Virginia
Here’s an excerpt from John Alexander Williams’ book, Appalachia: A History:
“It was also a fact, however, that the mountain region had plenty of secessionists. Thomas Clingman and William Waightstill Avery, Democratic rivals of Vance for leadership in western North Carolina, were “fire-eaters” even before the secession crisis. The representatives of southwest Virginia, including present southern West Virignia, voted as heavily in favor of secession in the Richmond convention as representatives from the northwest voted against it. ..”
HW
What do you think of the this notion? —
Pro-union anti-secession anti-slavery politics in Appalachia were not really that strong antebellum. It’s only because the Union won military that this myth of the pro-Union anti-secession anti-slavery Appalachian developed.
If I’m right, then it’s much the same deal as Germans in Dixie: Because of that, and also because of Hitler “guilt,” modern day German-Southrons and German-Americans blow this notion way out of proportion that every German both north and south was against slavery and secession and really loved blacks and racial equality.
Countenance, you are full of wishful thinking and have close to zero knowledge about the complexities of the War of Southern Secession. Don’t try to confuse the sentiments of current Eastern Tennesseean’s with those of their forefathers in the 1860’s.
Eastern Tennessee sent dozens of regiments to fight on the Union side.
Rudel
I think I was actually agreeing with you.
Your arguments more closely fit the state of Kentucky where the federals held force majeure from the gitgo, rather than East Tennessee. At any rate, Scotch-Irish hillbillies didn’t want to be ruled by anybody whether they be in Richmond or Washington D.C. This is also the case today in much of Appalachia and also in Alaska and the Mountain West and even as recently as in my youth it was true in much of the South and also in rural Vermont, New Hampshire, Texas, and Maine.
Count & Rudel…The Journal of East Tennessee History explores the succession issues in E. TN in their Vol. 84 – 2012 Issue….http://www.easttnhistory.org/research/publications. You should read about this POS & Yankee Puritan, “Parson” Brownlow, the Al Sharpton of the Yankee Abolitionist.
But westie, Brownlow was consistently pro-slavery until AFTER the war. In the 1840’s he supported the deportation of all un-enslaved, free Negroes to Liberia and was a leader of the schism of Methodists that began the long decline of Methodism. He engaged in public debates with abolitionists but refused Frederick Douglass because of his race. Quoting from his opening remark at one of his debates: ‘Not only will I throughout this discussion openly and boldly take the ground that Slavery as it exists in America ought to be perpetuated, but that slavery is an established and inevitable condition to human society. I will maintain the ground that God always intended the relation of master and slave to exist….’ He DID oppose secession, but only for the reason that the new government would be controlled by ‘purse-proud aristocrats’ (and the likes of Judah Benjamin). After the secession of Tennessee he joined anti-Confederate guerillas based in the Smoky Mountains, until they were captured and hanged. But Judah Benjamin arranged for Brownlow to escape to safety across the Union lines (presumably Judah could tell by then which way the wind was turning) — and it was from that point or after he saw the other rebels hanged that Brownlow seems to have become an abolitionist — but not before Judah Benjamin who had advocated emancipation of the slaves (for military service, and to please the British) from the beginning of the war: ‘Let us say to every Negro who wishes to go into the ranks, ‘Go and fight—you are free’!
Rudel,
They probably figures blacks were highly unlikely to come to their neck of the woods no matter what happened.
“the Al Sharpton of the Yankee Abolitionist.”
Anyone familiar with Tennessee history knows of the infamously vituperative Parson Brownlow although being a native of the Appalachian Virginia frontier he would be more aptly described as a scalawag rather than a Yankee. I don’t think even he believed in half the things he espoused as he was more interested in power than he was interested in principle.
Here is an interesting talk about Brownlow and his times given at Vanderbilt U. by Professor Stephen Ash of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville:
Brownlow was pro-slavery and he was an anti-Confederate scalawag.
countenance,
I’ve just begun my research, but it is already clear that Appalachia was divided on secession: eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee were opposed, but southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, and Middle Tennessee were pro-secession and fought for the Confederacy.
West Virginia’s 49 delegates to the Richmond secession convention generally opposed Virginia’s secession ordinance. However…once it passed on April 17, 29 of the 49 delegates returned to Richmond in June and signed the ordinance, the last one signing in Nov. 1861.
24 of West Virginia’s counties voted in favor of the secession ordinance on May 23, 1861, these counties comprised approximately two-thirds of the new state territory.
Only a minority of West Virginians voted for the new state. Francis Pierpont told Lincoln in a telegram, Dec. 30, 1862, that “The Union men of West Va were not originally for the Union because of the new state.” Pierpont lied when he was asked about the content of that telegram, little suspecting that the Library of Congress would one day post it for the world to see on something called the “internet”.
West Virginia’s Confederate history has never really been written. For instance, while there are 4 monuments at Gettysburg for WV Union regiments (half of which were men from OH and PA), the vast majority of WVians at Gettysburg were Confederate.
When Breckenridge stopped Sigel from taking the Shenandoah Valley at New Market in 1864, few people realize that most of Breckenridge’s army were WVians.
West Virginia is the only border state that did not send the majority of its men to the Union, it was about a 50/50 split, according to the recent soldier count conducted by the George Tyler Moore Center in Shepherdstown. Most of West Virginia’s Confederate soldiers were pulled from the defense of West Virginia and ended up in South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Shenandoah Valley and eastern Virginia. This is one of the reasons that there IS a West Virginia.
The Shenandoah Valley wasn’t named the breadbasket of the confederacy for nothing?? The boys from VMI turned the tide at New Market.
The Breadbasket of the Confederacy was farmed by many Germans, some of whom fled north during the War, but some still remain.