Chapter 11: A Region Divided — Appalachia and the Civil War

"I have no desire to dissolve the Union. My people have no desire to dissolve the Union. We are for the Union." — William G. "Parson" Brownlow, Knoxville Whig editor, 1861

"We are betwixt two fires." — Unnamed mountain farmer, quoted in a letter to the governor of North Carolina, 1862

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Explain why Appalachia was deeply divided over secession, unlike the plantation South
2. Describe the creation of West Virginia as a direct result of mountain Unionism
3. Analyze the internal civil war — bushwhackers, guerrilla warfare, neighbor against neighbor
4. Identify how the Civil War disrupted existing community structures and created lasting divisions

The War Comes to the Mountains

In the spring of 1861, when the cannons opened on Fort Sumter and states across the South voted to leave the Union, the Appalachian Mountains did something that no other part of the Confederacy did on the same scale: they said no.

Not all of them. Not everywhere. Not in unison. But from the ridges of western Virginia to the hollows of East Tennessee, from the coves of western North Carolina to the valleys of northern Alabama and northern Georgia, mountain people looked at the secession conventions meeting in their state capitals and saw something they recognized immediately — a decision being made by rich men in the lowlands that would cost poor men in the mountains everything.

This was not, as later mythmakers would have it, a simple story of heroic mountain Unionists standing against the slaveholding South. The reality was more tangled than that, more human, more brutal. Some mountain families were fiercely loyal to the Union. Some were fiercely loyal to the Confederacy. Many — probably most — were fiercely loyal to their own farms, their own kin, their own hollows, and wanted nothing to do with either army. What they got instead was four years of the worst kind of war: not the grand set-piece battles that fill most Civil War histories, but a grinding, intimate, neighbor-against-neighbor guerrilla conflict that destroyed communities from the inside out and left scars that would not heal for generations.

The Civil War in Appalachia was not a sideshow to the "real" war fought at Gettysburg and Shiloh. It was its own war — an internal civil war within the Civil War — and understanding it is essential to understanding everything that happened in the mountains afterward.

The Class Dimension: Why the Mountains Divided

To understand why Appalachia split, you have to understand what the mountains looked like in 1860 — and how different that landscape was from the cotton-and-tobacco lowlands where the secession movement had its deepest roots.

The Economic Divide

The 1860 census tells a story that the secession conventions did not want to hear. Across the plantation South, roughly a quarter to a third of white families held enslaved people. In the Appalachian counties — the hill country and mountain regions of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and what was still western Virginia — that number dropped sharply. In many mountain counties, fewer than one in ten white families were slaveholders. In some, the number was closer to one in twenty.

This was not because mountain people were morally superior to lowland planters. Some of them were. Many were not. The gap was economic and geographic. The steep terrain and narrow valley bottoms of the Appalachian interior did not support the kind of large-scale agriculture that made slavery profitable in the piedmont and coastal plain. You could not grow cotton on a forty-degree slope. You could not run a two-hundred-acre tobacco plantation in a holler that was a quarter mile wide. The mountain economy was built around subsistence farming — growing what your family needed, with modest surpluses traded at the county seat — supplemented by livestock, timber, ginseng, and small-scale industry.

Some mountain people did hold enslaved people. Chapter 6 documented the reality of slavery in the mountains — in the salt works of the Kanawha Valley, in the iron furnaces of the Shenandoah, on the larger valley farms that occupied the broader bottomlands. The slaveholding class in the mountains was real. But it was a minority, concentrated in the valley towns and county seats, and it had a political influence out of proportion to its numbers.

Here was the fundamental tension: when Southern states voted on secession, the decisions were made in state legislatures and conventions dominated by lowland slaveholders. The interests those men were protecting — the right to hold human beings as property, the economic system built on unpaid labor, the political power that came from the Three-Fifths Compromise — were their interests. They were not the interests of the non-slaveholding mountain farmer who owned eighty acres of hillside, grew his own food, owed no man, and saw no reason to die for the planter class.

The Political Fault Lines

The secession votes revealed the fracture. In Virginia, the secession convention initially voted against leaving the Union — largely because western Virginia delegates voted overwhelmingly no. It took the fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops to swing the convention, and even then, western Virginia's delegates voted against secession by a margin of more than two to one. In Tennessee, the first secession referendum in February 1861 failed statewide, with East Tennessee voting against it by nearly four to one. When Tennessee held a second referendum in June — after Sumter, after Lincoln's call for troops, after the political atmosphere had shifted — East Tennessee still voted no by the same margin. The rest of the state overruled them.

In North Carolina, the western mountain counties sent delegates who voted against calling a secession convention in February 1861. When the convention finally met in May, after Sumter forced the issue, the western delegates were outnumbered and overridden. In Alabama, Winston County's delegates were so opposed to secession that the county held its own convention and passed a resolution to secede from Alabama — an act of defiance that earned it the nickname "the Free State of Winston."

In Georgia, the mountain counties of the north — Fannin, Union, Towns, Gilmer — voted against secession delegates by wide margins. Union County, Georgia, was supposedly named as an act of political defiance, though the truth of that story is contested.

What these votes revealed was not a monolithic mountain Unionism but a class geography of secession. The counties that voted most strongly for secession tended to be those with the highest slaveholding rates — the valley towns, the county seats, the areas that were economically tied to the plantation system. The counties that voted most strongly against tended to be the most remote, the most mountainous, the most subsistence-oriented — places where the slaveholding class was smallest and where the war seemed most like someone else's fight.

Then and Now: The geographic pattern of the 1860s secession divide — mountain counties versus valley/lowland counties — would echo in later political fractures. The same terrain that made mountain people skeptical of the planter class would later make them suspicious of coal operators, distant corporations, and federal programs designed without their input. The question "Whose fight is this, and who benefits?" runs through Appalachian history like a seam of coal.

West Virginia: A State Born from Refusal

The most dramatic consequence of mountain Unionism was the creation of an entirely new state.

When Virginia voted to secede on April 17, 1861, the delegates from the western counties went home furious. Within weeks, they organized. On June 11, delegates from thirty-four western Virginia counties met in Wheeling — an industrial city on the Ohio River with far stronger economic ties to Pennsylvania and Ohio than to Richmond — and declared the secession ordinance illegal.

What followed was an improvised, legally unprecedented, and constitutionally dubious process that would produce the only new state created by the Civil War. The Wheeling Convention established a Restored Government of Virginia — a Unionist rival government that claimed to be the legitimate government of the entire state. Under the legal fiction that this body represented Virginia, it then gave itself permission to form a new state from Virginia's western counties.

The process was messy. The constitutional questions were enormous. The U.S. Constitution requires a state legislature's consent before any of its territory can be split off to form a new state. The secessionists in Richmond obviously would not consent. The Wheeling government, claiming to be the "real" Virginia, consented on its own behalf. Whether this was a brilliant act of democratic self-determination or a constitutional sleight of hand has been debated ever since.

On June 20, 1863 — in the middle of the war, with the outcome far from certain — West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the thirty-fifth state. It was the only state in American history created by splitting from an existing state during wartime.

But the creation of West Virginia was not the clean, heroic story that the new state's founders wanted to tell. The borders were drawn by negotiation, not by unanimous consent. Some counties included in West Virginia had not voted for separation. Others that had voted Union were left in Virginia because of their economic or geographic importance. The eastern panhandle — Berkeley and Jefferson Counties — was included partly because of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which Union strategists needed to keep running. Hardy and Pendleton Counties, deep in the Allegheny Mountains, were divided internally and had not necessarily wanted to be part of a new state at all.

Even within the counties that became West Virginia, loyalties were fractured. Families split. Men who had joined the Confederate army woke up one morning as citizens of a Union state they had not voted for. The new state constitution initially disenfranchised anyone who had supported the Confederacy, which meant that a significant portion of the population was excluded from the political process in their own state.

Primary Source Excerpt:

From the Wheeling Intelligencer, June 1861:

"The people of Western Virginia have been dragooned into a revolution which they abhor. They have been made parties to a treason against the government which they love. The time has come to sever the connection which binds us to the eastern part of the State — a connection which has brought us nothing but contempt for our interests and tyranny over our rights."

Analysis Questions: 1. What specific grievances does this editorial identify beyond secession itself? 2. The language of "tyranny" and "rights" echoes the American Revolution. Why might Unionists have chosen this framing? 3. What does the phrase "dragooned into a revolution" suggest about how western Virginians understood their relationship to the secession decision?

The creation of West Virginia was a revolutionary act born from a genuine democratic grievance — the western counties had been underrepresented in Virginia's government for decades, and the secession crisis brought that long-simmering resentment to a boil. But it was also an act of wartime expediency, enabled by military power and legal improvisation. Both things are true simultaneously, and you lose the history if you insist on only one.

East Tennessee: The Union Heartland

If western Virginia produced the most dramatic political result, East Tennessee produced the most dramatic resistance.

East Tennessee in 1861 was a region of small farmers, modest towns, and fierce independence. Knoxville was its largest city. The Great Smoky Mountains formed its southern boundary. The Tennessee Valley — the long, fertile corridor running from Chattanooga northeast to the Virginia border — was its economic spine. Slaveholding existed but was less dominant than in Middle and West Tennessee, where the plantation economy held sway. The region's most prominent politician was Andrew Johnson — a Unionist Democrat who had risen from poverty, hated the planter class with a personal intensity, and would go on to become Lincoln's vice president and then president.

When Tennessee voted to secede in June 1861, East Tennessee voted against it — and then refused to accept the result. On June 17, 1861, a convention met in Greeneville (Johnson's hometown) and passed resolutions asking the Tennessee legislature to allow East Tennessee to form a separate state, just as western Virginia was doing. The legislature refused.

What followed was a Unionist resistance movement that had no parallel in the Confederacy. East Tennessee Unionists organized militias, smuggled men north to join the Union army, hid deserters and draft evaders, and — most spectacularly — launched a coordinated campaign to burn railroad bridges.

The Bridge Burners

The bridge-burning campaign of November 1861 was one of the most audacious acts of sabotage in the Civil War. Coordinated by Unionist leaders and encouraged by federal officials who promised (and failed to deliver) a simultaneous Union military advance into East Tennessee, small groups of local men burned five railroad bridges on the same night — November 8, 1861 — disrupting the Confederate supply lines that ran through the Tennessee Valley.

The bridges targeted included crossings over the Holston, Hiwassee, and Lick Creek, all critical links in the rail network connecting Virginia to the western theater. The fires were dramatic, the damage was real, and the Confederate response was savage.

Confederate authorities declared martial law in East Tennessee. They arrested hundreds of suspected Unionists. They hanged bridge burners publicly, leaving the bodies on display as warnings. They imposed a regime of surveillance, informants, and military tribunals that turned neighbor against neighbor and made every household a potential site of suspicion.

The Reverend William Blount Carter, a Presbyterian minister who had helped organize the bridge-burning plot, escaped to Kentucky. Others were not so fortunate. C.A. Haun and Henry Fry, arrested for burning the Lick Creek bridge, were hanged on the railroad tracks — their bodies left swinging where every passing train could see them. The message was unmistakable: disloyalty would be punished by death.

But the hangings did not stop the resistance. They deepened it. East Tennessee became a region under occupation — occupied by the Confederacy, a government that most of its people had voted against. Thousands of men fled through the mountains to Kentucky to join the Union army. Those who stayed formed guerrilla bands, hid in the hills, and fought a shadow war that made the region ungovernable for the Confederacy for much of the conflict.

When Union forces finally occupied Knoxville in September 1863, the reception was rapturous. The city erupted in celebration. Unionist families who had spent two years hiding their loyalties, sheltering fugitives, and burying their dead openly wept in the streets. It was, by many accounts, the most enthusiastic welcome Union troops received anywhere in the South.

Confederate Conscription and Mountain Resistance

In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first conscription act in American history — a draft that required military service from all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five (later expanded to seventeen and fifty). The act included a provision that would become one of the most hated policies of the war: the Twenty-Negro Law, which exempted from the draft any white man who owned or oversaw twenty or more enslaved people.

In the mountain counties, where few men owned any enslaved people at all, the meaning of this exemption was brutally clear. The rich man who had pushed for secession to protect his human property could stay home, while the poor man who had voted against secession was forced to fight and die for a cause he did not believe in.

"It's a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." That phrase, which echoed through the mountains in 1862 and 1863, was not rhetoric. It was arithmetic.

Resistance to Confederate conscription took many forms in the mountains:

Draft evasion. Men simply disappeared into the hills. The Appalachian terrain — miles of unbroken forest, thousands of hidden coves, ridgelines that only locals knew how to navigate — was ideally suited to evasion. Confederate enrollment officers sent into the mountains sometimes came back empty-handed. Sometimes they did not come back at all.

Desertion. As the war ground on and casualties mounted, desertion from Confederate units recruited in the mountain counties became endemic. By 1863 and 1864, whole companies had melted away, their men returning to families that were starving because every able-bodied man had been taken. Confederate general Robert E. Lee himself acknowledged the problem, writing that desertion from mountain regiments was "a matter of serious concern."

Armed resistance. In some areas, draft resisters and deserters organized into armed bands that fought Confederate conscription details, Home Guard units, and anyone who tried to force compliance. These bands operated in the gaps between formal armies, sustaining themselves through a combination of community support, theft, and sheer survival skills honed by a lifetime in the mountains.

Flight to Union lines. Thousands of mountain men escaped through the mountains to reach Union territory — in Kentucky, in Tennessee after the Union occupation, in western Virginia — and enlisted in the federal army. An estimated thirty-one thousand white Southerners from Tennessee alone served in the Union army, the vast majority from the eastern part of the state. Virginia contributed significant numbers as well, and so did western North Carolina, northern Alabama, and northern Georgia.

Women and Conscription Resistance

The role of mountain women in supporting conscription resistance was essential and largely undocumented in official records. When men fled to the hills to avoid enrollment officers, women were left to manage farms, feed children, and navigate the dangerous terrain of wartime loyalty alone. But they did more than survive. They actively sustained the resistance.

Women served as lookouts, warning approaching men when conscription officers were in the area. They carried food and supplies to men hiding in the mountains — sometimes walking miles over ridge trails at night to avoid detection. They provided false information to Confederate officials, misdirecting search parties and covering the tracks of fugitives. They maintained communication networks that allowed scattered resisters to coordinate.

When Confederate soldiers or Home Guard units arrived at a farm demanding to know where the men were, it was women who faced them. The strategies they employed ranged from outright deception to calculated submission — whatever was most likely to protect their families and their hidden men. Some women were punished for their defiance. They were interrogated, threatened, and in some documented cases subjected to physical abuse by soldiers attempting to extract information. The torture of women at Shelton Laurel, described earlier in this chapter, was the most extreme example but not the only one.

These women left few written records. They did not file military reports. They did not apply for pensions. Their resistance was domestic and invisible by design — it worked precisely because it could not be officially seen. Recovering their stories requires reading between the lines of the records that do exist: the pension applications of their husbands, the Freedmen's Bureau reports that occasionally mention women's testimony, the oral histories recorded decades later by their grandchildren.

Debate Framework: Was Draft Resistance Principled or Practical?

Position A: Mountain resistance to Confederate conscription reflected deep political convictions — opposition to secession, loyalty to the Union, and hostility to the slaveholding class. These were political acts.

Position B: Most draft resisters were not making political statements. They were protecting their families from starvation and themselves from death in a war they had not chosen. The motivations were primarily about survival, not ideology.

Position C: The distinction between "principled" and "practical" is false. When a poor man refuses to fight a rich man's war because he recognizes the class dynamics at work, that refusal is simultaneously practical (he does not want to die) and principled (he believes the war is unjust). Class consciousness is not less political because it is also personal.

Consider: What evidence would you need to distinguish between these positions? Are soldiers' letters and diaries reliable guides to motivation?

Bushwhackers: The Shadow War

The formal armies — Union and Confederate — fought their battles at places like Rich Mountain, Carnifex Ferry, and Knoxville. But the war that most mountain people actually experienced was fought without uniforms, without battle lines, and without rules. It was fought by bushwhackers.

The term itself was imprecise and could mean almost anything. To Confederates, bushwhackers were Unionist guerrillas — armed bands who ambushed supply trains, shot sentries, burned bridges, and melted back into the forest. To Unionists, bushwhackers were Confederate irregulars — raiders who robbed Unionist farms, terrorized Unionist families, and committed acts of violence that had more to do with personal grudges and opportunistic theft than with military strategy. In practice, the term described anyone fighting an irregular war in the mountains, and it was applied by both sides to the other.

The guerrilla war in Appalachia was devastating precisely because it was intimate. This was not a war fought between strangers. It was fought between people who had shared church pews, traded livestock, attended each other's weddings, and knew exactly which families were on which side. The hollows were small worlds. Everyone knew everyone. And when the killing started, it was personal.

A Union man's barn burned in the night — and he knew which neighbor had done it. A Confederate sympathizer found dead on a trail — and the whole community knew who held the grudge. A family of Unionists forced to flee their home in the middle of winter, their livestock stolen, their cabin torched — and the men who did it lived two ridges over and could be named by name.

The Geography of Guerrilla War

The Appalachian terrain made this kind of warfare almost impossible to suppress. Consider what a Confederate Home Guard unit or a Union patrol faced when sent into the mountains to root out guerrillas:

The mountains were covered in dense, unbroken forest — chestnut, oak, hickory, poplar — that provided near-perfect concealment. The hollows were dead-end valleys, easy to defend and dangerous to enter. The ridgelines were natural highways for people who knew them and deathtraps for people who did not. There were no good maps. The roads, such as they were, followed creek bottoms and could be ambushed from the hillsides above. Every community had scouts — children, old women, hunters who knew the sounds of the forest — who could signal the approach of soldiers long before they arrived.

A guerrilla band of twenty men who knew the terrain could operate indefinitely against a force ten times their size. They could strike, scatter, reassemble at a prearranged rendezvous, and strike again. The armies learned this lesson repeatedly, and they never fully solved the problem.

The New River Valley: A Region Within the Divide

The New River Valley of southwestern Virginia illustrates the complexity of mountain loyalties at a granular level. This was not a region that divided neatly into Union and Confederate. It divided farm by farm, family by family, sometimes person by person.

Montgomery County, home to what would become Virginia Tech, was largely Confederate in its sympathies — it was a valley county with a county seat (Christiansburg) where the slaveholding class had political power. But Giles County, just to the west, was more divided. Floyd County, in the mountains to the southeast, had significant Unionist sentiment. The saltworks at Saltville, in neighboring Smyth County, were so strategically important that both armies fought repeatedly for control of them.

The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad ran through the New River Valley, making it a military target for Union raids and a supply corridor for Confederate forces. Troops from both sides moved through the region repeatedly. Local men served in both armies. And the guerrilla war raged in the mountains on either side of the valley — Unionist bands operating in the hills, Confederate Home Guard trying to suppress them, and an escalating cycle of reprisal that made every isolated farmstead a potential target.

Harlan County: The War in the Deep Mountains

In Harlan County, Kentucky — deep in the Cumberland Mountains, far from any major battlefield — the Civil War was experienced almost entirely as a guerrilla conflict. Kentucky had declared neutrality in 1861, a fiction that collapsed almost immediately. Harlan County was overwhelmingly Unionist in sentiment — it had few slaveholders and strong ties to the Union through kinship networks that extended into eastern Tennessee.

But Unionist sentiment did not mean safety. Confederate raiders moved through the county periodically, and local Confederate sympathizers — a minority, but armed and dangerous — waged their own campaign of intimidation. The county became a transit corridor for men trying to reach Union lines in central Kentucky, and those men needed food, shelter, and guides. Families who provided that support became targets.

The war in Harlan County was a preview of everything the county would later become known for: violence that was at once political and personal, disputes that mixed ideology with land and kinship, and a landscape so remote that outside authority could barely reach it. The seeds of "Bloody Harlan" — the labor wars of the 1930s — were planted in the 1860s.

The Shelton Laurel Massacre

On January 18, 1863, soldiers of the 64th North Carolina Regiment marched into the Shelton Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina, and executed thirteen men and boys. The oldest victim was over sixty. The youngest was thirteen years old.

The Shelton Laurel massacre was the single worst atrocity committed in Appalachia during the Civil War, and its circumstances reveal everything about the nature of the mountain conflict.

Madison County sat on the North Carolina–Tennessee border, in the heart of the Blue Ridge. It was poor, remote, and deeply divided. The Shelton Laurel valley — a narrow, isolated hollow — was home to a community of small farmers who were predominantly Unionist. They had resisted Confederate conscription, sheltered deserters, and in early January 1863, a group of armed men from the valley had raided the town of Marshall, the county seat, looting stores and the home of a prominent Confederate colonel.

The Confederate response was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Keith, who led troops into Shelton Laurel with orders to suppress the Unionist guerrillas. What followed was not a military operation but a campaign of terror. Keith's soldiers tortured women and old men to extract information about where the guerrillas were hiding — whipping them, hanging them by their necks until they lost consciousness, then reviving them and demanding names. They rounded up suspected Unionists — including boys too young to have been involved in the Marshall raid — and marched them out of the valley.

Then, on a hillside outside the valley, Keith ordered his prisoners shot. They were executed in two groups. Some were forced to kneel. Some were shot standing. The thirteen-year-old boy, David Shelton, reportedly begged for his life. He was shot anyway.

The massacre was not unknown at the time. Confederate general Henry Heth, Keith's superior, was appalled and attempted to have Keith court-martialed. The effort stalled in the bureaucratic chaos of the war, and Keith was never tried. After the war, he was indicted by a North Carolina grand jury but fled to Arkansas, where he died before ever facing justice.

Shelton Laurel became a wound that never closed. The families of the dead — the Sheltons, the Nortons, the Chandlers — passed the story down through generations. The massacre shaped the community's identity for a century and more, a reminder that the war in the mountains was not fought by distant armies over abstract principles. It was fought by neighbors over personal grudges amplified to lethal scale by the machinery of the state.

Primary Source Excerpt:

From a letter by Brigadier General Henry Heth to Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, February 1863:

"I desire to call the attention of the honorable Secretary to the fact that thirteen prisoners... were shot in cold blood. I desire that the case may be investigated. If the report which has reached me be true... I consider it murder."

Analysis Questions: 1. What does it reveal that a Confederate general called this act "murder"? 2. Why might the Confederate government have failed to pursue court-martial proceedings? 3. How does this letter complicate the narrative of the Civil War as a conflict between two unified sides?

Salt Works and Strategic Targets

While the guerrilla war raged in the hollows, the formal armies fought for control of the mountains' strategic resources — and none was more important than salt.

Salt in the 1860s was not a luxury. It was a necessity. Before refrigeration, salt was the primary means of preserving meat, curing hides, and feeding livestock. An army without salt could not feed itself. A civilian population without salt could not preserve its food supply for the winter. Control of salt production was, quite literally, a matter of survival.

The Appalachian region contained some of the most important salt-producing facilities in the Confederacy. The Saltville salt works in Smyth County, Virginia, produced an estimated four million bushels of salt during the war — roughly a third of the Confederacy's total supply. The Kanawha Valley salt works in what became West Virginia had been among the largest salt producers in the country before the war. The Kentucky salt works at various locations in the eastern part of the state also contributed.

Control of these facilities was a military priority for both sides. Union forces launched multiple raids targeting Saltville, and the battles there — particularly the Battle of Saltville in October 1864 — were among the bloodiest engagements in the Appalachian theater. After the first Battle of Saltville, Confederate troops murdered wounded and captured Black Union soldiers from the 5th United States Colored Cavalry — an atrocity that was investigated but never fully punished.

The Kanawha Valley salt works changed hands repeatedly as Union and Confederate forces fought for control of the valley. When Union forces held the area, they could supply federal troops and deny salt to the Confederacy. When Confederate forces held it, they could feed their own armies while starving Union-sympathizing mountain communities.

The struggle over salt illustrates a fundamental truth about the war in Appalachia: this was a region that mattered strategically, not just politically. The mountains were not a backwater. They were a contested landscape whose resources — salt, lead, iron, timber, livestock — were essential to both sides. The guerrilla war was fought over loyalty and survival. The conventional war was fought over supply lines and resources. And the people of the mountains were caught in the middle of both.

Enslaved People in Wartime Appalachia

The story of the Civil War in Appalachia is most often told as a story about white mountain people choosing sides — Union or Confederate, loyal or rebellious. But there were Black people in these mountains too, and the war transformed their lives in ways that the standard Appalachian narrative has been slow to acknowledge.

Chapter 6 documented the presence of enslaved people throughout Appalachia — in the salt works, the iron furnaces, the larger valley farms, and the households of the slaveholding class in the county seats. When the war came, those enslaved people did not simply wait passively for liberation. They acted.

Self-emancipation in the mountains took many forms. Some enslaved people fled to Union lines — a dangerous journey made somewhat easier by the proximity of Union-held territory in Kentucky and, after 1863, in West Virginia and parts of East Tennessee. Some took advantage of the chaos of war — masters away fighting, overseers absent, normal systems of surveillance disrupted — to simply walk away. Some attached themselves to Union military units as laborers, cooks, teamsters, and eventually soldiers.

The experience of enslaved people in Appalachia during the war was shaped by the same geographic and demographic factors that shaped everything else about the mountain conflict. Because slaveholdings were smaller, the relationships between enslaved and enslaving people were often (though not always) more intimate than on large plantations — and that intimacy cut both ways. Some enslaved people had more knowledge of the surrounding terrain and more opportunities for escape. Others were more closely watched precisely because the household was small and every absence was noticed.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, technically freed enslaved people in Confederate-held territory — but in the mountains, where Union and Confederate control shifted constantly, the practical meaning of the proclamation was uncertain. Freedom depended on geography, timing, and the presence or absence of armed men willing to enforce it.

What is clear is that Black Appalachians were not bystanders in the Civil War. They were participants — fleeing slavery, joining the Union cause, providing intelligence to federal forces, and beginning to imagine what freedom might look like in the mountains. Their story continues in the next chapter.

The Myth of Appalachian Unionism

Here is where the history gets complicated, and where honest scholarship has to push back against a comforting narrative that has served various political purposes for a century and a half.

The standard story goes like this: the mountain people of Appalachia were heroic Unionists who opposed secession because they were too independent, too democratic, and too poor to fight for the slaveholding elite. They were the good Southerners — the ones who got it right — and their Unionism proves that the South was not monolithically pro-slavery.

Parts of this story are true. There genuinely was widespread opposition to secession in the Appalachian mountains. West Virginia genuinely was created by Unionist resistance. East Tennessee Unionists genuinely did fight a brave and costly resistance campaign. Mountain men genuinely did enlist in the Union army in large numbers. The class dimension of the secession crisis — poor non-slaveholders resisting a war fought for the interests of wealthy slaveholders — was real and documented.

But the full story is more complicated, and the complications matter.

Not All Unionists Were Antislavery

First, Unionism and antislavery sentiment were not the same thing. Many mountain Unionists were perfectly comfortable with slavery as an institution — they simply did not own enslaved people themselves and did not want to fight a war to protect the institution for others. Andrew Johnson, the most prominent Appalachian Unionist, was himself a slaveholder. His Unionism was rooted in class resentment of the planter aristocracy and in Jacksonian democratic principles — not in any commitment to racial equality. When he became president and oversaw early Reconstruction, his racial views became painfully clear.

Not All Mountain People Were Unionists

Second, significant numbers of mountain people supported the Confederacy — and not just the slaveholding elite. The reasons varied. Kinship ties to the lowland South were strong in many communities. State loyalty — the feeling that Virginia was Virginia, regardless of what Richmond decided — motivated some men to fight for their state even when they opposed secession. The honor culture of the mountain South, with its emphasis on masculine courage and community reputation, pushed some men into Confederate service because refusing to fight was seen as cowardice.

In some mountain communities, the split between Union and Confederate roughly followed pre-existing political, kinship, or land-dispute lines. The war provided a framework — and weapons — for settling old grudges under new flags. A man might call himself Union because his rival was Confederate, or vice versa, and the "patriotic" motivation was really about who controlled the county court or who owned a disputed piece of bottomland.

Many People Just Wanted to Be Left Alone

Third — and this may be the most historically honest category — a large number of mountain people were not Unionist or Confederate in any meaningful ideological sense. They were survivalists. They wanted to keep their farms, feed their families, and stay alive. They resisted whichever army showed up to take their food, conscript their sons, or burn their barns. If it was Confederate conscription officers, they hid in the hills and were called Unionists. If it was Union foraging parties, they hid in the hills and were called Confederates. Their loyalty was to their hollow, their kin, and their survival — not to a flag.

This is not a morally neutral position — staying out of a war over slavery is itself a kind of moral choice. But it is a historically accurate one, and the romantic narrative of mountain Unionism does a disservice to the actual complexity of life in the mountains during the war.

Whose Story Is Missing?

The narrative of Appalachian Unionism has been told primarily through the stories of white men who fought for the Union. Whose perspectives are absent from this narrative?

• Enslaved and free Black people who lived in these same mountain communities
• Women who managed farms, hid deserters, fed guerrillas, and survived sexual violence during the war
• Cherokee people in western North Carolina, some of whom served in Confederate units (the Thomas Legion) under complex and coercive circumstances
• Mountain people who supported the Confederacy but whose stories were suppressed after the war because Unionism became the politically useful narrative

For each of these groups, consider: Why has their story been marginalized? Whose interests does the marginalization serve?

The War's Destruction of Community

The deepest damage the Civil War inflicted on Appalachia was not physical — though the physical damage was real. Barns burned, livestock killed or stolen, fences torn down, fields left unplanted, roads destroyed, bridges collapsed. In some mountain communities, the war reduced a subsistence economy that had been modest but functional to outright destitution.

The deepest damage was social. The war shattered the fabric of community life in ways that took generations to repair — if they were ever repaired at all.

Before the war, Appalachian mountain communities had functioned through networks of mutual obligation. Neighbors helped each other raise barns, harvest crops, and survive hard winters. Churches served as social centers. Kinship networks — the intricate web of marriages, cousins, and clan loyalties that made every hollow a kind of extended family — provided the basic infrastructure of trust.

The war turned those networks into weapons. Kinship that had bound communities together now determined which side you were on — and made you a target for the other side. Church congregations that had worshipped together split along Union-Confederate lines, and some church buildings were burned. The mutual aid that had sustained mountain life was replaced by mutual suspicion.

The cycle of reprisal was self-perpetuating. A Unionist family's farm was raided by Confederate sympathizers. The Unionist's kin retaliated. The Confederate sympathizers' allies retaliated for the retaliation. Each act of violence created a new grievance that demanded satisfaction, and each act of satisfaction created a new grievance. By the end of the war, some mountain communities had experienced four years of escalating vengeance that had nothing to do with Union or Confederacy and everything to do with blood debts that had accumulated between specific families.

This is the origin of many of the "feuds" that later chapters will examine. The Hatfield-McCoy conflict, the most famous of all Appalachian feuds, had roots in Civil War divisions along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. Other feuds — the French-Eversole War in Perry County, Kentucky, the Martin-Tolliver feud in Rowan County — grew from wartime grudges that were never settled by peace. When outsiders later arrived in the mountains and found communities riven by violent conflict, they explained it as primitive mountain culture. The actual explanation was simpler and more terrible: it was the Civil War, still echoing.

Aftermath: The Divisions That Lasted

The formal war ended in April 1865 with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. But in the mountains, the war did not end in April 1865. It trailed off slowly, unevenly, and in some hollows it never really ended at all.

Confederate guerrillas in remote areas did not necessarily know the war was over — or care. Unionist families who had suffered at Confederate hands were not inclined to forgive when their tormentors walked back to the hollow and picked up their plows. The federal government's amnesty policies, which restored citizenship rights to most former Confederates, felt like a betrayal to mountain Unionists who had risked everything for the Union cause and now watched their persecutors regain political power.

In West Virginia, the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates created a political class of Unionist loyalists who used their power to settle scores and consolidate control. When the restrictions were eventually lifted, the returning Confederate voters reshaped politics again, and the cycle of partisan recrimination continued.

In East Tennessee, the return of peace brought an explosion of Unionist political power — Andrew Johnson's rise to the presidency was its most visible expression — but also a legacy of bitterness between Unionist and secessionist families that shaped local politics for decades. In Knoxville, the Unionist-Confederate divide influenced elections, business partnerships, and social relationships well into the twentieth century.

In North Carolina, in Virginia, in Kentucky, in every Appalachian county where the war had divided neighbors, the social damage persisted. Families that had been on opposite sides did not reconcile easily. Land disputes rooted in wartime confiscations and reprisals festered in county courts for years. The men who came home — Union and Confederate alike — were often broken in body and spirit, and the communities they returned to were diminished, suspicious, and scarred.

The Civil War created a template for Appalachian history that would repeat: outside forces imposing decisions on mountain communities, mountain people dividing under the pressure, violence that was simultaneously political and personal, and a resolution that left the fundamental grievances unresolved. The extraction pattern that would define the industrial era — outside capital extracting wealth from the mountains while leaving communities with the costs — would follow the same logic. Different resources, different armies, same result.

The New River Valley and Harlan County: Two Communities, One War

Return one last time to the anchor communities.

In the New River Valley, the war left a landscape of divided memory. Montgomery County's Confederate majority and the surrounding counties' more ambivalent loyalties created a patchwork of memorial and resentment. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, which had made the valley a military target, would soon bring a different kind of transformation — Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, later Virginia Tech, was founded in 1872, just seven years after Appomattox. The new institution was a land-grant college, funded by federal legislation (the Morrill Act) that had been passed during the war itself, when Southern opposition was absent from Congress. In this sense, even the university that would reshape the New River Valley was a product of the Civil War.

In Harlan County, the war left a legacy of factional violence, deeply personal grudges, and a culture of armed self-reliance that would shape the county's identity through the labor wars of the twentieth century. The men who came home from the war — Union men, mostly, in Harlan — came home to a county that was still desperately poor, still isolated, still governed by the same dynamics of kinship and rivalry that had existed before the war, but now with the added fuel of wartime grievances. When the coal companies arrived a generation later, they entered a landscape already primed for conflict.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Civil War Division in Your County

For your selected Appalachian county, research the following:

1. Secession votes: How did your county's delegates vote in secession conventions or referenda? If the records exist, what were the margins?

2. Military participation: How many men from your county served in the Union army? The Confederate army? Are regimental histories or muster rolls available? (The National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System is a starting point.)

3. Guerrilla activity: Was your county affected by bushwhacker activity, guerrilla raids, or irregular warfare? What sources document this? (County histories, pension records, and postwar claims for property damage are useful.)

4. Divisions: Did the war divide your county along identifiable lines — geographic, kinship-based, class-based, or political? Are those divisions visible in any form today?

5. Aftermath: How did the war's end affect your county? Were there long-lasting feuds, political realignments, or economic consequences traceable to wartime divisions?

Tip: County court records, especially property claims and pension applications, are among the richest sources for understanding the Civil War at the local level. Many have been digitized and are available through state archives and FamilySearch.

Chapter Summary

The Civil War in Appalachia was not a minor subplot of the national conflict. It was a distinct and devastating war within the war — a conflict shaped by the mountains' geography, economics, and social structures as much as by the great political questions of secession and slavery.

The region's division was rooted in class. Non-slaveholding mountain farmers had different economic interests than the lowland planter class that drove secession, and they knew it. The result was a fracture that ran through every state, every county, and in many cases every family. West Virginia became a new state because of this fracture. East Tennessee launched a Unionist resistance that was without parallel in the Confederacy. Across the mountains, guerrilla warfare turned neighbor against neighbor in a cycle of violence that lasted long after the formal armies went home.

The myth of Appalachian Unionism — the comforting story that mountain people were simply loyal patriots — is too simple. Some were Unionists. Some were Confederates. Many were simply people trying to survive. Enslaved Black Appalachians were participants in the conflict, not bystanders, and their story has been systematically marginalized in the retelling.

The war's deepest legacy in the mountains was the destruction of community trust. The networks of mutual aid, kinship, and shared obligation that had sustained mountain life were weaponized by the conflict and never fully restored. The divisions the war created would echo through the feuds of the 1870s and 1880s, the labor wars of the early twentieth century, and the political faultlines that shape the region to this day.

The mountains did not choose this war. But they bore its costs — and they bear them still.