsistence and implements of husbandry including a dark bay mule” were not worth more than the $500 guaranteed by General Sickles’s General Orders 10, he feared he might lose it all after the court ruled against him for $47 on March 5, 1868. The sheriff had seized Sevier’s most important, albeit not his most valuable, property, his mule, to satisfy the debt. A mountain farm was practically crippled without a mule to pull the plow, and Sevier argued that the animal was “indispensable in the cultivation of his crop the approaching season.” Sevier fretted that without it he would incur more debts and slowly become insolvent. Under Canby’s orders, “military relief cannot be afforded unless it appears under oath that the Civil Courts are unable or have improperly refused to give the appropriate remedy.”⁹¹

Western North Carolina’s postwar political situation mirrored its wartime experience. Political faction loyalty—like wartime loyalty—was personal and unpredictable. In the end, anti-Confederates turned to outside sources of power in the form of the national Republican Party and the military to help gain the control over local politics denied them by the Conservatives’ resurgence in late 1865. While the military held ultimate authority, no organization would prove more active and influential in the western counties than the Freedmen’s Bureau. As much as the anti-Confederates hoped to keep politics the venue of white men, the presence of federal power embodied by bureau agents, who appeared in the region in greater number than military posts, played a vital role in making the anti-Confederates Republicans. For white western North Carolinians who believed that the status of African Americans might change as little as possible, the presence of the Freedmen’s Bureau was a clear indicator that the consequences of the war could not be avoided. For Unionists and anti-Confederates determined to gain control of local and state government, the bureau agents offered a real and tangible opportunity for profound social and political change.