Feelin’ Mighty Southern: Recent Scholarship on Southern Appalachia in the Civil War

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Southern appalachia, that region taking in western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, East Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northern Alabama, proved to be the wild card in Civil War politics and strategy. From the beginning of the secession crisis President Abraham Lincoln viewed the supposedly loyalist mountain regions as an ideal base for military operations into vital Confederate territory, and a place to drive a wedge into Southern unity. Politically, not to mention logistically, the mountain regions turned out to be less hospitable, and certainly less cooperative, than Northerners hoped. The Southern Appalachians, however, proved equally troublesome to the Confederate command. After an initial burst of wartime fervor, many mountain residents grew increasingly resistant, and then violently hostile, to coercive Confederate mobilization policies. The mountain regions also provided havens for deserters and increasingly fertile ground for bushwhackers, bandits, and resistance movements. At the same time, the war was particularly cruel to the Southern Appalachians, and residents suffered from economic collapse, social fragmentation, failed institutions, brutal partisan infighting, and heavy-handed intervention by outsiders, both Northern and Southern.