Virgil S. Lusk was an old man when he wrote his version of an attack upon him in 1869. Fifty-four years and the raw emotion of that day had faded since Ku Klux Klan leader Randolph A. Shotwell snuck up behind him and bludgeoned him with a cane. It was a different time then. Recalling those tense years in western North Carolina, Lusk wrote that “many of the [Civil War’s] surviveors [sic] could not draw a distinction between acts of war and personal malice.” Like much of Southern Appalachia, North Carolina’s mountain counties had experienced a bitter guerrilla conflict during the war and open political fighting after it. Little did it help, concluded the old solicitor, that “law was not enforced, crime was common, neither life [nor] property was secure, desperdoes [sic] and ruffians paraded the streets day and night with a Colt’s revolver in one pocket and a bottle of mean whiskey in the other.” As a former Confederate officer who became a leader of the southern mountain Republicans, Lusk knew better than most that in post–Civil War western North Carolina, “political toleration was out of the question.” Addressing the inability to obtain convictions against Ku Klux Klansmen, Lusk made an observation that could have just as easily described the entire postwar period: “a farce in a comedy of justice.”1
Lusk’s recollections captured the feelings that permeated Reconstruction in western North Carolina. Like much of the South, western North Carolinians experienced a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Divided loyalties split white mountaineers along class lines during the war, and this persistent division led Unionists and anti-Confederates to embrace federal power and African American voters after the war. The rise of the mountain Republicans points to how federal power, when adapted to local conditions, could effectively promote social and political change in the South. In particular, Freedmen’s Bureau agents made invaluable contributions to the region’s reconstruction. They extended helping hands to African Americans, mountain Unionists, and lower-class highlanders after the war. Rations, restrictions on illicit distilling, and the registration of black voters showed how federal agents could be effective when they adapted to local social dynamics. However, their success also prompted a massive backlash—at home and throughout the state—that toppled the Republican state government. A tobacco boom, the first major foothold of one of the South’s major staple crops in the mountains, allowed white Democrats to appeal to Republicans’ economic interests as well. As such, the political and racial violence employed by the Klan fractured Republicans along racial and class lines, and the Conservatives capitalized on that division by reestablishing antebellum bipartisan economic development such as the Western North Carolina Railroad (WNCRR).
In many ways, it was industrial growth with an eye on the past. The Civil War introduced many northerners—and future investors—to Southern Appalachia, and postwar local color writers depicted the region as backward and in need of economic salvation. Railroads brought more industry to all sections of the region, and the WNCRR transformed Asheville into a major market center for large enterprises. Tobacco production continued to expand. Between 1880 and 1890, thirteen western counties increased their tobacco production. Madison and Buncombe Counties continued to lead the way, producing 2,168,823 and 1,482,688 pounds each. Neighboring Haywood County surged from 39,516 pounds in 1880 to 861,096 pounds ten years later. But the tobacco boom proved fleeting. The tobacco business declined in the 1890s as the American Tobacco Company tightened its grip over the industry and shifted most of the production to the eastern part of the state.2
Long a part of the mountain economy, tourism became more critical in the wake of the railroad’s arrival. Railroads not only made it easier for tourists to move in and out of the region; they also helped create new communities geared directly toward outside visitors. Furthermore, tourism and industrial development went hand-in-hand. Northern visitors came with money, which local boosters urged them to spend on summer homes and local industry. It worked. Vacationing timber company executives admired the mountain section’s hardwood forests, then came back to buy large tracts and build sawmills. Local land agents promoted the scenery and the natural resources in combination, hoping to convince investors from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio to put their money to good use in the Carolina mountains. Boosters seized upon the moniker “Land of the Sky,” which Richard D. Starnes has noted was an image in the mold of Henry Grady’s New South more than the backward Appalachia of local color writers like Rebecca Harding Davis.3
Shut out from the tobacco boom of the 1870s, African Americans found employment in tourism and service jobs that also hinted at antebellum continuity since enslaved mountaineers served tourists for their masters. After the war, black workers catered to an evolving tourist population. In the early years of Reconstruction, blacks found work in health-related destinations like sanitariums. After the Oakland Heights Sanitarium opened in Asheville in the late 1880s, African Americans found work in a variety of service jobs ranging from chambermaid to coachman. Statistics showed that more than 45 percent of Asheville’s black population worked in some aspect of the tourism industry in 1886. Later they catered to visitors seeking recreation. In the growing urban center of Asheville, blacks found economic opportunity in the expanding number of hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other service jobs. African American men dominated the barber shops between 1880 and 1900. Black owners operated about a dozen restaurants, serving local and outside clientele in 1892.4
After waiting decades for the WNCRR to reach Asheville, residents in Haywood, Jackson, Macon, and other counties saw the railroad push quickly into their communities by 1890. The engines’ arrival allowed other mountain enterprises to pick up steam. Northern investors who balked at buying mountain lands in the 1870s found the region more enticing once the trains lowered transportation costs. Mountain landscapes, rich in minerals, waterpower, timber, and other natural resources, drew significant outside attention. In the decade following the completion of the WNCRR to Asheville, the amount of capital invested in manufacturing in western North Carolina more than doubled in nine counties. Rutherford County experienced the greatest growth, jumping from $56,850 in 1880 to $513,957 in 1890. Still, it was Buncombe County that benefited the most. In 1890, investors funneled more than $1 million into Buncombe businesses. People followed the money trail. By 1890, Asheville had risen to become the only town within the region with a population greater than ten thousand people. Asheville’s growth was part of a trend, as all of the region’s county seats but one, Robbinsville in Graham County, increased in size over that same time.5
And the mountain Republicans struggled on in the 1880s, finding ways to survive in a decade of Democratic domination of state politics. Emerging leaders, like second-generation mountain politician J. C. L. Harris, strove to uphold the party in difficult times. With strong family ties to the wartime peace movement and postwar Republican Party, Harris moved to Raleigh to work for William W. Holden’s newspaper in 1862. After the war, Harris founded a Republican newspaper through which he championed the party’s platform of equal suffrage, workers’ rights, and public education. He promoted a politics in the latter decades of the nineteenth century that rose above racial demagoguery. Harris tied the post–Civil War world to the antebellum struggles for broader democratic government. Many of his political mentors were prominent western North Carolinians, including several signers of the 1851 “Western Address” calling for the election of local officials by all white male voters. Harris connected that sentiment to the platform of the Republican Party, pushing the party to embrace local rule and labor rights in the 1880s. As a lawyer, Harris could not join the Knights of Labor, but he championed their cause as a logical continuation of post–Civil War Republican principles. Through the Knights and later political fusion with Populists in the 1890s, Harris and other Republicans found a way to survive and even thrive before statewide disfranchisement laws undermined meaningful biracial politics for more than fifty years.6
Reconstruction ushered in a new era in western North Carolina’s history. But on a broader level, western North Carolina’s post–Civil War experience tells us even more about the South and United States during this pivotal period. First, it shows the importance of a flexible central government. The intersection of the state and social history is an area that Reconstruction scholars have begun to develop, and it is a topic with significant ramifications. Devising a policy to deal with the defeated South—populated with a hostile and defeated white population as well as roughly 4 million former slaves—forced the government to deal with issues of loyalty and emancipation directly. However, in a diverse region, the needs of communities and people varied. Residents of the plantation belt, such as southwest Georgians, experienced a shift largely focused on the dictates of the cotton crop. The result was an emphasis on getting the crop planted and harvested. In the mountains, the absence of large plantations and staple crop agriculture influenced policy differently. Whereas the predominantly pro-Confederate plantation belt united in opposition to federal power and social change regarding former slaves, white mountaineers worried less about the future of labor and more about what class of whites would govern. As such, they formed a vocal and persistent opposition to President Andrew Johnson’s lenient reconstruction plan.
The Civil War proved definitively that the majority of white southerners were willing to fight and die to sustain a society built upon a foundation of racial slavery. Most white western North Carolinians joined their eastern neighbors and fellow Confederate states in the pursuit of independence. For many of them, the war did not necessarily stop in 1865. As Virgil Lusk made clear to the Senate committee on southern outrages, surrendering the fight may have been the easy part. Himself a Confederate officer who spent two years as a prisoner of war, Lusk yielded both the fight and the principle behind it. Many former Confederates, he warned, “may have surrendered their guns, but not the principle they fought for. I think they still retain it; still hang on to it.” Pressed on how peace and order could be restored to his community and the South, Lusk offered two options. First, the U.S. government could hang about five hundred men. Or it could “pay [former Confederates’] debt, compensate them for their emancipated slaves, give them all the offices, and acknowledge the existence of the confederacy.” A probably surprised senator asked him to clarify. Was Lusk suggesting “in other words, surrender to the rebels?” His answer left no doubt that he felt conditions in his district were dire: “Yes, sir.”7
When the federal government gave real support to local Unionists, anti-Confederates, Republicans (like Lusk), and African Americans after the Confederacy collapsed, an opportunity arose where reconstruction truly worked. The post–Civil War period in western North Carolina was a moment when the possibility of meaningful and permanent social change was tenable. The Freedmen’s Bureau as an organization functioned unevenly across the South, but in the North Carolina mountains, bureau agents exercised their power with a clear purpose. They protected the anti-Confederates and former slaves. In doing so, they helped establish a biracial political coalition that may have held on and effectively moved the region beyond slavery and the turmoil of the war. More than that, they demonstrated that federal policies could be employed successfully within southern communities to facilitate a transition from slavery to free labor. These political gains and reactionary violence were felt by mountaineers—and southerners at large—most fully at the local level. For western North Carolinians, the key issue was often who would rule locally. National and state office became a means to that end through appointment of local officials or patronage. For a moment, reconstruction in western North Carolina promised to create a new social order keeping with national expectations and hopes.
Even as the biracial Republican coalition struggled against the Klan, strong federal support could have stemmed the losses. In the end, mountain Republicans came to the same realization as James Justice, the victim of the Klan’s 1871 raid on Rutherfordton. They should have fought back themselves. Not doing so further emboldened the old white elite who preached corruption, fraud, and racial fears to divide the Republicans. In the end, violence was the wedge that allowed the elite to lure the upper- and middle-class whites away from the Republicans. Images of railroads, commercial development, and tobacco profits harkened back to the late antebellum commitment to internal improvements and white rule. In other words, industrial development trumped a commitment to social change and brought a reaction tied to race and class that doomed reconstruction in the western counties. Lusk’s memory of the post–Civil War period showed how far these conflicts had fallen. Some mountaineers kept the ideas of this period alive. The Grand Army of the Republic had posts in the region, including the Marion Roberts camp in Asheville. African Americans continued struggling for civil rights as they moved with greater numbers into the tourism industry and other urban jobs. But the people of western North Carolina needed real governmental power—not the veterans of earlier struggles.8
Reconstruction paved the way for western North Carolina’s development. The divided loyalties that persisted after the Civil War challenged the region’s political culture. Unionists’ political struggles against the region’s wartime leaders offered local allies for the outside influence made available by Confederate defeat. With the rise of the Republican alliance of white and black mountaineers, the bond between the region and the national party grew stronger. These issues moved the fate of the western section of the state to the heart of Reconstruction. It moved one part of Southern Appalachia from the margins of history to the heart of lived experience. All the core issues of southern Reconstruction—emancipation, political realignment, violence, and economic development—played out in western North Carolina. Mountaineers’ postwar realities demand that we, too, understand “Reconstruction” in new ways. Southern Appalachia reminds us that the restoration of the Union was a multifaceted proposition. Even as time inexorably marched on, participants in the events that shaped western North Carolina after the war never lost sight of the centrality of wartime loyalties, shifting political alliances, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. Even as residents of an increasingly urban Asheville looked out at the urban landscape made possible by the arrival of the WNCRR to their city in 1880, the legacy of Reconstruction was obvious. Today, part-time residents of the region doubt that there was ever a time when African Americans played a pivotal role in western North Carolina’s politics. Such views seem natural now, as the area once stuck “between slavery and the want of railroads” and populated by the “extremest form of humanity” has blossomed into the carefully constructed “Land of the Sky.”