Notes

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Department of North Carolina Records Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105. Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, North Carolina, 1865–1872. National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Ga.

NARA National Archives and Records Administration.

NC Klan Report Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: North Carolina. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872.

NCOAH North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, N.C.

Pension Files United States Civil War Pension Records, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Second Military District Records Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of the South and the Second Military District, 1867–68, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

SHC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Introduction

1. Davis, “Yares of the Black Mountains,” 177–78, 182–83; Noe, “‘Deadened Color and Colder Horror,’” 70. Davis was a native Pennsylvanian, but she largely grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Davis was a Unionist, and her view of the Civil War was somewhat conflicted, as she also believed the South had the right to secede from the Union. She began writing fiction set in western Virginia and Appalachia during the Civil War, which set the foundation for her later expansion to writing about western North Carolina.

2. Davis, “Yares of the Black Mountains,” 181–82. A quick note on terminology: I use “Reconstruction” when addressing a particular period of American history, specifically the period following the American Civil War. I use “reconstruction” when referring to the process by which the Union was reconstituted after the war. The first usage, when capitalized, is a nationally recognized policy or event. Lowercased “reconstruction” is the act and function of restoring the Union.

3. Noe, “‘Deadened Color and Colder Horror,’” 71–80. The titular family in “Yares of the Black Mountains” were themselves Unionists persecuted and challenged by a surrounding Confederate population. See Davis, “Yares of the Black Mountains,” 187–91.

4. O’Donovan, Becoming Free, quote on p. 9; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, quote on p. 3. For additional examples of state and local studies of Reconstruction, see Morgan, Emancipation in the Virginia Tobacco Belt; Saville, Work of Reconstruction; Dailey, Before Jim Crow. Two recent studies addressed Reconstruction in North Carolina. Mark Bradley’s study of the military’s role in North Carolina’s restoration to the Union recaptured another oft-overlooked aspect of the postwar period. The U.S. Army played a major part in Reconstruction, and Bradley found that white Union officers frequently sided with white North Carolinians in issues of power and social control after the war. Greg Downs went even further. In Declarations of Dependence, Downs argues that the Civil War created a politics of dependence that continued into the 1890s. Downs’s argument is provocative; he extends the idea of patron-client relationships (where a powerful “patron” garners the support of lower-class “clients”) to North Carolina and the South as a whole. In Downs’s view, the state (embodied by popular politicians like Zebulon Vance) became the patron and the people became the clients. Over time, conservative politicians reduced the clients down to white North Carolinians. See Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels, and Downs, Declarations of Dependence.

5. In Declarations of Dependence, Downs attempts to completely redefine the relationship of power between the state and the people, but he never really reaches the local level in his study. For instance, a large part of his evidence for the Freedmen’s Bureau’s limitations focuses on the state commissioner, Eliphalet Whittlesey, and agents from the central and eastern sections of the state. My research suggests that the subdistrict or county agent rather than the state assistant commissioner performed the real work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Downs ultimately offers another examination of the central and eastern counties while claiming to address North Carolina as a whole. For his assessment and use of evidence regarding the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Downs, Declarations of Dependence, 86–100.

6. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 311–19; Bender, Community and Social Change. On the internal divisions and rivalry within antebellum North Carolina politics, see Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics. On the “idea” of Appalachia and how Americans perceived the region, see Williams, “Southern Mountaineer”; Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind; Batteau, Invention of Appalachia. Some of the works that have challenged this idea of exceptionalism are Pudup, Billings, and Waller, Appalachia in the Making and Billings, Norman, and Ledford, Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes. On the Civil War era in Southern Appalachia, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters; Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad; Noe and Wilson, Civil War in Appalachia; Fisher, War at Every Door; Groce, Mountain Rebels; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia; Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War; McKnight, Contested Borderland; Sarris, Separate Civil War; McKnight, Confederate Outlaw.

7. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans; Eller, Uneven Ground, 4. Gordon B. McKinney’s Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900 long remained the best single volume on post–Civil War Appalachia, but it is no longer a singular voice on the subject of Reconstruction in the mountain South. A couple of the articles in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, reveal how Southern Appalachian communities dealt with slavery’s demise, but a comprehensive regional study of Reconstruction in the mountain South remains a missing piece in the historiography. For collected essays offering a variety of perspectives on Reconstruction in Southern Appalachia, see Slap, Reconstructing Appalachia.

8. Elites exerted tremendous influence in western North Carolina prior to the Civil War. For instance, Ashe County slaveholders made up only 6.6 percent of the farming population in 1860. Still, they commanded nearly 50 percent of the county’s real and personal wealth. An even stronger correlation existed between large landholdings and slave ownership. The fourteen largest landowners in Ashe were slaveholders and possessed nearly 14 percent of the county’s improved acreage, in spite of being less than 1 percent of the population. See Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, 34–35. Throughout this book, the two major political parties will be called the Conservatives and the Republicans. The Conservatives take their name from the Democratic Party as well as the Conservative Party, which formed during the Civil War and consisted of moderate Democrats and pro-Confederate Whigs. After the war, the Conservative Party remained viable electing state officials in each election prior to Congressional or Radical Reconstruction. After Congress assumed power, however, the Conservatives gradually drifted toward a formal alliance with the Democratic Party. This alliance was consummated in the 1870s, but even then many of its members used the terms “Conservative” and “Democratic” interchangeably in regard to their party. The Republicans are easier to define. They formed in early 1867 from the remnants of the anti-Confederate coalition that emerged in the war’s aftermath. Their party survives under the Republican name to this day.

Chapter One

1. Muir, Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 1, 22–24, 37, 42–43.

2. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 3–7; Taylor, Alleghania, 2, 11. As defined for this study, western North Carolina includes Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Burke, Caldwell, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Swain, Transylvania, Watauga, Wilkes, and Yancey Counties. The North Carolina legislature created Avery, Swain, and Graham Counties during Reconstruction.

3. Boyd, “Native Americans,” 7–10.

4. Blethen and Wood, From Ulster to Carolina, 15; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 7, 13, 62, 68–70, 76; Escott, Many Excellent People, 4–5, 7.

5. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 121; Crawford, “Political Society,” 378–81. For Ashe County, Crawford expressed the ratio of the percentage of slaveholders in the total population to the percentage of controlled wealth as 7.55 compared to 1.89 for the cotton South. Also the broader calculation cited here does not encompass Rutherford and Polk Counties.

6. Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 52–55; Crawford, “Mountain Farmers,” 443–44; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 13–14, 16–17, 37–38, 41, 45–46, 48–49, 52; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 14; Escott, Many Excellent People, 7–9; Fisher, War at Every Door, 17–18; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 2, 4–5, 9–11; Owsley, Plain Folk, 45–46. Livestock proved a more popular market commodity because the inefficient mountain road network made transporting perishable produce too costly. Yet mountaineers’ tendency to produce a surplus of corn and fruit obliged them to seek an economically viable means to maximize crop usage. Distillation proved a profitable alternative. Transporting whiskey and brandy to market was easier than moving perishable foodstuffs. For a detailed study of western North Carolina distilling during the antebellum period, see Stewart, “‘This Country Improves in Cultivation,” 447–78.

7. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 57–61, 68–69, 84–86; Escott, Many Excellent People, 9–10; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 16–18; Bolton, Poor Whites, 12–15, 29–32; Blethen and Wood, “Pioneer Experience to 1851,” 84–86; McKinney, “Society and Social Groups,” 411–12; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 48.

8. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 117, 126–30; Barney, Making of a Confederate, 19, 21, 145; Ashe, Weeks, and Van Noppen, Biographical History of North Carolina, 2:327, 333, 335; Genovese, “Yeoman Farmers,” 333–36; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 52–55. Among the reforms sought by western North Carolinians were an adjustment of state property taxes and voting rights.

9. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 88–90, 99–102, 104–7; Phifer, “Slavery in Microcosm,” 139, 148, 153–54. Elements of this interpretation of mountain slavery have been challenged in two works by Wilma Dunaway. See Dunaway, Slavery and African American Family.

10. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 154–57, 161, 165; Kruman, Parties and Politics, 5–11, 25–26; Brown, State Movement in Railroad Development, 129–32, 137–42.

11. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 127–28, 135–37; Kruman, Parties and Politics, 55–56, 64–66; Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 69, 123–25, 236–41; Crawford, “Political Society,” 383–85.

12. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 139–41, 143–47, 150; Kruman, Parties and Politics, 49–52, 86–90, 95–101; Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 268–76; McGee, “North Carolina Conservatives and Reconstruction,” 40–42.

13. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 219–21; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 985–86; and Fayetteville Observer, November 26, 1860, 1. Alleghany County voted with Ashe County through 1860. Clay, Mitchell, and Transylvania Counties formed in 1861. Madison County results were so uncertain that election officials rejected them entirely. See Paludan, Victims, 58.

14. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 226; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 30–32; Paludan, Victims, 63–64; Inscoe, “Race and Racism,” 104–16, 122.

15. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 42–44; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 238–40, 243–45, 250–51; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1013–15. For a broader analysis of the secession crisis in the Upper South, see Crofts, Reluctant Confederates.

16. Inscoe, “Mountain Unionism,” 115–17, 121–26; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 52, 227–28; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 47–50. William Holland Thomas quoted in Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 47.

17. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 63–64, 71, 73, 106–7; Crawford, “Confederate Volunteering and Enlistment,” 32, 35–40.

18. McKinney, “Layers of Loyalty,” 12, 15–19.

19. Bolton, Poor Whites, 146; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 78–81. For broader studies showing the war’s impact on southern women, see Faust, Mothers of Invention; Rable, Civil Wars; and Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

20. Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 182–87; Escott, Many Excellent People, 36–37, 39; McGee, “North Carolina Conservatives and Reconstruction,” 68–71; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 147–49.

21. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 147–51; Kruman, Parties and Politics, 230–41; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 999–1000. Mitchell County voted with Yancey County, and Transylvania County voted with Henderson County in that election.

22. Paludan, Victims, xi, 68, 84–98; Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War, 62–76; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 106–9, 114–15, 125–26. Such guerrilla violence was a standard of the Appalachian region during the Civil War. The mountain sections of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia experienced very similar trends of violence, as did northern Georgia. In both those regions, historians have found communities in duress comparable to the stress experienced by North Carolina’s mountain population. Both regions also underscore the complex intersection of regular soldiers who brought their own ideals and motivations and local people often fighting for very different and more community-based goals. For more on these Appalachian regions’ civil war, see McKnight, Contested Borderland, and Sarris, Separate Civil War. For an excellent overview of guerrilla violence during the Civil War, see Sutherland, Savage Conflict.

23. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 125–30.

24. Sidney McLean, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md.

25. Kruman, Parties and Politics, 244–52, 259–65; McGee, “North Carolina Conservatives and Reconstruction,” 75–77, 82–85; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 137, 154, 158, 162; Auman and Scarboro, “Heroes of America,” 327, 329–31, 336, 342, 345, 350. For a study of the Heroes of America in a Southern Appalachian region, see Noe, “Red String Scare,” 301–22.

26. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 167–71, 197–98, 225–29; Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 8–10, 13, 16.

27. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 209–22; Inscoe, “Coping in Confederate Appalachia,” 408–9.

28. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 242–43, 248.

29. Ibid., 247.

30. John M. Carson, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md.

31. Elijah Jennings and John Glass, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md.

32. Elizabeth Jolley, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md.

33. Betty Ann Hamilton and Mary Merrill, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md.

34. Isaac Garrison and John Chavers, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md. For a discussion of the distinctions made by northeastern and western Yankee soldiers, see Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea.

35. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 248–52.

36. Allen, Asheville, 51; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 252.

37. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 252–58. For more on Stoneman’s Raid through western North Carolina, see Spencer, Last Ninety Days; Van Noppen, Stoneman’s Last Raid.

38. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 133–34; Goff, Confederate Supply, 85–88, 154–55; Todd, Confederate Finance, 148. During the war, county governments and local elites tried—ultimately without success—to aid their suffering neighbors. See Escott, “Poverty and Governmental Aid,” 462–80.

39. E. A. Davis to Messrs. Wilson, Burns, and Co., June 13, 1866, Calvin J. Cowles Papers, SHC; Calvin J. Cowles, Wilkes County Agricultural Circulars, Return Days September 1, October 1, 1866, Calvin J. Cowles Papers, SHC.

40. Garren, Mountain Myth, 20, 89. Garren’s estimates should be taken with some degree of caution. Most significantly, his definition of Unionism clouds his interpretation of his numbers. For example, his estimates lack specificity on the Confederate side. While he gives names for all of his estimated Union soldiers, he does not give names for his Confederate soldiers. Such a task would be extremely time consuming and fill hundreds of pages, but his argument regarding the level of Unionism versus Confederate sentiment hinges almost entirely on the number of men that joined each side’s armies. As such, not having the Confederate names prohibits us from applying the same rigorous standard to Confederate loyalty that he applies to Unionists. In his definition, anyone who deserted from the army could not have been a Unionist. Yet historians well know that many white southern men joined the Confederate army only to later join the Union army. Through his presentation of all the Union soldiers’ names and only abstract tables on the Confederate troops, Garren obscures a full understanding of the estimated troops to both sides.

41. Muir, Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 42.

Chapter Two

1. Isaac Garrison, Southern Claims Commission Case Files, Allowed Claims, Record Group 217, NARA, College Park, Md. On slavery’s endurance during the war in western North Carolina, see Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 209–26. On mountain slavery, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61–62, 68–70, 72, 74–76, 88–92; Inscoe, Race, War, and Remembrance, 54, 58–62; Dunaway, Slavery; Dunaway, African American Family. James Henry Greenlee was a typical mountain slave owner. On his McDowell County farm, Greenlee’s slaves devoted half of their labor to agriculture. Beyond the fields, they worked on the farm’s fencing, roads, and other construction or maintenance needs. If he could not find full employment on his own farm, Greenlee employed his chattel in mines, on public works such as the Western North Carolina Railroad, or in a specific skill. Western North Carolina had a total population of 119,243 in 1860, and African American slaves made up 12,183 of that. Burke County had the highest concentration of slaves in 1860 at 31.6 percent, while Watauga County was only 2 percent enslaved. See Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61.

2. Susan O’Donovan’s study of slavery and emancipation in southwest Georgia underscores the contingency and varied forms that unfreedom and freedom could take in local parts of the South. In particular, O’Donovan makes clear how slaves’ experience in local settings shaped their definitions of freedom once the war ended. See O’Donovan, Becoming Free.

3. African Americans’ adjustment to freedom has become a central theme in Reconstruction scholarship. Historians such as Leon Litwack, Eric Foner, and others have forcefully put African Americans at the heart of postwar Reconstruction. See Litwack, Been in the Storm, and Foner, Reconstruction. One of the major developments on this theme is the impact of emancipation on southern households. White and black southerners struggled to come to grips with the changing division of labor within their homes and its impact on social relationships throughout the region. For an excellent example of the household changes taking place in a central North Carolina county, see Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion. The interpretation of sharecropping as a compromise solution to the South’s postwar labor struggles gained precedence after Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom. For an excellent overview of the challenges confronting southern whites, black southerners, and northerners in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, see Hahn et al., Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1, chap. 1. The transformation from labor lords to landlords is detailed in Wright, Old South, New South.

4. Robertson, Small Boy’s Recollections, 102–3.

5. Ibid., 105–6.

6. Sallie Lenoir to Lizzie Lenoir, July 25, 1865, Thomas I. Lenoir Papers, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C. Rufus’s unmarried sister who also lived at Fort Defiance, Sarah Lenoir, wrote that many former slaves had returned in July 1865 after failing to find better prospects elsewhere and “begged to stay just as they did before the war.” One former slave in particular, a skilled seamstress, returned after she failed to set up a paying shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. See Sarah J. Lenoir to Brother, July 25, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

7. James Gwyn Diary entry, July 31, 1865, Indenture of Property, July 4, 1865, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.

8. Cornelia Henry Diary entry, May 18, 1865, Henry Family Papers, North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, N.C.; Clinard and Russell, Fear in North Carolina, 262, 271, 279. The Kentuckian may have been a man identified as Hunecut.

9. Davis Tillson to Maj. G. M. Bascom, May 1, 1865, in U.S. War Dept., War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 49, pt. 2, 555; Dyer, Part 3 in Compendium of the War, 1721; Ella Reed Matthews essay, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Asheville Armory folder; Robertson, Small Boy’s Recollections, 101. None of the sources of this attack identify the victim. A letter from Robert B. Vance to his brother Zebulon later that summer, however, indicates that the victim was Kate Garrison. Robert informed Zeb that the four black men had been shot “at my field” for the rape of “poor Kate Garrison.” See Robert B. Vance to Zebulon B. Vance, July 12, 1865, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 4.

10. Davis Tillson to Maj. G. M. Bascom, May 8, 1865, in U.S. War Dept., War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 49, pt. 2, 669–70; Robert B. Vance to Zebulon B. Vance, July 12, 1865, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon B. Vance, reel 4. For more on Tillson, see Warner, Generals in Blue, 506–7. Mark Bradley noted a general shift in the relationship between white officers and black troops across the state after the war. The bonds of war succumbed to the bonds of race, Bradley argues, as the white officers attempted to reconcile their white former enemies. See Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels, 65.

11. Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Alexander County; Testimony of Andrew W. Stephenson, Testimony of Martha Hammer, Testimony of Martin L. Stephenson, Testimony of James Simmons, Testimony of Thomas Allison, in State v. Belt Campbell, William Brown, Harrison Campbell, and Solomon Davis, Alexander County Criminal Action Papers, Alexander County Records, NCOAH. Thomas Allison stated that William Brown blamed John Hammer for his son’s death.

12. W. C. Tate to “My Dear Daughter,” August 27, 1865, Miscellaneous Letters, SHC; T. T. Heath to Clinton A. Cilley, September 3, 1865, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Department of North Carolina Records).

13. R. K. Miller to Clinton Cilley, August 28, 1865, Department of North Carolina Records. Miller had 292 men from the Fiftieth Ohio Volunteer Cavalry Regiment present at Camp Heath (formerly Camp Vance) roughly two and a half miles from the westernmost terminus of the Western North Carolina Railroad. Corpening reported the incident to the military authorities, claiming that Lawson offended his wife and complained about his rations and that he intended the shots only as a warning. A military court fined Corpening $500 and sentenced him to ninety days in jail. Because of Corpening’s previous good conduct, age, and weak health, however, the military later reduced his punishment to thirty days and $250. See Bogue, “Violence and Oppression in North Carolina during Reconstruction, 1865–1873,” 37–40. Corpening’s white neighbors reacted with indignation to the military’s interference in a white man’s management of his domestic affairs. One member of his community could not believe such a punishment “only for shooting that negro last summer!!” See Corneal Pinkney Abernethy to Matilda Abernathy, December 14, 1865, William G. Dickson Papers, SHC (emphasis in the original).

14. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 17–19, 23, 27–29; Raper, Papers of William Woods Holden, 189–90.

15. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 21; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, chap. 9.

16. Foner, Reconstruction, 199–201; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 153–56; Jacqueline Baldwin Walker, “Blacks in North Carolina during Reconstruction,” 175–76; Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 40–44. On the condition of free blacks in North Carolina before the Civil War, see Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina. Such vagrancy laws also played out in the western counties with the larger African American populations. In Buncombe County, Naz Weaver faced a vagrancy charge during the Superior Court’s September 1866 term. Although Weaver was young and able to work, the white-dominated court charged him with “gaming, sauntering about, without employment and endeavoring to maintain himself by undue and unlawful means.” See J. B. Sawyer, Buncombe Co., August 20, 1866, Buncombe County Criminal Action Records, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH; V. S. Lusk, Superior Court, Buncombe Co., September Term 1866, Buncombe County Criminal Action Records, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH.

17. Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part I,” 48–49; W. Wallace Rollins, October 23, 1865, “To the Voters of the Senatorial District, Composed of the Counties of Transylvania, Henderson, Buncombe, Madison, Yancy, and Mitchell,” Benjamin W. Austin Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Henderson Pioneer, June 27, 1866, 1, 4.

18. Cornelia’s husband owned $45,000 worth of real estate and $22,000 of personal property. The family’s slaves ranged in age from fifty-two years to a mere seven years in 1860. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County.

19. Cornelia Henry diary, May 11, 1865, May 14, 1865, and May 16, 1865, Henry Family Papers, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, N.C. Asheville experienced a fair population surge after the war. According to the 1883 city directory, the city’s population grew from 1,100 in 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. No doubt a portion of this growth stemmed from African Americans moving into the county seat. See J. P. Davison, Asheville City Directory and Gazetteer of Buncombe County for 1883–’84, 123–24.

20. Henry Family Papers, May 25, 1865. Cornelia’s distrust of George, in particular, was not new. In July 1861, the Henrys discovered that George and another slave had taken wheat from them. Upon being discovered, Cornelia denounced George as “a mean negro as ever went unhung.” See Clinard and Russell, Fear in North Carolina, 30.

21. Henry Family Papers, June 6, 1865. The reality of Federal occupation was unpredictable. With major troop deployments in Morganton and Salisbury, only detached portions of those commands moved into the more western counties. General Thomas T. Heath felt that conditions in Madison, Yancey, Watauga, and Buncombe Counties were “such that I did not feel willing to trust my junior officers” to handle, so he went there to assess matters for himself in September 1865. Based on his findings, he sent troops to the counties along the Tennessee border and located a small garrison in Asheville. He also instructed one of his captains to organize the local police, fill it to eighty men, and keep every local man ready to respond to an emergency quickly. Perhaps thinking of the execution of Kate Garrison’s attackers, Heath also vowed to resist the influx of black soldiers from East Tennessee “unless under orders from competent authority.” See Thomas T. Heath to Clinton A. Cilley, September 3, 1865, Record Group 393, NARA.

22. Henry Family Papers, June 16, 1865; ibid., June 23, 1865.

23. Henry Family Papers, July 5, 1865; ibid., July 9, 1865; ibid., August 10, 1865.

24. Henry Family Papers, September 9, 1865. At different times through her journal, Cornelia referred to one freedwoman by two different spellings. For the sake of consistency, I have determined to use Cela instead of Celia.

25. Henry Family Papers, September 27, 1865; ibid., October 15, 1865.

26. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph C. Norwood, August 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; Barney, Making of a Confederate, 85–86; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61. Lenoir retired from the battlefield after losing his right leg in the Confederate army at Ox Hill, Virginia, in late August 1862.

27. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph C. Norwood, August 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; Tom Lenoir to R. T. Lenoir, August 14, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

28. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph C. Norwood, August 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. According to Thomas I. Lenoir, the payment W. W. Lenoir made to his former slaves was his “best cow, and over a hundred pounds of bacon, 16 bushels corn, 3 hogs, some tools &c &c.” See Thomas I. Lenoir to R. T. Lenoir, August 14, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

29. Lytle Hickerson labor agreement, James Gwyn Papers, SHC. In terms of their work schedule, Hickerson’s laborers received Sundays off plus half of Saturday, leaving the rest of the day for their own work unless “there is a pressure of work and some part of the crop is likely to suffer.”

30. Ibid.

31. Tenant Agreement between James Gwyn and Byram and Henderson, December 13, 1865, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.

32. Tenant Agreement between James Gwyn and Payton and Bart, January 19, 1866, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.

33. Hahn, Miller, O’Donovan, Rodrigue, and Rowland, Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1, 319–20, 321, 324–26; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 129–31. For a concise discussion of the South’s shift to contract labor, see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 408–20.

34. Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 60–61, 67, 89–97.

35. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph C. Norwood, August 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

36. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 56–57, 69, 93–104; Blethen and Wood, “Pioneer Experience to 1851,” 84–86; Bolton, Poor Whites, 17–18, 37–38. Although Bolton drew his conclusions from the central Piedmont, that region’s demographic similarity to western North Carolina suggests that his conclusions are also applicable to the mountain counties. According to Dunaway, 57.1 percent of all farm acreage in western North Carolina belonged to residential owners in 1800. By 1860, she argued that western North Carolina had a landless rate of 46.1 percent. See Dunaway, First American Frontier, 77.

37. Reid, “Antebellum Southern Rental Contracts,” 71–79. The number of slaves owned by the family fluctuated during the antebellum period. In 1842, the family commanded roughly fifty slaves. Each of the sons had experience commanding slave labor as well as white tenants, and it seems that they preferred the latter. See Barney, Making of a Confederate, 24–25, 29–30, 39. In 1860, Rufus T. Lenoir owned two slaves, Thomas I. Lenoir had eighteen slaves, William A. Lenoir possessed six slaves, and their father’s estate owned forty-seven slaves. All of these slaves resided in Caldwell County except those belonging to Thomas I. Lenoir in Haywood County. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Caldwell and Haywood Counties.

38. W. W. Lenoir to Joseph C. Norwood, August 4, 1865, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

39. Eliphalet Whittlesey to O. O. Howard, August 21, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1; October 6, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1; Eliphalet Whittlesey to Clinton Cilley, November 16, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1. Eliphalet Whittlesey (1821–1909) of Connecticut was a Bowdoin College professor-turned-soldier in the Civil War. Although he enlisted as a chaplain, Whittlesey eventually joined Major General O. O. Howard’s staff as an aide. Both indomitable Christians, they shared a strong bond of respect and friendship. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 78–80. Clinton Albert Cilley (1837–1900) was born in New Hampshire to a family known for its early political opposition to slavery. Cilley fought with the Union in many battles, including Chickamauga, for which he received a Medal of Honor. He received appointment as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in western North Carolina early in 1866. After he left that post, Cilley had an influential career promoting free public education for all and economic development. Escott, “Clinton A. Cilley,” 405, 409, 426. The Western District included Alexander, Alleghany, Anson, Ashe, Buncombe, Burke, Cabarrus, Caldwell, Cherokee, Clay, Cleveland, Davidson, Davie, Forsyth, Gaston, Guildford, Haywood, Henderson, Iredell, Jackson, Lincoln, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mecklenburg, Mitchell, Montgomery, Polk, Randolph, Rowan, Rutherford, Stanly, Stokes, Surry, Transylvania, Union, Watauga, Wilkes, Yadkin, and Yancey Counties. See Clinton A. Cilley to Eliphalet Whittlesey, December 14, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7.

40. E. A. Harris, Remarks Explanatory of the Accompanying Report of Operations to December 31, 1865, Sub District of Morganton, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, North Carolina, 1865–1872, National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Ga. (hereafter cited as Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records), NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 59; Western District Report, December 15, 1865, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105. Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 60; Report of Operations of Freedmen’s Bureau in the District of Western North Carolina since the Surrender to December 31, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 59; E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, January 31, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 60; Report of Operations from February 1 to February 15, 1866, Morganton Sub District, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 60; Report of Operations from February 15 to February 28, 1866, Morganton Sub District, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 60; and E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, March 12, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 62; Report of Operations, Morganton Sub District, April 15, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 60.

41. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 44–45; Rebecca Scott, “Battle over the Child,” 102–3. The Freedmen’s Bureau’s record on apprenticeship, according to historian Karin Zipf, was confused and inconsistent across the state. She notes a struggle between parents trying to raise their children and control their labor, whites determined to dictate the terms of labor, and a bureau wedded to free labor mores. While this struggle informed the conflict in western North Carolina, the distance from Raleigh to western agents forced bureau officials in the mountains to exercise more control themselves. On the relationship between the bureau and apprenticeship in North Carolina, see Zipf, Labor of Innocents, chap. 3.

42. E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, December 22, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 57; E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, December 25, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 57; Monthly Report, Morganton Sub District, E. A. Harris, February 28, 1866, E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, December 25, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 59; Clinton A. Cilley to Unknown Agent, February 5, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 56; Indenture of Cloud to W. F. McKesson, January 18, 1866, Indenture of Mary to W. F. McKesson, January 18, 1866, Indenture of Sarah to W. F. McKesson, January 18, 1866, all in Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 62; E. A. Harris to Clinton A. Cilley, March 12, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 62.

43. Eliphalet Whittlesey to Samuel F. Patterson, February 21, 1866, Jones and Patterson Family Papers, SHC; and Scott, “Battle over the Child,” 103. Whittlesey took a little time to come to that decision. Both he and western district chief Clinton Cilley waffled over the propriety of child apprenticeship. See Zipf, Labor of Innocents, chap. 3 (esp. 78–79).

44. Western District Circular, February 23, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7; and Western District Circular, February 27, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7.

45. Scott, “Battle over the Child,” 104, 107–9, 111.

46. Trefousse, “Andrew Johnson and the Freedmen’s Bureau,” 34; Foner, Reconstruction, 196–97, 243–44.

47. Clinton A. Cilley to Eliphalet Whittlesey, April 4, 7, 9, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7; Bentley, History of the Freedmen’s Bureau, 162–63.

48. P. E. Murphy to Stephen Moore, June 5, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, reel 4; P. E. Murphy to Clinton A. Cilley, May 23, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, reel 4; P. E. Murphy to Clinton A. Cilley, May 19, 23, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA 1909, reel 4; P. E. Murphy to Stephen Moore, June 13, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, reel 4.

49. James Clarence Harper Diary, January 20, 1866, James Clarence Harper Papers, SHC; State v. William Blalock et al., North Carolina Supreme Court Records, NCOAH; R. B. Bogle to A.W. Shaffer, January 1, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 58; R. B. Bogle to Clinton A. Cilley, March 30, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 59.

50. R. B. Bogle to Stephen Moore, June 4, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 62; R. B. Bogle to Stephen Moore, July 31, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 59.

51. P. E. Murphy to Clinton A. Cilley, May 19, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4; P. E. Murphy to Clinton A. Cilley, May 25, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

52. Rawick, American Slave, 14:356, 358. One of the most important things to keep in mind regarding the end of slavery in the South is that the peculiar institution was not monolithic. African Americans’ experience under slavery varied depending on their location, the crop they grew, their master and mistress’s temperaments, the type of labor they performed, and other factors too numerous to list. Thus their reactions to emancipation were similarly diverse. Yet certain actions occurred frequently enough to form a pattern. First among these was the search for family. Second, the former slaves had to decide whether to stay on their former owners’ land or not. Third, they had to determine how best to care and provide for their families. For more on these responses to freedom, see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, esp. chap. 4; Foner, Reconstruction, esp. chap. 3.

53. Oscar Eastmond to George A. Williams, March 3, 1868, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 393, NARA (hereafter cited as Second Military District Records); J. M. Israel to George A. Williams, April 13, 1868, Second Military District Records. This may not have been the first time Mary Luther found herself in trouble with the law. An indictment from Buncombe County Superior Court named Luther as a defendant with three men for disturbing a church service on June 11, 1866. Luther and her friends allegedly disrupted the service by dancing, petting, talking and laughing loudly, using profane language, and even pulling clapboards off the school’s roof. In the case of breaking up the church service, Mary and her friends were found not guilty. See David Coleman, Superior Court, Buncombe Co., Spring Term 1866, Buncombe County Records, Criminal Action Papers, NCOAH.

54. Marriage Bond of Dick and Emily Addington, August 4, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH; Marriage Bond of Andrew and Mandy Love, August 4, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH; Marriage Bond of Leander and Harriet Shepherd, August 13, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH; Marriage Bond of John C. and Loueasy Love, August 30, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH; Marriage Bond of Samuel L. and Marget E. McDonnell, September 7, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH; and Marriage Bond of William Moore and Ann Patton, September 7, 1866, Macon County Records, Misc. Records, Cohabitation Certificates, NCDOAH. The total number of sixty-four such marriages comes from the combination of records for both counties. Based on the forty-nine-couple sample, the average marriage was 12.7 years. Three couples had been married for less than one year, and one couple identified themselves as having been married for “several years.” The remainder of the couples gave no indication of how long they had been married prior to the summer of 1866.

55. Statistics regarding children compiled from Ancestry.com, 1870 United States Federal Census. For the couples identifiable in that census, the Alexander County men were roughly fifty years old, while their wives were roughly forty-five years old. For the smaller sample of Macon County, the husbands were roughly forty years old and their wives averaged about thirty-six years of age.

56. Henry Family Papers, May 19, 1866; ibid., July 15, 1866; ibid., July 22, 1866; ibid., November 30, 1866.

57. Henry Family Papers, July 5, 1865; ibid., March 1, 1868.

58. Henry Family Papers, July 5, 1866; ibid., November 2, 7, 10, 15, 17, 1867.

59. Henry Family Papers, March 21, 1868; ibid., April 5, 1868.

60. Minutes of the Freedmen’s Convention, Held in the City of Raleigh on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th of October 1866, 8, 14–15 (accessed on June 17, 2007, at http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/freedmen/freedmen.html).

61. Ibid.; Oliver Otis Howard to Charles Emery, July 22, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1.

62. Minutes of the Freedmen’s Convention, 6–7, 18, 22.

63. Statement of Mitchell Hayden, Buncombe Co. Superior Court, September 20, 1867, Second Military District Records; E. W. Dennis to Louis V. Caziarc, October 23, 1867, Second Military District Records. In 1867, Stepp lived in Sulphur Springs, fifteen miles southwest of Asheville.

64. Statement of Mitchell Hayden, Buncombe Co. Superior Court, September 20, 1867, Second Military District Records; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970 (computer file). For secession crisis rhetoric warning white mountaineers about an influx of freed slaves should slavery be abolished, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 225–26.

65. Statement of Mitchell Hayden, Buncombe Co. Superior Court, September 20, 1867, Second Military District Records. Jackson Reeves allowed Hayden and his family to live on his land despite the latter’s inability to work after his beating.

66. Marion Roberts to Oscar Eastmond, December 25, 1867, Second Military District Records; Oscar Eastmond to Jacob F. Chur, November 25, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

67. Oscar Eastmond to George A. Williams, March 3, 1868, Second Military District Records. Eastmond recorded no date for the attack on Edward Horsey.

Chapter Three

1. Mira E. Brown to “My dearest Sarah,” August 30, 1865, Hamilton Brown Papers, SHC. For more on the activities of regular soldiers around Columbia, Tennessee, see Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 91, 132.

2. Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part II,” 208.

3. Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part III,” 358, 360–61.

4. Ibid., 342. Historians have largely neglected Reconstruction in the mountain South. Such oversight fits within the prevailing historical interpretation of Reconstruction, which emphasizes emancipation and its aftershocks. Eric Foner’s synthesis, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, concentrates on the conflict and negotiation over freedom in the postbellum South. The relative absence of African Americans in Southern Appalachia therefore made the region’s neglect by Reconstruction scholars a logical consequence of that interpretive trend. See Foner, Reconstruction. For examples of scholarship dealing with postemancipation Appalachia, see Cimprich, “Slavery’s End in East Tennessee,” and Smith, “Negotiating the Terms of Freedom.” The one region of Southern Appalachia that has received fairly significant attention from Reconstruction scholars is East Tennessee. Fisher’s War at Every Door explores the role of partisan violence in the struggle between Unionists and Confederates in East Tennessee and shows the continuity between wartime violence and Reconstruction in Appalachia. Ben H. Severance’s Tennessee’s Radical Army examines the role of the Republican State Guard and the “politics of force” in East Tennessee’s Reconstruction. Although he does not explore the political battles of Presidential Reconstruction in his study, Severance’s study also demonstrates the importance of wartime loyalties in postwar Appalachian politics. In this regard, both his work and my own are deeply indebted to Gordon B. McKinney’s Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900. George Rable helped advance the idea that Reconstruction constituted a continuation of wartime hostilities by other means in But There Was No Peace. Dan T. Carter’s When the War Was Over has greatly influenced this study. Carter argued that race did not blind all southern whites after the war to larger issues of control and that the former Whigs were particularly open-minded about the future of the former Confederacy. Finally, Philip Shaw Paludan’s Victims captures the raw emotion that pervaded the mountain counties during the war. See Paludan, Victims, xi.

5. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina 1836–1865, 252, 254–55, 258. The 1860 Federal Slave Schedule reveals that Zebulon Vance owned six slaves, Merrimon owned two, and the Avery family owned dozens of slaves. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County; Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Burke County.

6. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina 1836–1865.

7. McGee, “North Carolina Conservatives and Reconstruction,” 106–7; Olsen, “North Carolina,” 162, 169. Well-educated and experienced in state politics, Conservatives dominated most professional classes and social groups, and with much of their landed wealth intact, they emerged from the war eager to restore the antebellum status quo. For more on western North Carolinians’ complex calculus of loyalty, see McKinney, “Layers of Loyalty.”

8. Allen T. Davidson, Amnesty Petitions, roll 38 (accessed online February 2, 2007, at http://community.berea.edu/cwaltp/). Davidson owned two slaves in 1860. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Cherokee County.

9. Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part I,” 43–46, 58; Olsen, Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, 9, 160; and Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part II,” 207.

10. Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels, 30, 40–42, 53; Portrait and Biographical Album of Washtenaw County, Michigan, 502; William C. Stevens to William N. Stevens, June 7, 1865, William Collin Stevens Correspondence, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; William C. Stevens to Sister, June 20, 1865, William Collin Stevens Correspondence, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

11. William C. Stevens to William N. Stevens, June 7, 1865, William C. Stevens Papers, Bentley Library, University of Michigan.

12. R. K. Miller to Clinton A. Cilley, August 28, 1865, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Department of North Carolina Records); North Carolina Reports, 61:246–52; Francis A. Wolcott and E. A. Carr to General, July 18, 1866, Department of North Carolina Records; Burgess S. Gaither to A. C. Avery, September 29, 1865, Avery Family of North Carolina Papers, SHC; Burgess S. Gaither to “My Dear Sir,” September 29, 1865, Avery Family of North Carolina Papers, SHC; A. C. Avery to his wife Sue, October 17, 1865, Alphonso Calhoun Avery Papers, SHC. For more on the background of A. C. Avery, see Arthur, Western North Carolina, 405–6; Phifer, “Saga of a Burke County Family,” 333–38. Keith Blalock had joined the Confederate army to avoid conscription in 1862, but he received a medical discharge later that year. Once freed from the southern army, he returned home to Grandfather Mountain. To avoid conscription a second time, he fled to East Tennessee, where he joined the Tenth Michigan Cavalry, in which he served as a scout and recruiting officer for the war’s duration. Keith skirmished regularly with Confederate Home Guards and partisans. As the conflict grew more desperate, partisans on both sides increasingly targeted their enemies’ families. Austin Coffey was a devout Unionist who instilled a similar devotion in his stepson, Keith Blalock. Although his sympathies for the Union were well known, Coffey’s neighbors respected him as a kind, old man. That reputation failed to save him from the brutal violence that plagued western North Carolina. Local Confederates took him captive and murdered him in early February 1865. On Coffey’s death and his relationship with Blalock, see Trotter, Bushwhackers, 147–48, 152–55.

13. Bogue, “Violence and Oppression,” 51–52; Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part II,” 209–10; Henderson County Petition to Provisional Governor Holden, November 1865, Holden Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; and A. S. Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, June 7, 1866, in Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 1:601. Separate indictments from the Henderson County Superior Court’s spring 1866 term named justices of the peace S. T. Featherston, W. D. Whitted, A. M. Hawkins, N. P. Carn, A. H. Jones, S. Waldrop, James Blythe, and Robert Hamilton and sheriff W. D. Justus for doing nothing to quell the riot. See David Coleman (solicitor), Henderson County Superior Court, Spring Term 1866, Henderson County Records, Criminal Action Papers, NCOAH. Case’s loyalties were no secret, as he came from a family of strong Union sentiment.

14. Thomas T. Heath to Lieutenant Estes, August 18, 1865, Record Group 393, NARA. The Walton family had strong Confederate ties. Not only did the patriarch, Thomas George Walton, serve in the Confederate military; his sons John M. and James T. Walton also fought for the Confederacy. Watford, Mountains, 44.

15. Tod R. Caldwell to William W. Holden, September 18, 1865, Department of North Carolina Records. The Morganton City commissioners attempted to curtail the lawlessness. Among a series of measures passed September 30, the commissioners imposed a two-dollar fine on any person firing “any gun or pistol or [selling or setting] fire to explode or [using] any squib or fire cracker, or any discharge of powder, except in the discharge of some public duty (Christmas and New Years day not excepted) within the limits of the town of Morganton.” See Minutes of the City Commissioners, Morganton, North Carolina, 1865–1880, September 30, 1865, October 30, 1865, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

16. Griffin, History of Old Tryon and Rutherford, 319–20; Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Rutherford County; Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County; Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Wilkes County. Uniting all of these men were similar backgrounds and status. Harris was a thirty-eight-year-old who owned $5,450 worth of real and $4,000 worth of personal estate in 1860. A young lawyer in 1860, Merrimon owned a comparable $7,000 of real estate, and his personal property was valued at $9,100. Cowles exceeded both of them. His vast landholdings were worth roughly $20,000, while his personal estate was a comparable $5,295. None of these men suffered terribly from emancipation. Merrimon owned two slaves and Logan owned eleven slaves in 1860. Cowles owned none.

17. William Pickens to W. W. Holden, August 16, 1865, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; William Pickens to W. W. Holden, August 17, 1865, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. Pickens was a modest farmer. His real estate was worth $1,600 and his personal estate $1,400 in 1860. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County.

18. Martin Lipps to Calvin J. Cowles, August 5, 1865, Calvin J. Cowles Papers, NCOAH.

19. Calvin Cowles to W. W. Holden, September 4, 1865, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; R. K. Miller to Clinton A. Cilley, August 28, 1865, Record Group 393, NARA; Thomas T. Heath to Clinton A. Cilley, September 7, 1865, Record Group 393, NARA.

20. Pickens to Holden, August 16, 1865, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

21. Marion Roberts to “The Loyal People of Western North Carolina,” August 12, 1865, New Era (Greeneville), 1.

22. Jones, Knocking at the Door, 13. Alexander Hamilton Jones (1822–1901), a Mexican War veteran born in Buncombe County, claimed he taught himself to love the Union as a child reading about George Washington and other national figures. Jones’s interests as a merchant at the outbreak of war led him into politics. He helped organize Unionists in western North Carolina before Confederate authorities captured him. The state’s only outright Unionist elected to Congress in 1865, Jones was an influential Reconstruction politician and newspaper editor. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 3:312–13. Lower-class mountaineers resented the Conscription Act, which exempted one white male on every farm with over twenty slaves, and lower-class white women led a handful of bread riots throughout the western counties.

23. Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Census, Henderson County; Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part I,” 38, 40–41. Richard Abbott addressed the southern Republicans’ need for legitimacy during the postwar period. Newspaper editors and other Republicans struggled to gain a sense of legitimacy by a populace that largely viewed them as foreign and forced upon them by the victorious North. See Abbott, For Free Press, 46–47. At the war’s outset, he and his family lived comfortably in Haywood County with Gash’s real and personal property each valued at $15,000. His wife, Margaret, was the great-granddaughter of Waightstill Avery, one of the mountain section’s wealthiest and most distinguished founding figures.

24. Arthur Ladson Mills, Amnesty Petitions, roll 41. In 1860, Mills ranked as one of the mountain counties’ wealthiest men with real property valued at $40,000 and a personal estate worth $22,000. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Census, Rutherford County. It is surely worth noting that the petitions sent to Andrew Johnson were designed to remove the applicants’ political disabilities and that they would put the most positive spin on their loyalty. In other words, it seems logical that they would tell the hardened Unionist from East Tennessee what they thought he wanted to hear. Nevertheless, this does not entirely invalidate their statements to cooperate with the restored United States. In fact, the mountain petitioners seemed frank and sincere in their confessions of cooperation.

25. John C. Duckworth, Amnesty Petitions, roll 38. It appears that Duckworth stayed true to his word and the anti-Confederate coalition assembled by Holden. Governor Holden appointed the Transylvania County resident as a colonel in the reorganized state militia. See General Orders No. 3, State Adjutant General, September 1, 1868, Adjutant General’s Office, Order Book, 1868–1871, NCOAH.

26. Cotton, “Appalachian North Carolina,” 169; Raper and Mitchell, Papers of William Woods Holden, 228–31; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 120–21. The full mountain delegation was William Baker for Ashe and Alleghany, E. M. Stephenson for Alexander, Tod Caldwell for Burke, Rev. L. L. Stewart for Buncombe, R. L. Patterson for Caldwell, G. W. Dickey for Cherokee, W. G. B. Garrett from Haywood, A. H. Jones for Henderson and Transylvania, James R. Love for Jackson, Robert M. Henry for Macon, G. W. Gahagan for Madison, Alney Burgin for McDowell, G. W. Logan and Ceburn L. Harris for Rutherford and Polk, George W. Bradley for Watauga, P. Smith and J. Q. A. Bryan for Wilkes, and G. Garland for Yancey and Mitchell. See Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at Its Session of 1865, 2, 5–6, 10. Clay County was not among the counties represented and was probably included with Cherokee County. I found only twelve of the seventeen western delegates in the 1860 census conclusively. I could not positively identify Baker, Garrett, Dickey, and Bryan. Despite their various political backgrounds, the delegates shared comparable class standing. Based on those identified in the 1860 census, the mountain delegates owned an average of $5,550 each in real estate and $8,004 in personal property. That put each roughly in between the suggestive regional average for identified anti-Confederates and Conservatives. These property statistics are only suggestive. Love himself owned little property, but his father owned more than forty slaves and over $50,000 in personal property in 1860. Rufus L. Patterson was a manufacturer whose father, Samuel F. Patterson, was an equally prosperous farmer in terms of land and slaves. Rufus owned some $20,000 of real estate and $15,000 of personal property in 1860. He owned no slaves, but his father owned thirty-six. Furthermore, slaveholding was not exclusively a Conservative phenomenon; George W. Logan owned eleven slaves himself. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census.

27. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 120–26; Andrews, The South since the War, 156. Baker formally registered his discontent when he signed a protest written by a Warren County delegate that decried the issues before the convention as unnecessary “to return North Carolina to her position in the Union, and relieve her people from military rule.” See Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at Its Session of 1865, 92.

28. Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at Its Session of 1865, 17, 23–24, 27–29.

29. North Carolina Daily Standard, December 28, 1865, 3; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 125–26. Slave populations for western North Carolina listed by county are available in Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61.

30. W. Wallace Rollins, October 23, 1865, “To the Voters of the Senatorial District, Composed of the Counties of Transylvania, Henderson, Buncombe, Madison, Yancy, and Mitchell,” Benjamin W. Austin Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

31. Ibid.; Olsen, “Prelude to Reconstruction, Part I,” 45–46n11. Gash defeated Rollins in the election, 1,429 to 852. Gash defeated Rollins soundly in every county of their district except Rollins’s home county of Madison, where he outpolled Gash 238 to 187. Although no such platform for Gash exists, his actions in the legislature suggest a strong support for relief measures to help North Carolinians recover from the war. He also shared Rollins’s hope for the freedpeople’s colonization. In late 1865, Leander Sams Gash shared with the state senate pleas from the grand juries of Buncombe and Transylvania Counties for either the freedmen’s colonization or strong regulatory laws. See Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part I,” 48–49, 52.

32. Allen T. Davidson to Zebulon B. Vance, October 22, 1865, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 4. For more on Worth and his wartime activities, see Zuber, Jonathan Worth, esp. chaps. 11 and 12.

33. Zuber, Jonathan Worth, 206–8; McGee, “North Carolina Conservatives and Reconstruction,” 119. Holden had hoped that the president might overrule the Conservatives’ victory, but Johnson never intended the election to produce a crop of handpicked officials. Worth and the Conservatives remained victorious statewide. With the Conservatives surging into power across the state, the new state legislature considered former Confederate Senator William A. Graham and Governor Zebulon Vance for the U.S. Senate. Apathy and low voter turnout also marked the election. In Macon County, Allen T. Davidson believed that Worth’s defeat seemed so likely that he concluded “it is a foregone conclusion that Holden must be elected Gov. for the present without a fight.” See Allen T. Davidson to Zebulon B. Vance, October 22, 1865, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 4.

34. Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 999–1000. Of course, Congress refused to seat the southern delegations to the Thirty-Ninth Congress. According to Augustus Merrimon in Asheville, the low turnout was because “the people did not want to vote for Holden, and many never heard of Worth.” In Rutherford County, similar apathy existed among the voters. See Williams, Papers of William Alexander Graham, 6:441, 451.

35. J. Cassius L. Gudger to Zebulon B. Vance, January 22, 1866, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 4; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 126–29.

36. Marion Roberts to Thaddeus Stevens, May 15, 1866, in Padgett, “Letters to Thaddeus Stevens,” 190; P. E. Murphy to Clinton A. Cilley, May 28, 1866, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105. Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, North Carolina, 1865–1872, National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Ga. (hereafter cited as Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records), NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

37. A. C. Bryan to John C. Robinson, July 10, 1866, Jonathan Worth, Governors’ Letter Books, NCOAH.

38. Wolcott to General, July 18, 1866, Record Group 393, NARA; “Loyal Citizens” of Caldwell, Mitchell, and Watauga Counties Petition to General Thomas Ruger, May 25, 1866, Record Group 393, NARA; Affidavit of Keith Blalock, September 14, 1867, Keith Blalock Collection, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University.

39. Francis Wolcott to John C. Robinson, August 16, 1866, Governor Worth’s Letter Books, NCOAH; Auman, “Heroes of America,” 336–38. Auman speculates that the Heroes of America may have been active in Wilkes County as early as January 1862 but concludes that they operated in the mountain counties definitively in 1864. Furthermore, he suggests that the Heroes of America became a sort of umbrella organization for dissenters across the state. Wartime rumors suggested that leading mountain Unionists such as Tod Caldwell or George W. Logan used the Heroes to further the peace movement in Burke and Rutherford Counties and that it was active in Henderson County. See Auman, “Heroes of America,” 333, 342, 345, 347–48. Kenneth W. Noe’s study of the Red Strings in southwest Virginia suggests that the Heroes were active in that section of Appalachia in 1863 and became a major concern for the Confederate government, which sent detectives there in 1864. See Noe, “Red String Scare,” 316–19.

40. Worth to W. P. Caldwell, September 7, 1866, Governor Worth’s Letter Books, NCOAH.

41. Augustus Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, June 7, 1866, Jonathan Worth, Governors’ Letter Books, NCOAH; A. C. Bryan to John C. Robinson, July 10, 1866, Jonathan Worth, Governors’ Letter Books, NCOAH; William Mason to Jonathan Worth, August 17, 1866, Jonathan Worth, Governors’ Letter Books, NCOAH. This problem was not isolated to the northwest, either. In Transylvania County, J. M. Hamlen sought Worth’s permission to form a Conservative militia unit. Unionists and anti-Confederates dominated the local militia, and Hamlen felt that “the conduct of these men (one excepted) is so far from being commendable, that in forcing men of Southern Chivalry, though of undoubtable authority, to subject themselves to their authority, will result in serious consequences.” See J. M. Hamlen to Jonathan Worth, February 26, 1867, Jonathan Worth Papers, Private Collection 49, NCOAH.

42. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 172–73; Escott, Many Excellent People, 105; Foner, Reconstruction, 194–95; and Andrews, The South Since the War, 167. The proposed constitution also provided for the reduction of property qualifications for state officeholders, the transition from appointive local positions to elective, and a stay law against the collection of debts accrued from the war. See Lancaster, “Scalawags of North Carolina, 1850–1868,” 141–42. In 1860, only 15,194 of western county residents were African American slaves, compared with the 315,865 living in the rest of the state. With emancipation, the rest of the state stood to lose 189,519 “people,” or roughly 50,000 more than the total population of western North Carolina in 1860.

43. Escott, Many Excellent People, 105–6; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 172–73.

44. Escott, Many Excellent People, 105, 109; Richard L. Zuber, North Carolina during Reconstruction, 15; North Carolina Daily Standard, December 28, 1865, 3; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1013–15. To be certain, however, not all mountain Conservatives supported the proposed constitution. Theodore F. Davidson noted that many Conservatives in Asheville opposed the constitution “on account of the appropriation clause, and I understand many votes will be given against it in the western counties for the same reason.” Yet even Davidson noted that this resistance would fall short of defeating the constitution. See Theodore F. Davidson to Zebulon B. Vance, August 4, 1866, in McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 29.

45. Henderson Pioneer, June 27, 1866, 2 (italics in original). Despite the public bluster, cracks within the anti-Confederates were apparent. Dr. Tyre York, a state representative from Wilkes County, informed Worth in June 1866, “Your vote will be much increased in the west.” He felt that Worth’s opposition embraced a “general repudiation platform,” which he deemed “very obnoxious to our people.” In the 1865 contest, York informed the governor, “Your vote was small but this time I feel sure you will carry the county by a handsome majority.” See Tyre York to Jonathan Worth, June 16, 1866, in Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 1:630. During the war, York adhered to a rather middle course. As a doctor, he was exempt from active military service, but he also granted medical aid to those men hiding in the mountains to avoid Confederate conscription and Home Guards. See Crouch, Historical Sketches of Wilkes County, 69–71.

46. Augustus Merrimon to George W. Swepson, July 7, 1866, George W. Swepson Papers, NCOAH; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, November 15, 1866, 3; and Connor, Manual for North Carolina, 1001–2.

47. Henderson Pioneer, September 12, 1866, 3.

48. Henderson Pioneer, October 3, 1866, 2. Southerners often referred to the Fourteenth Amendment as the “Howard Amendment,” so called because of Michigan senator Jacob Howard’s role in guiding it through the U.S. Senate.

49. T. D. Bryson to Jonathan Worth, October 1, 1866, in Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2:807. Bryson’s letter to Worth clearly drew a line between mountain Conservatives and Unionists, but his letter also revealed a key point of sympathy between the factions. In his 1865 broadside, W. W. Rollins stood for the continued internal improvement of the west. Bryson agreed. In his letter to Worth, he expressed dismay about Worth’s decision not to support the Tuckaseege and Keowee Turnpike Road. This road had been in the works for many years before the war, and Bryson and his neighbors felt such a strong interest in its completion that he termed Worth’s failure to aid the road’s construction “a damper” on the Conservatives’ prospects in Jackson County. See Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2:807–8.

50. Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part II,” 221.

51. Ibid., 235; Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part III,” 358, 360–62.

52. North Carolina Daily Standard, March 13, 1867, quoted in Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 241.

53. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 240–43; New York Tribune quoted on 242; Lancaster, “Scalawags of North Carolina,” 202–10.

54. Ida Holden Cowles to William W. Holden, January 4, 1869, William Woods Holden Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; diary entry, May 5, 1866, James Gwyn Papers, SHC. The town, to say nothing of the countryside surrounding it, teemed with a sense of desperation. Money was scarce, and just a year earlier mouths screamed out in hunger because of a shortage of corn. In a report to the federal Department of Agriculture on October 1, 1866, Calvin Cowles rated the corn crop a 6.25 out of 10 in terms of quality. Beyond corn, the county seemed to be recovering from the war fairly well with one other noticeable exception. While the amount and quality of tobacco increased, Cowles rated the caliber of cattle at a measly 3 out of 10 compared to 1865. See Agricultural Report, October 1, 1866, Calvin J. Cowles Papers, SHC.

55. Testimony of Andrew Porter, August 17, 1867, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 393, NARA (hereafter cited as Second Military District Records). It is not entirely clear what Stokes said in his speech. None of the witnesses commented on his address. Only R. F. Armfield, in his statement for the Conservative Raleigh Daily Sentinel, spoke to the content of Stokes’s speech. According to Armfield, Stokes challenged the sincerity of white Republicans’ commitment to black rights by asking who among the attending Republicans would welcome him at their home or dinner table. Armfield alleged that Stokes also challenged Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation. While Stokes stirred the emotions of his fellow Republicans, one must be careful not to embrace Armfield’s account of the speech wholesale. One reason to question Armfield’s version of the speech is that he claims Stokes advised the African Americans in attendance to love their old masters as their best friends, an odd stance for a leading Republican. See R. F. Armfield’s letter to the Raleigh Sentinel included in the military testimony, Second Military District Records.

56. Testimony of Alfred Stokes, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records. Robert Franklin Armfield represented Yadkin County in the state’s secession convention in 1861. He later joined the Thirty-Eighth North Carolina Infantry Regiment in 1862. A veteran of the Seven Days battles outside Richmond, he was wounded at Shepherdstown in October. While Armfield was recuperating from his injury, the state legislature named him solicitor for the Sixth Judicial District. He served in that capacity until President Andrew Johnson removed him from office. He moved to Wilkesboro in the summer of 1865 and remained there until relocating to Statesville in 1870. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 1:41–42.

57. Testimony of Hanan Dowell, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Alfred Stokes, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Andrew Porter, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Thornton Brown, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of William G. Ball, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Harral Hays, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of T. D. Mills, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records. It was a pistol, it seems, that Peden thought to bring only that day. According to William G. Ball, Peden had borrowed the gun only three hours prior to the meeting in the courthouse. It should be noted that amid all the various accounts of the riot, only Hanan Dowell placed the gun in another person’s hands. He testified that he saw W. W. Carmichael brandish a weapon. It appears that he is alone in that observation. All the other people who saw a man armed with a gun put the pistol in Peden’s hands. T. D. Mills directly testified that Carmichael was not armed but admitted that Peden carried a pistol to the courthouse that night.

58. Testimony of Wesley Ball, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records, Record Group 393, NARA; Testimony of William G. Ball, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Hanan Dowell, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Andrew Porter, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of John A. Porter, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of T. D. Mills, Second Military District Records; Testimony of John F. Parlier, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of Harral Hays, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of William A. Sneed, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records; Testimony of James A. Reynolds, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records. Joseph W. Peden reached the rank of second lieutenant in the Confederate army and suffered a wound to the thigh at Antietam in September 1862. See Watford, Civil War in North Carolina, 2:222n55.

59. North Carolina Daily Standard excerpt included in military testimony collected in Wilkesboro, Second Military District Records, Record Group 393, NARA. African American Republican Alfred Stokes resolutely maintained that the fight did not “have any thing to do with politics” and was the result of “bad whiskey.” The facts of the riot and the reaction to the affair belie his interpretation. See Testimony of Alfred Stokes, August 17, 1867, Second Military District Records.

60. Armfield letter to the Raleigh Daily Sentinel, July 28, 1867, included in military file on Wilkesboro Riot, Second Military District Records.

61. Ibid. (italics in original). Armfield admitted that “respectable” Republicans such as Harrison Church, Adam Staley, Samuel Smith Jr., and Alfred Stokes were not the source of the problem. His inclusion of Stokes among that number is certainly interesting. Furthermore, his indication that many of the Republicans he disdained were members of the Heroes of America spoke not only to their wartime activities but also to the postwar revival of that peace organization to aid the Unionists and later the Republican Party within western North Carolina.

62. Jonas H. Ramsey to Andrew Johnson, January 27, 1867, Jonathan Worth, Governors’ Letter Books, NCOAH. According to the 1870 census, Ramsey was then a thirty-three-year-old farm laborer with no property of his own. He lived with his wife and their four young children. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Burke County.

63. B. S. Gaither and T. George Walton to Jonathan Worth, February 25, 1867, Worth Governors’ Letter Books 53, NCOAH. For his part, Worth embraced the report and sent it to Johnson. He hoped that the president would agree with its findings and dissuade him of any impression of persecution in the mountains.

64. Garren, Mountain Myth, 31; William Lankford to Daniel Sickles, April 1, 1867, Second Military District Records; Lankford to Capt. G. W. Urban, April 26, 1867, Second Military District Records; William Lankford to Maj. Gen. E. R. S. Canby, October 14, 1867, Second Military District Records; Henderson Pioneer, October 3, 1866, 2. The actual date of the “crime” is unclear. Lankford claims it occurred during the administration of General Sickles. A Buncombe County magistrate issued a summons for Lankford on August 14, 1867, but the reason for the warrant was not listed. See Summons for William Lankford and Johnson Ashworth, August 14, 1867, Criminal Action Records, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH. Lankford was a rather prosperous man. In 1860, he owned $1,000 of real estate and $4,000 of personal property. He still was comfortable ten years later, with $3,000 of real estate and $900 of personal property. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, 1870 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County.

65. Affidavit of Elihu H. Rector, October 19, 1867, Affidavit of William R. Roberts, October 19, 1867, Affidavit of Mrs. M. A. Bradley, October 19, 1867, Affidavit of William Randall, October 19, 1867, in McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” North Carolina Historical Review 29, no. 2 (1952): 264–65.

66. Affidavit of Elisha Tweed, October 19, 1867, J. J. Gudger to Daniel Sickles, July 20, 1867, in McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” 267–68; State v. Neely Tweed & others, Madison County Superior Court Fall Term 1861, Madison County Criminal Action Papers, Madison County Records, NCOAH. Coincidentally, the solicitor pressing charges against these men in the fall of 1861 was none other than Augustus S. Merrimon.

67. J. J. Gudger, William A. Henderson, H. A. Barnard, Thomas J. Rector, Thomas J. Candler, William R. McNew, M. W. Roberts to Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, July 20, 1867; W. W. Rollins to Major McNue, August 3, 1867; John Mitcalf to W. W. Rollins, July 6, 1867, in McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” North Carolina Historical Review 28, no. 4 (1951): 502–5, 509; Alexander H. Jones to E. R. S. Canby, September 11, 1867, in McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” North Carolina Historical Review 29, no. 1 (1952): 115–16. A notation on the docket book for the 1868 spring term of the Madison County Superior Court says, “In this case it is ordered that all further proceedings in this case be dismissed according to military order of Major General Ed. R. S. Canby. Filed judgement accordingly.” See Minute Docket Books, Madison County Superior Court, Spring Term 1868, NCOAH.

68. Diary entry, December 6, 1865, James Clarence Harper Papers, SHC. David Coleman’s political and legal career tied him to some of the biggest names in western North Carolina; he alternately won and lost elections against Nicholas Woodfin, Zebulon Vance, and Augustus Merrimon. His uncle, David Swain, was a prominent antebellum Whig governor and longtime president of the University of North Carolina. A Mexican War veteran, Coleman volunteered his services to North Carolina and the South at the outbreak of war and rose to the rank of colonel in the Thirty-Ninth North Carolina Infantry.

69. Solomon Mace’s attorney’s version of the case against Mace in the Fall Term of Transylvania Co. Superior Court, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of Samuel J. Tracy, W. A. Bishop, J. N. Cagle, G. M. Mace, A. F. English, and W. N. Nicholson, J. M. George, T. S. Neath, Alexander Gray, and W. P. Bishop, Transylvania County, Undated, Second Military District Records. Ownership over mules and horses was by no means a simple matter in North Carolina after the war. The impressment of animals led General William T. Sherman to allow the loaning of draft animals to citizens to help bring in the summer harvest in 1865. Afterward, the collection of government-owned stock proved difficult as competing claims on the animals became clear. See Kirkland, “Federal Troops in North Carolina,” 12–13; Currey, “Role of the Army,” 8.

70. Mace in the Fall Term of Transylvania Co. Superior Court, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of Samuel J. Tracy, W. A. Bishop, J. N. Cagle, G. M. Mace, A. F. English, and W. N. Nicholson, J. M. George, T. S. Neath, Alexander Gray, and W. P. Bishop, Transylvania County, Undated, Second Military District Records.

71. William G. and J. K. Ledford to Andrew Johnson, April 22, 1866, Governors’ Letter Books 53, Jonathan Worth, NCOAH.

72. Augustus Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, June 7, 1866, Governors’ Letter Books 53, NCOAH.

73. Ibid. The reference was to the prominent Radical Republicans, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.

74. Petition of W. G. and J. K. Ledford to Andrew Johnson, April 22, 1866, Governors’ Letter Books 53, NCOAH.

75. Augustus Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, June 6, 1866, Worth Letter Books, NCOAH.

76. Petition from Cherokee County to Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, August 20, 1867, Second Military District Records.

77. Henderson County Petition, September 18, 1867, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of Harriet M. Dempsey, August 23, 1867, Second Military District Records.

78. Samuel Tracy to Daniel Sickles, August 29, 1867, Second Military District Records.

79. Transylvania County Petition to Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, August 30, 1867, Second Military District Records.

80. Elisha Cordell to Daniel Sickles, September 2, 1867, Second Military District Records; A. J. Willard Endorsement, October 14, 1867, Second Military District Records. Elisha Cordell’s name appears in the record as Cordel and Cordell. For consistency, I have used Cordell.

81. David Coleman to George Price, October 27, 1867, Second Military District Records. Bad blood flowed freely through many mountain communities. In Transylvania and Clay Counties, where Unionists were outspoken in their animosity toward Coleman, the solicitor pointed to the divisions within mountain society and accused his opponents of acting on personal vendettas. Coleman claimed that Transylvania County’s sheriff opposed him because he had indicted a number of his family on various counts—including theft and other misdemeanors. As for Clay County, whose residents seemed equally opposed to Coleman, the solicitor surmised that his bad reputation stemmed from his actions in the Ledford case. Sheriff Galloway of Clay County allegedly testified that spite and malice motivated Coleman.

82. Ibid.

83. Augustus Merrimon statement, January 8, 1868, Second Military District Records.

84. David Coleman to E. H. Luddington, February 17, 1868, Second Military District Records; W. B. Royall endorsement, October 31, 1867, Second Military District Records.

85. Augustus Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, July 22, 1867, McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” 506–7. Merrimon filed a similar letter of resignation with the military. See Augustus Merrimon to Daniel Sickles, July 21, 1867, Augustus S. Merrimon Papers, SHC.

86. Augustus Merrimon to George W. Swepson, February 22, 1866, George W. Swepson Papers, NCOAH; and Augustus Merrimon to George W. Swepson, July 7, 1866, George W. Swepson Papers, NCOAH.

87. Alfred R. Garren Affidavit, October 4, 1867, Second Military District Records; Agga Corpening Affidavit, October 7, 1867, Second Military District Records. According to the 1860 census, Garren was forty-five years old and living with his wife on a farm worth roughly $100. His personal property was also valued at $100. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County.

88. Affidavit of Nathan Brown, October 4, 1867, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of John Taylor, October 2, 1867, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of Elisha Cordell, October 3, 1867, Second Military District Records.

89. Jackson Shipman to J. C. Denney, September 25, 1867, Second Military District Records; Affidavit of Jackson Shipman, October 4, 1867, Second Military District Records; Jeremiah C. Denney Report, October 15, 1867, Second Military District Records.

90. Oscar Eastmond to W. B. Royall, January 20, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4. Johnson appointed General E. R. S. Canby to succeed Sickles in command of the Second Military District on August 26, 1867, and the general formally took command on September 5. See Kirkland, “Federal Troops in North Carolina,” 83–84, 94; Currey, “Role of the Army,” 30, 90.

91. Edward Sevier to E. R. S. Canby, March 20, 1868, Second Military District Records; W. W. Smith to E. R. S. Canby, October 26, 1867, Second Military District Records. The military was sympathetic to debtors. In his sweeping General Order 10, Sickles halted the collection of any debts incurred while North and South Carolina were in rebellion. Creditors had to wait a year to collect any sums concluded before May 20, 1861. Sickle’s order suspended debts involving slave sales, and it made wages due for agricultural labor payable by a lien on the crop. General Order 10 provided a level of protection to average farmers. It was this protection, which allowed defendants with dependent families to keep their homes, twenty acres of land, clothing, subsistence, and work tools up to the value of five hundred dollars, that Sevier seemed to reference in his appeal to Canby. For more on Sickles’s stay of debts, see Kirkland, “Federal Troops in North Carolina,” 77–78.

Chapter Four

1. “North Carolina Free,” included in Fisk P. Brewer to E. P. Smith, July 12, 1867, American Missionary Association and Amistad Research Center, American Missionary Association Archives: North Carolina, reel 3. Run by northern missionaries, the Washington School catered primarily to African Americans. However, some poor white children also attended the school. See Beckel, Radical Reform, 78. Federal forces quickly mustered out of service following the war’s conclusion. North Carolina had 43,948 soldiers present in June 1865. By January 1866, the occupation force dropped to 2,209. See Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels, 42.

2. Fitzgerald, Union League Movement, 2; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 240–43, 329, 337; “Colaard Leag” insert inside Republican Petition to W. W. Holden, August 5, 1868, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

3. In this regard, the bureau in western North Carolina lived up to the “grass-roots Bureau” detailed by George R. Bentley in his pioneering study of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Overall, the bureau’s staff peaked between 1867 and 1868. By the end of 1868, 901 men—including 348 clerks—worked in the agency. Vast commands, little military aid, and a lack of clerks left many agents to their own devices. Their jobs were immense. As Commissioner Oliver Otis Howard said, his agents had to act as “a magistrate with extraordinary judicial power—overseer of the poor of all classes in his district, agent to take charge of abandoned lands, and required to settle, in a few days, most intricate questions with reference to labor, political economy, &c, that have puzzled the world for ages.” See Bentley, History of the Freedmen’s Bureau, chap. 10, esp. 136–38. Quote appears on 136.

4. The impact of the Freedmen’s Bureau on the South has elicited myriad interpretations. Some scholars viewed it as a well-meaning organization that largely failed to enact much change. Others have seen the bureau as federal paternalism, not unlike the antebellum southern variety, which attempted to replace slave labor with an equally problematic contract labor system. A more evenhanded view can be found in Paul Cimbala, who like others attempts to place the bureau and its actions in the context of broader nineteenth-century society. More recently, historians like Steven Hahn have reminded us that whatever the bureau accomplished, it did so largely because of the political agency of southern African Americans. His criticism of historians’ tendency to overplay the influence of the Freedmen’s Bureau in empowering blacks politically is a just warning, but it also runs the risk of being an overcorrection. Karin L. Zipf views the bureau agents’ protection of black single mothers’ rights to their children harshly. Others, such as Denise Wright, have focused on relief efforts and the impact of those efforts on society in Georgia. See Cimbala, Under Guardianship of the Nation; Zipf, Labor of Innocents; Wright, “Civil War and Reconstruction Welfare.” Gordon McKinney overlooked the bureau’s important relief and political role in his influential study of southern mountain Republicans. See McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans.

5. Personnel Files, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 29; J. F. Allison to Jacob F. Chur, February 28, 1867, and J. F. Allison to Jacob F. Chur, September 24, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 29; William N. Thompson to Jacob F. Chur, July 19, 1867, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, North Carolina, 1865–1872, National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Ga. (hereafter cited as Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records), NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 27; Clinton Cilley to Stephen Moore, June 12, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1; General Orders No. 6, September 1, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 20.

6. Oscar Eastmond to John Murphy, August 1, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4; John Jordan oath, September 10, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 5; Oscar Eastmond to Jacob F. Chur, August 26, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

7. Oscar Eastmond to James Horton, August 2, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4; Thomas Miller oath, September 3, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 5; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 61; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970 (computer file), 1984. As Rebecca Scott has noted, local bureau agents often found themselves left to make decisions themselves on apprenticeship. It was bureau policy, however, to apprentice black children only with the consent of the parents. In practice, this policy was uneven. Courts often apprenticed black children without parental consent, and girls faced longer terms than boys did. Redress was also difficult, as parents who changed their minds about indentures signed during Presidential Reconstruction could do little later to regain custody. See Scott, “Battle over the Child,” 102–5, 107–8.

8. Asheville Pioneer, August 20, 1867.

9. George S. Hawley to John Sanders, September 19, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14. The authority may stem from Hawley shifting course. African Americans in northeastern North Carolina accused Hawley of ignoring their parental rights in April 1866. For his part, Hawley denied apprenticing children whose fathers opposed the measure in all but one instance. In that exceptional case, Hawley described the father as “no better than a fool” and incapable of providing for his kids. Gender, according to historian Karin L. Zipf, played a critical role in Hawley and the bureau’s actions. Single black mothers, it seems, garnered little support from Hawley in eastern North Carolina—part of a larger trend of deprecating the maternal rights of black women. See Zipf, Labor of Innocents, 81–82. A case from July 1866, however, showed a different side of Hawley. He recommended the revocation of seven black children’s indentures. The parents, Hawley contended, could and would provide for the children. District head Clinton A. Cilley refused. He argued that an apprentice bond was a contract and that parents should not be able to overturn bureau actions based on their willingness to provide for the children. For Cilley, the bureau’s word was its bond and had to be upheld. See Scott, “Battle over the Child,” 108, 111.

10. James F. Allison to Richard Nicks, October 24, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James F. Allison to William Finley, November 13, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James F. Allison to Elisha Wellborn, November 13, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James F. Allison to Mr. Hardin, November 21, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James F. Allison to Frank Stinson, December 18, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James F. Allison to George Sharpe, December 18, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

11. Affidavit of Oscar Eastmond, City of Washington, District of Columbia, May 31, 1869, United States Civil War Pension Records, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Pension Files); Oscar Eastmond Compiled Service File, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

12. Oscar Eastmond to Lt. Col. J. A. Campbell, A.A.G., June 10, 1865, Book Records of Voluntary Union Organizations, 1st North Carolina Infantry Regimental Letter and Endorsement Book, in Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s–1917, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and Civil War Compiled Service Records, Volunteer Union Soldiers, First Infantry, North Carolina, National Archives Microfilm 401-3, NCOAH.

13. Henderson Pioneer, exact date unknown. Printed copy included in Oscar Eastmond to Jacob F. Chur, July 12, 1867, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 393, NARA (hereafter cited as Second Military District Records). For more on the Union League and its history throughout the South, see Fitzgerald, Union League Movement. Jones referred to John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, in order to illustrate the hostility toward the Union League.

14. Eastmond to Chur, July 12, 1867, Second Military District Records.

15. Augustus Merrimon to Jonathan Worth, August 9, 1867, David Coleman to Jonathan Worth, August 9, 1867, Natt Atkinson to David Coleman, August 9, 1867, in McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina to Andrew Johnson,” North Carolina Historical Review 28, no. 4 (1951): 511–16; Robert Hawkins Warrant to Arrest Spears, Buncombe Co., November 14, 1866, Criminal Action Papers, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH; W. R. Young to Sheriff of Buncombe County, Warrant for Spears, January 23, 1867, Criminal Action Papers, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH; Carney Spears Indictment for Larceny, Superior Court, Buncombe County, Fall Term 1866, Criminal Action Papers, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH; W. R. Young to Sheriff of Buncombe Co., August 8, 1867, Criminal Action Papers, Buncombe County Records, NCOAH. A native of McMinn County, Tennessee, Natt Atkinson married Harriet Newell Baird in 1858. Historian John Preston Arthur dubbed Atkinson, a Confederate captain, lawyer, newspaper editor, and railroad booster, “one of the most useful and enterprising of Asheville’s citizens ... forgetting his own interest in that of the community.” In the case of Camy Spears, such praise seems misplaced as Judge Merrimon, who was married to Harriet Atkinson’s sister Margaret, allowed Atkinson to very much realize his own interest by allowing him to essentially buy the labor of a black man convicted in his court. See Arthur, Western North Carolina, 453; Bell, “Merrimon, Augustus Summerfield.” Sources alternately refer to Spears as Carney and Camy. For the sake of consistency, I use Camy as did the Freedmen’s Bureau agent.

16. McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina,” 511, 514. Eastmond’s reversal of Spears’s conviction was within the scope of the bureau’s power, but it also reinforced his belief in the Conservatives’ disloyalty. For all the claims of a fair trial, the court’s denial of Spears’s right to testify in his defense clashed with federal injunctions to protect black men’s rights. Consequently, the case entered the bureau’s legal jurisdiction. See Circular from the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, October 14, 1865, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 31.

17. McPherson, “Letters from North Carolina,” 513, 515 (emphasis in the original). Eastmond had campaigned his superiors vigorously for troops to be sent to Asheville. He believed that his district’s “remote” nature necessitated a military presence to invigorate bureau actions. In June 1867, he requested one commissioned officer and five soldiers to assist him. See Oscar Eastmond to Jacob Chur, June 28, 1867, Second Military District Records. Amid the Spears case in August 1867, he was more outspoken about the need for a military force to support him. “Lieut. Murphy when here,” Eastmond wrote, “was cursed and damned to his face and threatened with cowhiding.” If not for the arrival of Captain Denney, Eastmond believed the same would have happened to him. The agent denied charges of impropriety or of overstepping his bounds and asked for an inspecting officer who would discover from local white Unionists and black residents at least fifty cases of injustice previously neglected by the civil and military authorities. “If there is a place in North Carolina where military power is needed,” Eastmond opined, “it is west of the Blue Ridge.” See Oscar Eastmond to Jacob Chur, August 27, 1867, Second Military District Records.

18. Oscar Eastmond to Hannibal D. Norton, September 20, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4; Oscar Eastmond to Jacob F. Chur, October 20, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

19. Oscar Eastmond to George A. Williams, March 3, 1868, Second Military District Records; J. M. Israel to George A. Williams, April 13, 1868, Second Military District Records. In the case of William Young, both Solomon Luther and his daughter Mary escaped punishment. The hearing on the attack upon Lewis Young resulted in Mary’s acquittal and Solomon Luther’s five-dollar fine. Further proof of Eastmond’s forceful prosecution of these cases was the removal from office of the three justices of the peace, Israel, Thrash, and Garrison. General Canby removed them by special orders in early April. See Headquarters Second Military District to Commanding Officer, Morganton, April 3, 1868, Second Military District Records.

20. James F. Allison to John Edie, November 10, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65. Allison does not specify which Peden in his report, but it is likely he referred to John Peden because of his prominent role in the military testimony. John T., Joseph W., and Sandy Peden faced arrest warrants from July 5, 1867. Also wanted by the Wilkes County sheriff on July 5, 1867, were William W. Carmichael, Dagon Gray, Andrew Porter, John Porter, and Wesley Ball. See R. F. Hackett to Sheriff of Wilkes County, July 5, 1867, Criminal Action Papers, Wilkes County Records, NCOAH.

21. Jonathan Worth to Burgess S. Gaither, May 16, 1867, in Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2:954–55 (emphasis in Hamilton).

22. Petition of the People of Cherry Lane Post Office, Alleghany County, to Daniel Sickles, May 23, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 32; W. W. Holden to Daniel Sickles, June 1, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 32; Reconstruction and Military Government in the South, 1867–1870 (microfilm): Office of Civil Affairs, reel 12.

23. Petition of Many Citizens of Pigeon River, Haywood County, July 3, 1867, Jonathan Worth Papers, Private Collection 49, NCOAH.

24. North Carolina Daily Standard, November 25, 1868, 3. For cries of African American supremacy from South Carolina, see Holt, Black over White.

25. Zuber, North Carolina during Reconstruction, 13–14; Hannibal Norton, May 15, 1867, Report of persons recommended for inspectors of elections for the county of Burke, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 32; Hannibal Norton, June 6, 1867, Report of persons recommended for inspectors of elections for the county of McDowell, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 32; Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of North Carolina, at Its Session, 1868, 4. The three registrars elected to the convention were John S. Parks of Burke County, W. A. B. Murphy of McDowell County, and J. Q. A. Bryan of Wilkes County. Also returning to convention duty from 1865 were George W. Gahagan of Madison County, J. Q. A. Bryan from Wilkes County, and George W. Bradley from Watauga County. See Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at Its Session of 1865, 2, 5–6, 10.

26. Jonathan Worth to B. G. Worth, December 26, 1867, in Hamilton, Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2:1094–95.

27. April 1867 Roster of Teachers at Work in North Carolina, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 29; M. C. Avery to Mrs. R. L. Patterson, February 21, 1866, Jones and Patterson Family Papers, SHC. In 1860, Burke had 2,371 slaves, Buncombe 1,933, and Henderson 1,382. Only Rutherford County had more slaves in 1860 than these three counties. For a broad discussion of black education in the South after the war, see Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, esp. chap. 1. Martha Caroline Jones married Willoughby F. Avery on November 7, 1866, but she died less than two years later. See Phifer, “Saga of a Burke County Family,” 332.

28. James F. Allison to John R. Edie, September 25, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

29. James F. Allison to Jacob F. Chur, November 18, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

30. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, November 20, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14.

31. James F. Allison to John R. Edie, December 10, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

32. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, December 17, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14; George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, January 22, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 18; George S. Hawley to F. A. Fiske, March 6, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14.

33. Hannibal Norton to Jacob F. Chur, August 7, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 18. On the Freedmen’s Bureau’s involvement with African American schools throughout the South, see Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, 31–37.

34. Diary entry, May 5, 1866, James Gwyn Papers, SHC; Leander Sams Gash to Jonathan Worth, May 5, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7; Leander Sams Gash to Gash, Erwin, & Sons, December 11, 1866, in Olsen and McGrew, “Correspondence of State Senator Leander Sams Gash, 1866–1867, Part II,” 233; Clinton A. Cilley to Lt. Beecher, March 8, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 7; R. J. Hardin to Andrew [Cowles], December 11, 1866, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 3. An acting army inspector was incredulous at reports of destitution in Ashe County. The inspector deemed it “hardly credible ... that the destitution should be so much greater among the whites than among the black population” and instructed the military post commander in Salisbury to investigate all petitions for relief before issuing any rations. See Acting Inspector Suly to John Edie, January 19, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1. In Georgia, Denise Wright has shown that the bureau proved the crucial link between wartime relief measures and later charitable aid. Assisting poorer white southerners was central to this process. See Wright, “Civil War and Reconstruction Welfare Programs for Georgia’s White Poor.” One reason for the high number of destitute families in Henderson County was the decline in corn production. Between the 1860 and 1870 agricultural census, the county’s corn production fell from 326,110 to 212,914 bushels. See Agriculture of the United States in 1860; The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States.

35. Stewart, “‘This Country Improves in Cultivation,’” 459–61, 464, 467–72; Bruce E. Stewart, “Attacking ‘Red-Legged Grasshoppers,’” 29. To put the economic advantages of distillation in perspective, a mule could transport roughly four bushels of corn to market. When distilled, a mule could carry the rough equivalent of twenty-four bushels of corn. And often these items sold for comparable prices, with the whiskey frequently producing greater profit. See Stewart, “‘This Country Improves in Cultivation,’” 461.

36. General Orders No. 25, Second Military District, May 20, 1867, in Senate Executive Document No. 14, Fortieth Congress, 1st Session, 69–70; General Orders No. 32, Second Military District, May 30, 1867, in Senate Executive Document No. 14.

37. E. R. S. Canby to E. A. Rollins, September 17, 1867, Second Military District Records, Record Group 393, NARA.

38. Jacob F. Chur to C. L. Harris, March 10, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1; Daniel Worth to Jonathan Worth, April 30, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 38; Jacob F. Chur to Hannibal D. Norton, June 19, 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 1; Ration Report, Morganton, June 15, 1867, Second Military District Records; Ration Report, Morganton, June 30, 1867, Second Military District Records; Ration Report, Morganton, July 31, 1867, Second Military District Records. According to the 1861 revised U.S. Army manual, a ration was “three-fourths of a pound of pork or bacon, or one and a fourth pound of fresh or salt beef; eighteen ounces of bread or flour, or twelve ounces of hard bread, or one and a fourth pound corn meal; and at the rate, to one hundred rations, of eight quarts of beans, or, in lieu thereof, ten pounds of rice, or, in lieu thereof, twice per week, one hundred and fifty ounces of desiccated potatoes, and one hundred ounces of mixed vegetables; ten pounds of coffee, or, in lieu thereof, one and one-half pound of tea; fifteen pounds of sugar; four quarts of vinegar; one pound of sperm candles, or one and one-fourth pound of adamantine candles, or one and one-half pound of tallow candles; four pounds of soap, and two quarts of salt.” See Revised Regulations for the Army of the United States, 1861, 243.

39. William Thompson to John Edie, September 5, 1867, September 22, 1867, October 3, 1867, October 22, 1867, November 7, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 27; Oscar Eastmond to Jacob Chur, November 7, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4; George Hawley to Jacob Chur, March 30, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14.

40. George Hawley to Jacob Chur, December 16, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14; George Hawley to Jacob Chur, December 21, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14. What aid Hawley may have provided is unclear. No ration reports have been found for the Franklin Freedmen’s Bureau office.

41. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 253, 273–77; Escott, Many Excellent People, 142, 144; Zuber, North Carolina during Reconstruction, 14; Alexander, “Hostility and Hope,” 121–22. Fifteen of the Republican delegates were African American, although none of those were from western North Carolina.

42. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 265, 272, 277; Escott, Many Excellent People, 142, 144. Political tensions between the eastern and western sections of North Carolina were prominent before and during the Civil War. For more on the intrastate rivalries and their impact on antebellum issues such as internal improvements, see Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, and Inscoe, Mountain Masters.

43. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 278–79; McKinney, Zeb Vance, 274–75.

44. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, March 19, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14.

45. Stewart, “Attacking ‘Red-Legged Grasshoppers,’” 31–32.

46. James Carle to O. O. Howard, April 2, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James Carle to Nelson A. Miles, March 21, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

47. James Carle to W. B. Royall, March 24, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

48. James Carle to Samuel H. Wiley, April 8, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65; James Carle to Jacob Chur, April 17, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 65.

49. Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 278–85; diary entries for March 21, 1868, and April 5, 1868, in Clinard and Russell, Fear in North Carolina, 372. Holden’s relationship with Johnson deteriorated in 1866 over the Fourteenth Amendment. The former provisional governor believed that the amendment’s acceptance was North Carolina’s last chance to avoid a more heavy-handed Reconstruction. Such an opinion did much to undermine Johnson’s faith in Holden, and as the gubernatorial election of 1866 became a referendum on the amendment, Holden abandoned faith in Presidential Reconstruction. See Harris, William Woods Holden, 204–9.

50. Oscar Eastmond to George Williams, April 17, 1868, Second Military District Records. Historian Allen Trelease argues that the Ku Klux Klan began as a social fraternity in Tennessee, but it morphed into a paramilitary organization opposed to the Republican Party and African Americans’ civil rights as it spread into North Carolina and other southern states in late 1867 or early 1868. See Trelease, White Terror, xi, 49.

51. Asheville Petition to E. R. S. Canby, December 20, 1867; Asheville Town Ordinance, December 27, 1867; E. W. Ward to Oscar Eastmond, January 21, 1868; Office of the Mayor and Town Council for Asheville, February 20, 1868, all in Second Military District Records.

52. Eastmond to Williams, April 17, 1868, Second Military District Records; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, June 29, 1867, 2; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 5, 1867, 2; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 30, 1867, 2.

53. Rutherfordton Western Vindicator, March 23, 1868, 2; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, March 24, 1868, 2.

54. African American participation in the 1867 elections was widespread throughout the South. In Georgia, roughly 75 percent of black voters cast a ballot. Participation was higher in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where almost 80 percent of black voters took part. The vast majority of those voters supported constitutional conventions and the Republican Party. See Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 205.

55. Jacob F. Chur to George S. Hawley, August 18, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Records, reel 2; Jacob F. Chur to Hannibal Norton, Jacob F. Chur to Oscar Eastmond, August 31, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 2.

56. Macon County, Monthly Education Report, April 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Macon County, Monthly Education Report, June 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Alexander, “Hostility and Hope,” 121–22. Hawley and other agents struggled in gaining the support of state bureau education chief F. A. Fiske, who hoped to win the support of upper-class white southerners. He hoped to win their support for a black education based on literacy as the key for suffrage. It seems Fiske’s faith rested with those whites that Hawley criticized as indifferent and unwilling to help. Furthermore, Fiske shared the broader conclusion that the Republicans’ victory in the state elections meant that the bureau’s job was nearing completion. See Goldhaber, “Mission Unfulfilled,” 201–3.

57. Macon County, Monthly Education Report, August 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15.

58. Wilkes County, Monthly Education Report, August 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm reel 15; Wilkes County, Monthly Education Report, September 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Wilkes County, Monthly Education Report, November 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15.

59. Roster of Teachers at Work in North Carolina, April 1867, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 29; William G. Briggs, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Colored Schools in North Carolina, July 1, 1865, American Missionary Association and Amistad Research Center, reel 3; Oscar Eastmond to H. C. Vogel, September 1, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 4.

60. Monthly Education Reports, Asheville Sub-District, March 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Reports, Asheville Sub-District, April 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Reports, Asheville Sub-District, May 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Reports, Asheville Sub-District, June 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15.

61. Monthly Education Report, March 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15.

62. Monthly Education Report, April 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Report, September 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Report, October 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15; Monthly Education Report, November 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 15.

63. “North Carolina Free,” included in Fisk P. Brewer to E. P. Smith, July 12, 1867, American Missionary Association and Amistad Research Center, reel 3.

Chapter Five

1. “To the Conservative Party of the Mountain District of North Carolina,” April 27, 1872, Clinton A. Cilley Papers, SHC; James C. Harper Speech of May 4, 1872, copy available in the Clinton A. Cilley Papers, SHC. The newspaper clipping of the speech did not identify the paper, but in all likelihood it was from Cilley’s local Lenoir Topic from the county seat of Caldwell County.

2. A. B. Sams to William W. Holden, July 23, 1868, Williams Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. The Ku Klux Klan was an organization founded in Tennessee after the war, and it later spread into other former Confederate states. The name itself was an umbrella term; most Klansmen identified themselves as members of the Invisible Empire or Constitutional Union Guard. But this, one Klan informant revealed, was a strategic decision. Through the individual organizations, men could swear faithfully not to be Ku Klux without lying. It was a technicality, and they knew it to be just that, for they knew they were largely members of the Klan.

3. Buncombe County Republican Petition to William W. Holden, August 5, 1868, William Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

4. Diary entry, July 4, 1868, James Clarence Harper Papers, SHC.

5. Over the past half-century, the prevailing thought among historians is that the Ku Klux Klan terrorized southern blacks in order to divide them from southern white Republicans. The most prominent work in this regard remains Trelease, White Terror. A similar interpretation for North Carolina appeared a short time earlier in Olsen, “Ku Klux Klan,” 340–62. One of the most interesting accounts of the Klan in the Carolina mountains is McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 89–104. The uniqueness of the Klan experience in western North Carolina has been more fully rendered by Bruce E. Stewart, who emphasizes the role illicit distillation played in the Klan’s mountain campaigns. See Stewart, “‘When Darkness Reigns,’” 453–74. Stewart acknowledges the impact of race, but not to the extent that perhaps it deserved. Mountain Klansmen sought to drive a wedge between the federal government and the Republican voters—of both races—that denied them the control that they had held previously in the region. Although the distillation issue played an important role in organizing Klansmen, the primary targets remained white and black Republicans. This chapter stresses the racial and political implications of the Klan over the distillation issue. More recently, Deborah Beckel argued that the Republican Party repeatedly formed “fusion” or cooperative arrangements with other political parties and factions in order to promote an agenda of “Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Ballot and Free Schools” that appealed to a broad, interracial electorate. Her work, however, is hamstrung by a near total neglect of western North Carolina. See Beckel, Radical Reform.

6. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, September 7, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 18; Affidavit of James Common, June 23, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 31.

7. Affidavit of James Common, June 23, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 31; George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, June 5, 1868, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, North Carolina, 1865–1872. National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Ga. (hereafter cited as Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records), NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14; George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, June 25, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 31; George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, June 5, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14. Hawley ordered the arrest of Burton Allen, William Davis, William R. Allman, John Allman, James Common, and A. K. Gibson. More men were involved in the attack, but they were currently out of the county, which delayed their capture.

8. Hannibal Norton, June 6, 1867, Report of persons recommended for inspectors of elections for the counties of Rutherford, Polk, Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Clay, and Cherokee, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 32; George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, June 5, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14; Barbara McRae, African Americans of Macon County, N.C. and Surrounding Areas, 204 (copy in the possession of the author). Hawley identified Bryson’s tormenters as William Bumgarner, Fayette Fisher, William P. Allman, and Andrew Bryson. Another African American, Dock Sloan, received a similar punishment at the hands of Bumgarner and his friends for the same offense. Neither man’s case made it before the civil authorities of Jackson County.

9. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, June 25, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 31. Hawley’s subdistrict included Macon, Jackson, Clay, and Cherokee Counties. It was a territory he described as roughly one hundred miles from east to west and eighty miles from north to south. See George S. Hawley to W. B. Royall, September 16, 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14.

10. George S. Hawley to Jacob F. Chur, July 17, 1868, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, NARA Microfilm 1909, reel 14; Jacob F. Chur to George S. Hawley, August 18, 1868, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of North Carolina Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1870, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 2. According to the 1860 Macon County census, Allison owned $110 of personal property. See Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, Macon County.

11. McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 93; Asheville Pioneer, August 13, 1868; North Carolina Daily Standard, August 19, 1868. According to Virgil S. Lusk’s 1923 account of Klan activity in the Twelfth Judicial District, the Klan organized in Asheville in the winter of 1868. Lusk said it was the work of a man identified solely as Sanders and two accomplices. Little about Sanders appeared to be what it seemed, underscored by the fact that his accomplices later stood accused of murdering him. Lusk believed that Sanders had orders from Nathan Bedford Forrest to organize the Klan in North Carolina and that local residents perceived the organization as akin to an informal police force at first. Lusk states that violence in Madison County began shortly thereafter, but other sources clearly indicate that violence in Madison predated Lusk’s identified starting point for similar problems in neighboring Buncombe County. It appears likely that the Klan bubbled up from below in several communities at once, and likely was not the work of a singular actor like the mysterious Sanders. See McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 93.

12. North Carolina Daily Standard, September 8, 1868; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, September 9, 1868; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, September 14, 1868; North Carolina Daily Standard, September 15, 1868; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, September 17, 1868; North Carolina Daily Standard, September 23, 1868; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, September 28, 1868.

13. Diary entry, July 25, 1868, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.

14. Cornelia Henry Diary entry, October 1, 1868, Henry Family Papers, North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, N.C.; “Your devoted cousin M. D.” to Matilda Abernathy, October 7, 1868, William G. Dickson Papers, SHC; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 9, 1868.

15. “Your devoted cousin M. D.” to Matilda Abernathy, October 7, 1868, William G. Dickson Papers, SHC; Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 9, 1868. Buncombe County had 2,303 black residents in 1870. Only Rutherford and Burke had larger African American populations, and Burke County had only an eleven-person edge. See Ancestry.com, 1870 United States Federal Census, Buncombe County; Ancestry.com, 1870 United States Federal Census, Burke County; Ancestry.com, 1870 United States Federal Census, Rutherford County. Buncombe County may have had the largest rally in the region, but it was not the only such campaign assembly in western North Carolina. James Gwyn attended a similar event that same month in Wilkes County. But he was less impressed with its accomplishments, since he believed the national Democrats “will avail but little” because of their inability to overcome the Republicans’ “money & villainy.” Buncombe County Conservatives left their rally confident of success; Gwyn departed the Wilkes County cookout resigned to four more years of “stealing & tyranny.” See diary entry, October 27, 1868, James Gwyn Papers, SHC.

16. Asheville Pioneer, August 13, 1868; North Carolina Daily Standard, October 7, 1868.

17. Harriet Jones to William C. Stevens, William Collin Stevens Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; McKinney, “Southern Mountain Republicans and the Negro, 1865–1900,” Journal of Southern History 41 (November 1975): 495–96; North Carolina Daily Standard, November 5, 1868; Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: North Carolina, 239 (hereafter cited as NC Klan Report); Olson, “Race Relations in Asheville,” 154–56. Holden won the election 1,049 to 875. It is also important to keep in mind that an indeterminable number of former Confederate officials remained disfranchised in 1868. Since the margin of victory was 174 votes, black voters may have tipped the balance. If only half of the 418 registered black voters cast a ballot for the Republicans, they more than accounted for Holden’s margin of victory.

18. NC Klan Report, 239; Olson, “Race Relations in Asheville,” 154–56; Arthur, Western North Carolina, 299–300. In his account of the riot, Arthur heaps blame upon Eastmond. Not only does he accuse the agent of disappearing for days afterward; he wrote that it was “thought” that Eastmond incited the riot by telling “negroes to arm themselves with stout hickory sticks and shout for Grant and Colfax.” Sadly, Arthur has no footnote for his telling of the riot, implying that he gathered that information from oral tradition. Although Eastmond’s location cannot be verified beyond his listed location as Asheville, he reported the riot to his superiors the day it happened.

19. Harriet Jones to William C. Stevens, December 7, 1868, William Collins Stevens Correspondence, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

20. Oscar Eastmond, telegram, November 3, 1868, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 18.

21. Jacob F. Chur to Oscar Eastmond, November 4, 1868, North Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau Records, NARA Microfilm M843, reel 2; R. M. Henry to William W. Holden, November 4, 1868, William W. Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. As it stood immediately after the election, Democrat Horatio Seymour of New York held a five-vote advantage over Grant in the presidential race. Interestingly, the total number of voters in the county increased for the presidential election with Seymour’s advantage growing to eleven votes. Still, Henry’s statement on the number of voters short of registration was accurate. See North Carolina Daily Standard, November 25, 1868.

22. Harriet Jones to William C. Stevens, December 7, 1868, Stevens Papers; NC Klan Report, 110–11, 144; Alexander H. Jones to William W. Holden, December 9, 1868, William Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; Affidavit of J. E. Reed, February 23, 1869, William Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. Harriet Jones also said that thirty-six votes in another county—possibly referring to Transylvania as well—went uncounted because the African American elector’s name had been scratched off the ticket. See Jones to Stevens, December 7, 1868, Stevens Papers. Some Republicans worried for Jones. W. D. Whitted wrote Holden that “Jones sometimes gets throwed off of his balance and I am afraid that he is suffering too much Solicitude about this matter, but we must do all we can for him.” See W. D. Whitted to William W. Holden, December 20, 1868, William Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

23. R. B. Bogle to Tod R. Caldwell, November 16, 1868, Tod R. Caldwell Papers, SHC. Vote totals come from the diary of G. W. F. Harper of Caldwell County. Beall won Watauga County, 241 to 89. James C. Harper recorded the corroborating numbers in his diary. Burke County favored Bogle with a 442-to-423 majority, but Caldwell County sided with Beall 446 to 224, and Watauga followed suit with a 152-vote edge for the Conservative candidate. See G. W. F. Harper Diary, December 17, 1868, G. W. F. Harper Papers, SHC; James C. Harper Diary, December 17, 1868, James Clarence Harper Papers, SHC. Folk first moved to Salisbury after the war but later relocated to Watauga County, where he met his wife. His wartime service also garnered him something of a reputation, albeit a controversial one. Joseph Reece accused Folk and J. C. Tate of murdering his son, who they claimed was a bushwhacker. They settled the case out of court in the fall of 1866. See Joseph L. Reece settlement with Folk and Tate, October 24, 1866, George N. Folk Papers, Southern Historical Collection, SHC; and Alexander, Here I Will Dwell, 151.

24. C. Happoldt to Tod R. Caldwell, November 29, 1868, Tod R. Caldwell Papers, SHC; Bruce E. Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists, 64–73, 92–94. While a previous agreement allowed the men to appear through counsel rather than in person, Republicans felt only a grand gesture could save them. Happoldt called upon Lieutenant Governor Caldwell to return home to Burke County as their lawyer in order to defuse the situation.

25. Walter W. Lenoir to Jamie Gwyn, February 16, 1869, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; Walter W. Lenoir to Sade Lenoir, February 28, 1869, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

26. Diary entry, 122, 130–31, 133, David Schenck Papers, SHC; Steward, David Schenck, chap. 5, 82–83. When the spring circuit of 1869 concluded, Schenck viewed serving before Logan as a sign that the once “proud, noble, learned and unsullied” judiciary of his state had been tainted by “such ignorant asses as Logan, [J. L.] Henry, [R. H.] Cannon and others ... elevated by negro votes to disgrace the bench and dishonor the office.” Not all Conservatives shared Schenck’s anger. A letter writer from McDowell County supported Conservatives’ criticism of the current state administration and the manner of the Republican judges’ election but determined it was his “solemn duty to do justice where justice is due.” James L. Henry “presided in a manner to give full satisfaction” in the recently concluded court at the county seat of Marion. Citing Burgess S. Gaither, whom the author esteemed as the “ablest lawyer in Western North Carolina,” and others, the author praised Henry’s “promptness, fidelity and impartiality.” See Asheville News and Mountain Farmer, May 20, 1869, 2.

27. Lusk Sketch Biography, Virgil S. Lusk Papers, NCOAH; McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 93–94. Years later, editor Shotwell maintained that Lusk “had procured the indictment of a number of respectable farmers of Madison County on some trumped up charge of violation of the Enforcement Act.” See Hamilton, Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell, 2:305.

28. McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 94–96. In his memoirs, Shotwell mentioned that he and Merrimon were friends. In fact, he contended that James H. Merrimon recruited him to move to Asheville and begin a Conservative paper there. Nor did Shotwell report this event the same way as Lusk. Instead, Shotwell maintained that he went armed because he felt that Lusk meant him personal harm after his response to Carter was published. According to Shotwell, he saw Lusk talking to a friend among a crowd, and he seized the opportunity to publicly chastise his foe. He claimed it was him or his foe, as Lusk “was awaiting me.” Intending only to challenge the solicitor on his rebuttal in the Asheville Pioneer, Shotwell later claimed that Lusk forced his hand by going for his pistol first. Interestingly, Shotwell named those who assisted him after his wounding. These men included Melvin E. Carter, David Coleman, W. M. Davies, James H. Merrimon, and others. See Hamilton, Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell, 2:303, 305–6.

29. McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 94–96. Shotwell would recover from his wounds, and Lusk would ultimately receive what he considered justice. At the next term of the Buncombe County superior court, a jury returned a bill against Shotwell but not one against Lusk. For his part, Shotwell did not appear, but his lawyer, David Coleman, the same man Lusk replaced as district solicitor and who attended the injured Shotwell after the fight, pleaded guilty on the editor’s behalf.

30. Trelease, White Terror, 49, 113, 226, 246–47, 278. On Tennessee’s struggles with the Klan, see Severance, Tennessee’s Radical Army.

31. Trelease, White Terror, 194, 197.

32. Ibid., 194, 197–99; “A Proclamation, By his Excellency, the Governor of North Carolina,” April 16, 1869, William Woods Holden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. The law itself was passed on April 12, 1869.

33. Trelease, White Terror, 203–4, 209; Zuber, North Carolina during Reconstruction, 28–29. Removing the habeas corpus provision also avoided a possible legal challenge because the recently adopted state constitution forbade the writ’s suspension. Also, rather ominously for the Republicans, Klansmen chased the act’s author, T. M. Shoffner of Alamance County, from the state.

34. Trelease, White Terror, 205–6; Nelson, “Red Strings and Half Brothers,” 39, 43–46; Troxler, “‘To Look More Closely,’” 404, 406, 411–14, 416–17. One of Outlaw’s half-brothers was a member of the White Brotherhood in Alamance County, which underscores the personal nature of the violence during this period.

35. NC Klan Report, 22, 24, 105, 107, 153, 161, 165; Stewart, “When Darkness Reigns,” 470–71. Rutherford Klansmen seemed a bit unsure of themselves at first, so they chose a fairly safe target: an elderly black man named Nelson Birge. Many of the characteristics common to future Klan assaults manifested themselves in Birge’s beating. Five men in pale red disguises, their faces carefully masked, broke into Birge’s home at night and whipped him.

36. NC Klan Report, 22, 105, 107–8, 157, 165–66. Conservatives painted a different picture of Aaron Biggerstaff’s role in the shooting at his half-brother’s home. Cleveland County Klan leader Plato Durham told Congress that not only did Aaron accompany McGahey to Samuel’s house in February 1870, but both he and his son-in-law also shot into the house. Durham viewed Aaron’s act as even more egregious than McGahey’s because Biggerstaff fired with intent to kill into a corner of the house where his half-brother slept. Furthermore, Durham claimed that Judge Logan’s unwillingness to punish Biggerstaff more severely created immense anger among Biggerstaff’s neighbors. In essence, Durham cast the violence around McGahey and Biggerstaff as isolated personal feuds and unrelated to the Ku Klux at all. Two key problems appear in Durham’s version of events. First, he heard none of the evidence himself. He claimed that all his information came from Biggerstaff’s lawyer. Second, Durham called the idea that the Klan was responsible in any way for the violence gripping Rutherford County “preposterous.” Every other person who testified before Congress, however, contradicted him on these points. See NC Klan Report, 305–8, 314, 316–18.

37. Trelease, White Terror, 208–12; Massengill, “Detectives of William W. Holden, 1869–1870,” 448, 454, 474–75.

38. Trelease, White Terror, 213. According to their original plan, Stephens’s body was to be moved to an African American meetinghouse to serve as a warning comparable to Outlaw’s lynching. When his disappearance was discovered, however, that plan was discarded. Local black men took control of the courthouse that night and refused to let anyone interfere with the crime scene until they could recover Stephens’s body the next morning.

39. Ibid., 212–16.

40. Ibid., 217; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 499–500. Tennessee passed an Act to Organize and Equip a State Guard on February 20, 1867, which allowed Republican governor William Brownlow to organize and call out a state militia to restore order. The State Guard represented a last resort, according to historian Ben Severance. George W. Kirk was one of Brownlow’s militia officers. During his company’s operations in Franklin County, the former Union officer encountered a hostile pro-Confederate population. Still, Kirk carried out his mission with great success, garnering several white recruits and revitalizing the county’s Republican Party. He even handled a crisis following the death of one of his men with great calm, and he prevented an escalation of the violence. See Severance, Tennessee’s Radical Army, 11–12, 54, 93–95.

41. Muster Roll of Co. A, 2nd North Carolina Regiment, July 14, 1870; Muster Roll of Co. B, 2nd North Carolina Regiment, July 14, 1870; Muster Roll of Co. C, 2nd North Carolina Regiment, July 14, 1870; Muster Roll of Co. F, 2nd North Carolina Regiment, July 14, 1870, North Carolina Adjutant General Records, NCOAH; McGuire, “‘Rally Union Men,’” 306. Kirk’s motley band ranged from fifteen to seventy years old. Such data also belie the portrait of Kirk’s men painted by the prosecution at Governor Holden’s impeachment trial. See, for example, Trial of William W. Holden, Governor of North Carolina, on Impeachment by the House of Representatives for High Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1:149. Based on a sample of Companies A, B, and E, Samuel McGuire found similar data. His calculations showed an average age of twenty-three and nineteen for officers and enlisted men, respectively, in Company A. Company B’s officers’ average age was twenty-six, and its privates were roughly twenty-one years old. Company E’s officers and privates averaged approximately twenty-three years of age. See McGuire, “‘Rally Union Men,’” 302–4.

42. Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, 1870 United States Federal Census, database available from author upon request; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 499. McGuire found comparable data for property ownership as well. His research showed Company A officers’ land and personal property to be worth around $566, which was roughly $100 more than its privates’ wealth. Company B’s officers owned more land, with real property averaging $572, but that company’s privates owned roughly $758 each. The latter number was also skewed by the data for men living in their parents’ household. Finally, McGuire found the privates in Company E to slightly edge out their officers, $446 to $431 in approximate wealth. See McGuire, “‘Rally Union Men,’” 302–4.

43. Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, 1870 United States Federal Census; McGuire, “‘Rally Union Men,’” 305–6. For more on the Shelton Laurel massacre, see Paludan, Victims. Another man, Peter McCoy, who escaped death with John Norton at Shelton Laurel, enlisted in Company A. See McGuire, “‘Rally Union Men,’” 306n68.

44. Rosters; Ancestry.com, 1870 United States Federal Census; Massengill, “Detectives of William W. Holden,” 475n66. Kirk recommended Garland for an officer’s commission, and he received one as a second lieutenant. D. C. Pritchard may well have been the D. C. Pritchard who supported Keith’s petition for an increased military pension on September 4, 1868. A later pension document identified D. C. Pritchard as a member of Blalock’s wartime “gang.” See D. C. Pritchard Affidavit, December 19, 1874, Keith Blalock Collection of Papers, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University.

45. Trelease, White Terror, 218–23.

46. James Gwyn Diary, August 4, 1870, James Gwyn Papers, SHC; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 521–22; Cotton, “Appalachian North Carolina,” 218, 221–23; diary entry, August 4, 1870, James Clarence Harper Papers, SHC. As J. Mills Thornton observed of the Lower South, the tax rate for small farmers in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi almost doubled between 1860 and 1870. Such high taxes, contrasted with the prewar debates over an ad valorem general property tax in the Lower South alienated lower-class whites from the Republicans. While appeals to lower taxes played well to conservatives across the South, Mills’s argument has limits when applied to the Appalachian South. Rather than antebellum calls for a fairer tax on land, mountain farmers across Southern Appalachia argued instead for ad valorem taxation on their wealthier neighbors’ slave property. While Mills is right to say such antebellum attitudes shaped Reconstruction, his paradigm is somewhat inverted in the mountain counties. See Thornton, “Fiscal Policy,” 351–52, 355–60, 367, 378.

47. NC Klan Report, 26, 106, 108–9. Jonathan B. Carpenter testified that the Republicans enjoyed a majority of 300 to 400 in the white electorate of this disaffected area.

48. Ibid., 102, 106, 119–20, 145.

49. George W. Logan to Tod R. Caldwell, December 27, 1870, Tod R. Caldwell Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; George W. Logan to Tod R. Caldwell, January 22, 1871, Tod R. Caldwell Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

50. Harris, William Woods Holden, 301–7; J. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 1, 1871, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; Maria W. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 13, 1871, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; James Gwyn Diary, February 19, 1871, James Gwyn Papers, SHC; E. Bryan to “My Dear Sir,” February 22, 1871, Edmund Walter Jones Papers, SHC.

51. North Carolina Daily Standard, November 25, 1868, 3; Trelease, White Terror, 194, 197.

52. Maria W. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, January 7, 1871, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC.

53. Ibid.; Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 5, 1871, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; NC Klan Report, 241; Testimony of Virgil S. Lusk, Report on the Alleged Outrages in the Southern States, by the Select Committee of the Senate, March 10, 1871, 118–19. When testifying before Congress, Nicholas Woodfin opined that the Honeycutts acted alone. Both Maria and Robert Johnston, however, reported that more than the two brothers had attacked the Brookses.

54. NC Klan Report, 20–23, 106–7, 109, 112, 146, 151, 305–8, 314, 316–18.

55. Ibid., 22, 111.

56. Ibid., 27, 111.

57. Ibid., 25, 104, 111, 114, 202, 210, 216, 219–20, 232. Harrill, Wells, and Grant took a great risk in testifying to the Klan’s activities, but it is unknown what became of them after their testimony.

58. Ibid., 20, 113. Indeed, the young man did know them. Several men—Jonas Radford, James Hunt, Jason Witherow, John Witherow, and Thomas Toms—received arrest warrants after that night. Each had their case bound to the August session of the McDowell County court to stand trial for their crimes.

59. Ibid., 24–25, 111.

60. Ibid., 114, 116–17.

61. Ibid., 117–18, 125. Where was George W. Logan? Justice misunderstood the question, and directed them instead toward one of the editors of the Rutherford Star, the local Republican paper.

62. Ibid., 118–22.

63. Ibid., 116, 124, 127, 149.

64. Trelease, White Terror, 392; NC Klan Report, 24, 114. Still, Justice and others’ argument that the magistrate must act or resign prompted action. The frightened commissioner promised to issue the warrants if other men promised to force the prosecution. These efforts led to the arrest of the men involved in the second attack on Aaron Biggerstaff, and their bounding over to the August term of McDowell County court. See NC Klan Report, 114.

65. NC Klan Report, 136–37.

66. Ibid., 141–42.

67. Ibid., 139–40, 142, 145.

68. Ibid., 159–61, 194, 228–29. Suggestion that the McGahey-Biggerstaff incident was a “personal feud” hints at larger cultural images of Southern Appalachia as inherently violent, clannish, and backward. Such intimation dismisses the evidence of the struggle for power between a biracial Republican Party and Conservatives in the mountains. Historian Altina Waller’s classic study of the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud used one of the region’s most nationally known incidents to reject this image of Appalachia. See Waller, Feud. T. R. C. Hutton further demonstrates that politicians used “feud” frequently after the Civil War to mask the political nature of postwar violence. See Hutton, Bloody Breathitt. For a broad historiographical assault upon the notion of an inherently violent Southern Appalachia, see the collected essays in Stewart, Blood in the Hills.

69. NC Klan Report, 121, 159; diary entry, April 18, 1871, David Schenck Papers, SHC, 216–18; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1017–18.

70. “To the Conservative Party of the Mountain District of North Carolina,” April 27, 1872, Clinton A. Cilley Papers, SHC; W. A. Collett to Tod R. Caldwell, June 9, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Perkins Library, Duke University; McKinney, Zeb Vance, 284–92.

71. W. A. Collett to Tod R. Caldwell, March 27, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Perkins Library, Duke University. For example, one fellow Burke County Republican accused Caldwell of forcing his removal from a patronage post after he voted for a Conservative candidate to the aborted constitutional convention.

72. Ibid.; C. C. Jones to F. D. Erwin, June 3, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Perkins Library, Duke University. These sorts of efforts at political cooperation are emblematic of the sort of early “fusion” efforts noted by Deborah Beckel. See Beckel, Radical Reform, esp. chap. 4.

73. C. C. Jones to F. D. Erwin, June 3, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Perkins Library, Duke University.

74. Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1002–3.

75. Kerr Craige to Thomas D. Johnston, August 11, 1872, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; Dowd, Sketches of Prominent Living North Carolinians, 132–33.

76. Hamilton, Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell, 2:237, 247–48, 256–57.

Chapter Six

1. Augustus S. Merrimon to W. H. Bower, April 20, 1873, Samuel Finley Patterson Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. An 1872 endorsement for the position as a clerk depicted Bower as “a young man of good repute and education, a sterling, active and unflinching Democrat,” but “of limited pecuniary means.” Among his references were Zebulon B. Vance, Robert B. Vance, Alfred M. Scales, Robert F. Armfield, and Burgess S. Gaither. See 1872 Endorsement, William Horton Bower Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

2. Augustus S. Merrimon to George W. Swepson, February 22, 1866, and Augustus S. Merrimon to George W. Swepson, July 7, 1866, George W. Swepson Papers, NCOAH; W. H. Bower to Nat, April 10, 1873, William Horton Bower Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; W. H. Bower to J. A. Bower, August 5, 1877, Samuel Finley Patterson Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

3. In terms of the New South, C. Vann Woodward saw a fall of the planters and a discontinuity between the prewar and postwar South. It is a testimony to the power of his argument that scholars continue to wrestle with his findings. For North Carolina, Dwight B. Billings Jr. found significant continuity as a result of planters’ continued control over the region. Edward L. Ayers argues that southerners began to construct a new society out of necessity in 1877, but western North Carolinians seemed unwilling to wait that long to start that process. See Woodward, Origins of the New South; Billings, Planters; Ayers, Promise of the New South.

4. Much of the postwar literature falls into an Old South–to–New South persistence debate, dividing Reconstruction from the New South more neatly than makes sense when dealing with western North Carolina. Other scholars, like Steven Hahn, argue that southern mountaineers earnestly tried to avoid or otherwise eschewed market production for fear of jeopardizing self-sufficiency. Few scholars have looked at the Appalachian South in terms of this debate, preferring instead to focus on the period of rapid industrialization that began after 1880. Those who have done so, however, have contributed new perspective to the debate. For instance, Robert Weise’s careful study of eastern Kentucky demonstrates that the male heads of household entangled themselves in webs of debt that made the goal of household independence virtually untenable. His argument is compelling, but he largely skips the complex Reconstruction years, linking the chaos of the Civil War and industrialization without the building blocks in between. Stephen Wallace Taylor’s look at southwestern North Carolina has similar gaps. Taylor takes a strong step forward by suggesting not only that western North Carolina fit within the New South paradigm but also that many mountain residents wanted economic development and supported local boosters in their quest for industry. Most of his book, however, deals with twentieth-century issues, and he surveys only the post–Civil War period. Richard D. Starnes argues that tourism was the most vital industry in the expansion of western North Carolina’s economy. While he is right that tourism played a key role in the region’s economy over the long term, in the 1870s western North Carolinians were equally—if not more—focused on the development of the region’s resources. They saw a future for the Carolina mountains in mining, manufacturing, and agricultural production as well as a destination spot. See Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; Weise, Grasping at Independence; Taylor, New South’s New Frontier; Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky.

5. In the shift to a younger generation of leaders, events in western North Carolina parallel Peter Carmichael’s findings for Virginia. Ambitious, young, educated men, many of them with ties to the antebellum Whig Party, promoted the region’s development along lines consistent with broader southern social norms. Thus men like Zebulon Vance, Augustus Merrimon, Thomas Johnston, Virgil Lusk, J. L. Henry, W. W. Rollins, and others replaced Thomas Clingman and other antebellum leaders after the war. As Carmichael noted in Virginia, these men shared a more cosmopolitan outlook in their commitment to internal improvements and market involvement. See Carmichael, Last Generation; and Stewart, “Select Men.”

6. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 152, 154, 157, 161, 163–67, 169–71; Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 27. An article in the North Carolina Citizen laid out the numbers clearly. Based on the editors’ calculations, the state invested $227,574 in improvements for eastern North Carolina between 1815 and 1861. Middle and western North Carolina received $46,943.62 and $20,629.29, respectively. During the period between 1848 and 1861, North Carolina issued state bonds to support internal improvement projects. When the bonds sold for approximately $8.5 million, only $3,043,000 went to build the WNCRR east of Morganton. The transmontane section of the state received $50,000 worth of Cherokee land bonds to fund the Western Turnpike Road. See North Carolina Citizen, January 1, 1880, 4–5.

7. Cotton, “Appalachian North Carolina,” 199–202; Report of the Commission to Investigate Charges of Fraud and Corruption, Under Act of Assembly, Session 1871–’72, 14; Yandle, “Relapse of Reconstruction,” 99. The state’s investigatory commissioners were W. M. Shipp, J. B. Batchelor, and James G. Martin. For more on the important role railroads played in the southern Republican Party during Reconstruction, see Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction.

8. Report of the Commission to Investigate Charges of Fraud and Corruption, 14–15; Zuber, North Carolina during Reconstruction, 55–56; State vs. George W. Swepson, R. R. Swepson, R. Y. McAden, M. S. Littlefield, Haywood County Superior Court, Spring Term 1873, Haywood County Railroad Records, NCOAH.

9. Cotton, “Appalachian North Carolina,” 224–25.

10. Tod R. Caldwell to Grant & Caldwell Club of Raleigh, August 5, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 48.

11. W. A. Collett to Tod R. Caldwell, June 9, 1872, Tod Robinson Caldwell Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

12. See chapter 4; North Carolina Citizen, March 21, 1878, 1. It is also worth noting that the Citizen used this report to shame the lack of support among local whites for education. “Our own white children are being allowed to grow up in ignorance,” it chided. Although it alluded to reasons for the lack of white support, parents’ roles were singled out. “The colored children are made to attend School by their parents,” the editor noted, “while even the few public schools which may be established for white children are but scantily attended.” For full discussion of the complicated relationships between emancipation, education, and Reconstruction, see Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love; Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks; Williams, Self-Taught; and Butchart, Schooling the Freed People.

13. Pinckney Rollins to Tod R. Caldwell, December 29, 1872, Tod R. Caldwell, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; Asheville Petition to Tod R. Caldwell, Tod R. Caldwell, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

14. J. E. Reed to Tod R. Caldwell, December 29, 1872, Tod R. Caldwell, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, January 17, 1873, Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, January 20, 1873, in the Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 6, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; C. M. McLoud to Thomas D. Johnston, February 10, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC, UNC-CH; James P. Sawyer to Thomas D. Johnston, February 10, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC.

15. Theodore F. Davidson to Thomas D. Johnston, February 15, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC. Western Carolinians need not look far to see the impact a railroad could do for a mountain section. Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee, for instance, both saw a growth in outside economic activity, market agriculture, and greater tourist traffic. For more on the impact railroads had on these other Appalachian sections, see Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad; Groce, Mountain Rebels; and McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels.

16. L. R. Garren to Thomas D. Johnston, January 28, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; W. W. Rollins to Thomas D. Johnston, February 3, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; T. D. Carter to Tod R. Caldwell, June 27, 1873, Governors’ Papers, Tod R. Caldwell, NCOAH.

17. B. S. Gaither to Tod R. Caldwell, December 18, 1873, Governors’ Papers, Tod R. Caldwell, NCOAH.

18. Marcus Erwin to Curtis H. Brogden, June 17, 1875, Curtis H. Brogden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; James R. Love to Curtis H. Brogden, June 28, 1875, Curtis H. Brogden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 165–71.

19. James L. Robinson to Curtis H. Brogden, August 4, 1875, Curtis H. Brogden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH.

20. Waters, “Life beneath the Veneer,” 63–65; McKinney, “Zeb Vance and the Construction,” 2, 64. Convict labor become increasingly common in the South, including the Appalachian South, during the 1870s. Railroad companies such as the Chesapeake and Ohio, which began the formidable mountain barrier as it passed from Virginia into West Virginia in December 1868, found convict labor an invaluable tool in the difficult and dangerous work before them. See Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man, 77–78, 104–5. Between 1876 and 1894, the black prison population nearly tripled in North Carolina. In 1876, the state penitentiary had 676 black inmates. As the WNCRR neared completion in 1880, there were 979 African American prisoners. These black prisoners formed the backbone of the state’s convict labor force. Waters, “Life beneath the Veneer,” 63.

21. Quotes appear in Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists, 87–88, 100.

22. Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists, 105–7.

23. Oscar Eastmond to Robert P. Dick, June 20, 1873, Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685–1993, Record Group 21, U.S. Circuit Court, National Archives and Records Administration, Morrow, Georgia.

24. Robert P. Dick, U.S. Federal District Court, Western District of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, July 1, 1873, Record Group 21, U.S. Circuit Court, NARA; Oscar Eastmond to Robert P. Dick, November 14, 1873, Record Group 21, U.S. Circuit Court, NARA. Eastmond’s fall from grace appears to have begun around this time. In the summer of 1877, W. M. Hardy reported that a trial began in Washington that brought both Virgil Lusk and Eastmond to the capital. Hardy noted that Eastmond’s “character was assailed and Rollins & James O. Robertson & others swore his character was bad in every respect. Lusk swore, so I am told, that Eastmans [sic] character was good in the community of Asheville for truth & honesty—this statement excited surprise and indignation even among the Republicans from Asheville here.” The letter continues to accuse Eastmond of vowing never to return to North Carolina to live while also attempting to blackmail Lusk. What the grounds are for that last charge, no evidence was given. See W. M. Hardy to Thomas D. Johnston, July 5, 1877, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC.

25. Escott, Many Excellent People, 166–70. Justices of the peace grew even more powerful after this maneuver. Following additional legislation, justices of the peace held the power to levy and collect taxes for the county’s benefit as well as responsibility for maintaining public highways, bridges, and related transportation routes in their townships. In noting that the magistrates controlled “the peace, prosperity and comfort of the community,” the North Carolina Citizen declared these local officials more important than the state governor and the president of the United States. See North Carolina Citizen, April 3, 1879, 4.

26. North Carolina Citizen, April 19, 1877, 2; North Carolina Citizen, February 13, 1879, 4.

27. T. C. Land to President of North Carolina Central Railroad, November 6, 1866, Hamilton Brown Papers, SHC; Lands of the Western North Carolina Land Company, 1; W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University. Land placed the Elk Knob mine in Watauga, when it is actually in Ashe County. Like land speculation, mining was not new to western North Carolina in the postwar years. A “gold rush” in the early 1830s sparked an interest in the wealth hidden beneath the surface of the region that continued through the antebellum and postwar periods. Copper and gold mining also provided a common outlet for mountain slaves before emancipation. This same interest also enhanced antebellum hopes for a railroad that would make access and extraction of these mineral resources more economical. See John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 67–68, 78–79, 164, 170–72. Warrior Creek flows from the central part of Caldwell County to the Yadkin River in the western portion of Happy Valley. See Powell, North Carolina Gazetteer, 518.

28. Owen and Eve, Report of a Geological Examination, Made on Certain Lands and Mines in the Counties of Haywood, Madison, Buncombe, Jackson and Macon, N.C. and in Cocke County, Tennessee, 5–6.

29. Ibid., 14–17. Emery is a granular form of corundum. See Kerr, Report of the Geological Survey, 1:64–65. Mining was a familiar enterprise for residents of southwestern North Carolina. Some western North Carolinians had experience working in the Ducktown, Tennessee, copper industry. Like other regional industries, Ducktown boosters put a tremendous emphasis on the railroad as critical if the copper mines were to recapture their previous profitability. On Ducktown mining during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, see Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke, chap. 1.

30. D. D. Davies to Thomas D. Johnston, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; Ovide Dupré to Thomas D. Johnston, March 24, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; R. V. Welch to Thomas D. Johnston, July 20, 1873, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC.

31. North Carolina Citizen, May 9, 1878, 1; Arthur, Western North Carolina, 555; Albert Siler to his wife, August 2, 1873, Albert Siler Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; North Carolina Citizen, September 26, 1878, 1. Bryson’s wheeling and dealing was the stuff of local gossip. Alfred Siler noted the major’s apparent good fortune in August 1873 as well. Trapped beneath a “depressing load of debt” to Swepson—unidentified but likely George Swepson—Bryson was released from the debt of several thousand dollars. Local gossip placed the major’s new debt in the southwestern counties’ climate. Swepson, apparently quite ill, came to the mountains to recover from his ailments. His improved health convinced him to release Bryson in exchange for his aid in “some perfectly legitimate business transactions,” which Siler felt had promise. According to Siler, Bryson’s prospects for making money off his land by year’s end looked good. See Albert Siler to Josey, August 16, 1873, Albert Siler Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

32. Cherry and Cherry, Geological Report: Gap Creek Mine, North Carolina, 3, North Carolina Collection, UNC-CH; Blosser, “Calvin J. Cowles’s Gap Creek Mine,” 380, 382–84.

33. Cherry and Cherry, Geological Report: Gap Creek Mine, North Carolina, 4, 6–7, 9, 11–12.

34. Blosser, “Calvin J. Cowles’s Gap Creek Mine,” 383–84, 387–92. Once hailed as the enterprise’s savior, Brandreth proved to also be its undoing. He splurged on expensive equipment that was too bulky to be transported to the mine and issued more stock that reduced Cowles’s stake in the company. In the end, Brandreth mismanaged the mine and its stock while regularly excluding Cowles from the company’s decision-making process.

35. Barney, Making of a Confederate, 168, 172, 178, 180, 182, 185. Combined, Walter and his brother, Thomas I. Lenoir, owned roughly ten thousand acres in Haywood County. When he finally sold the “Crab Orchard,” it was to his brother-in-law, James Gwyn.

36. Walter W. Lenoir to Rufus Lenoir, July 16, 1866, Thomas Lenoir Sr. Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

37. Walter W. Lenoir to Sade, November 23, 1866, Thomas Lenoir Sr. Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

38. The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States; Report on the Productions of Agriculture as Returned at the Tenth Census, June 1, 1880.

39. Walter W. Lenoir to Philip R. Freas, December 28, 1876, Thomas Lenoir Sr. Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 21–22; Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 80–83, 108–17. Founded by Philip R. Freas in 1830, the Germantown Telegraph became one of the largest newspapers in Pennsylvania. It earned Lenoir’s interest because it was one of the few large newspapers that devoted part of each issue to agricultural issues. See Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 3:1995. Walter’s target audience heard his appeals. A. L. Elwyn wrote him in late January 1877, acknowledging reading Walter’s letter in the Germantown Telegraph and expressing interest in western North Carolina for farming, raising sheep, and tourism. See A. L. Elwyn to Walter W. Lenoir, January 27, 1877, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. Years later, a northern artist for local color writer Rebecca Harding Davis set off a firestorm in the Asheville press after he published a far-from-flattering account of his travels through western North Carolina in the New York Tribune. In their zeal to refute the charges leveled against their region and people, the North Carolina Citizen ran a statement from “the leader of a successful colony of Northern men in Macon County” that described western North Carolinians as “intelligent, honest and kindly disposed.” Although the mountaineers “have been isolated from the world and lacked opportunities,” they harbored no ill will toward Yankees. There was some indication, however, that all was not well in this statement. “Our position as Republicans between the upper and lower millstones of Northern Republicanism and Southern Democracy,” the colony’s leader wrote, “is a difficult one, and is rendered worse by inflammatory and false reports such as these.” See North Carolina Citizen, November 27, 1879, 1.

40. Lenoir to Freas, December 28, 1876, Thomas Lenoir Sr. Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham. N.C.; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1001–2. While Walter put a positive reunion spin upon his description of North Carolina, he sometimes caught himself falling into harsher tones. When discussing the northern armies for Hayes and Tilden, Walter originally remarked, “If you should be rash enough to get up a war about it at the North you could not have any of the fighting done at the South unless you brought a Tilden army and a Hayes army both from the North to fight each other.” Perhaps he thought better of calling his prospective emigrants rash and prone to political violence at the expense of the South, because he edited it to read, “To get up a fight about it here you would have to bring a Tilden army and a Hayes army both from the North to fight each other on Southern soil.”

41. Walter W. Lenoir to D. D. Ludlow, December 10, 1877, Thomas Lenoir Sr. Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Ludlow proposed moving about a dozen families, composed of “plain, energetic, and industrious people” to North Carolina. See D. D. Ludlow to Walter W. Lenoir, November 17, 1877, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. Lenoir’s public promotion of western Carolina made him a frequent correspondent with northerners looking for new opportunities in the South. Another New Yorker, Fritz Ortel, wrote Lenoir in June 1878 of his plans to move to either Watauga or Haywood County and raise sheep. Ortel told Lenoir that he singled him out for advice because he knew Walter “has the interest of Western North Carolina thoroughly at heart.” See Fritz Ortel to Walter W. Lenoir, June 19, 1878, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC.

42. Blue Ridge Blade, October 19, 1878, 4.

43. Raleigh Daily Sentinel, April 16, 1867; D. Frash to “Dear Sir,” July 4, 1873, Bryan and Leventhorpe Family Papers, SHC.

44. Dillwyn Parker to Thomas D. Johnston, January 12, 1878, Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC; North Carolina Citizen, November 7, 1878, 6; North Carolina Citizen, August 14, 1879, 6.

45. Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 104–5, 108–9; Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States, 766–69; Report on the Productions of Agriculture, 165–66.

46. Calvin J. Cowles, Wilkes County Agricultural Circulars, Return Days August 1, 1866 and October 1, 1866, Calvin J. Cowles Papers, SHC; Cameron, Sketch of the Tobacco Interests, 32; Allen, Asheville and Land of the Sky, 51–52; James Gwyn to Rufus Lenoir, February 27, 1870, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; Asheville Western Expositor, January 7, 1875, 2, Misc. Asheville Newspapers, reel 1, North Carolina Collection, SHC; North Carolina Citizen, February 14, 1878, 1. The state sponsored the international promotion of western tobacco. Governor Tod Caldwell tasked his old Burke County neighbor Samuel McDowell Tate to promote the state’s resources at the 1873 Vienna Exposition. Tate took samples of mountain timber, wheat, tobacco, gold, iron, and other minerals. He was particularly proud of the tobacco, which he termed “the finest tobacco in America” (emphasis in the original) from Wilkes County. See Samuel McDowell Tate to Tod R. Caldwell, June 21, 1873, Tod R. Caldwell, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH. According to J. D. Cameron, Shelton earned an honorable mention at the Paris Exposition. See Cameron, Sketch of the Tobacco Interests, 32.

47. Asheville Western Expositor, January 7, 1875, 2, Misc. Asheville Newspapers, reel 1, North Carolina Collection, SHC; North Carolina Citizen, February 14, 1878, 1.

48. North Carolina Citizen, March 14, 1878, 1; North Carolina Citizen, July 18, 1878, 1; North Carolina Citizen, July 31, 1878, 1. Madison County correspondent for the Citizen J. J. Gudger reported a total of 510,709 pounds of tobacco shipped from the county in 1878. Merchants in the county seat of Marshall sold 188,036 pounds of that total for $44,145.11, or an average of 18.5 cents a pound, according to Gudger. See North Carolina Citizen, October 9, 1879, 1.

49. Waters, “Life beneath the Veneer,” 68–69; Lee, “Southern Appalachia’s Nineteenth-Century Bright Tobacco Boom,” 187–89.

50. 1880 Agricultural Census, Buncombe, Haywood, and Madison Counties. The reasons are unclear for African Americans’ limited participation in tobacco production. Without qualitative sources, one can only speculate. It is possible given the changes in the region’s labor force that whites viewed the cash crop as a means to recover lost fortunes or upward mobility, and they resisted extending such opportunities to blacks. It is also possible that African Americans preferred moving to urban areas or working in more familiar agricultural jobs. Another explanation has to do with the mobility of African Americans. Perhaps they did not live in or moved out of the townships where tobacco proved most profitable. Politics may have also played a role, though initial observation does not correlate to political party affiliation.

51. North Carolina Citizen, April 3, 1879, 1; North Carolina Citizen, November 11, 1879, 1; North Carolina Citizen, August 14, 1879, 1; North Carolina Citizen, December 18, 1879, 1. Its warehouse, an emblem of regional progress, was the work of J. W. Wilder and Company of Danville, a clear indication of the town’s integration into broader tobacco market networks. By the summer of 1880, E. L. Holmes and Company had begun construction of a tobacco factory and production of “Golden Leaf,” “Pisgah,” and “Land of the Sky” brands of smoking tobacco in Asheville. See North Carolina Citizen, May 20, 1880, 1, and August 26, 1880, 1.

52. North Carolina Citizen, September 11, 1879, 4. Buncombe County produced 23,006 pounds of tobacco in 1860, and Madison County grew even less at 15,705 pounds. Little had changed by 1870 when those counties produced 30,689 and 19,108 pounds, respectively. During the 1870s, however, that output exploded. According to the Report on the Productions of Agriculture, Buncombe produced 475,428 pounds and Madison yielded 807,911 pounds. Haywood County also saw significant growth in tobacco. Between 1870 and 1880, the amount of the weed grown in the county more than doubled from 18,692 to 39,516 pounds. See Report on the Productions of Agriculture, 300.

53. North Carolina Citizen, April 10, 1879, 7; North Carolina Citizen, October 16, 1879, 1.

54. North Carolina Citizen, November 6, 1879, 1; North Carolina Citizen, November 13, 1879, 1.

55. North Carolina Citizen, December 4, 1879, 8.

56. North Carolina Citizen, July 17, 1879, 1; North Carolina Citizen, August 14, 1879, 1. For a discussion of this “progressive” ideology in antebellum western North Carolina, see Bruce E. Stewart, “Select Men,” 289–322.

57. Henderson County Advertiser, October 1, 1874, 2. The barbecue itself took place on September 10, 1874.

58. G. M. Roberts to Curtis H. Brogden, October 9, 1875, Curtis H. Brogden, Governors’ Papers, NCOAH; Collett Leventhorpe to Mrs. Ursilla Bryan, February 24, 1877, Bryan and Leventhorpe Family Papers, SHC.

59. North Carolina Citizen, April 11, 1878, 1; North Carolina Citizen, June 6, 1878, 1; North Carolina Citizen, July 25, 1878, 1.

60. North Carolina Citizen, December 5, 1878, 1; North Carolina Citizen, March 20, 1879, 4.

61. North Carolina Citizen, July 3, 1879, 5; North Carolina Citizen, July 10, 1879, 1, 4.

62. Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 2, 1877, Robert B. Johnston to Thomas D. Johnston, February 15, 1877, and Thomas D. Johnston to Annie, February 19, 1877, all in Thomas D. Johnston Papers, SHC.

63. Morris, “Western North Carolina Railroad,” 259–60.

64. Ibid., 260–65.

65. Bower ultimately did prosper. He moved to Lenoir, the county seat of Caldwell County in 1881, and the next year his neighbors elected him to the state House of Representatives. He also had a successful legal career. In 1893, he was elected to Congress. See “William Horton Bower,” in Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (accessed June 4, 2009, at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000688).

Conclusion

1. McKinney, “Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 92–93.

2. Lewis, “Industrialization,” 63–64; Report on the Productions of Agriculture as Returned at the Tenth Census, June 1, 1880, 300, 302; Report on the Statistics of Agriculture in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 444–45; Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 48.

3. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 31–34, 43.

4. Waters, “Life beneath the Veneer,” 70–71, 78–80; Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 25–32, 83–84.

5. Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists, 186–88.

6. Beckel, “‘Take the Negro Out of Politics,’” 12–15, 19, 21–28.

7. Testimony of Virgil Lusk, Report on the Alleged Outrages in the Southern States, by the Select Committee of the Senate, March 10, 1871, 120–21.

8. Arthur, Western North Carolina, 299–300.