Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains

Abstract

The title of Steven E. Nash's impressive book is both concealing and revealing. Reconstruction's Ragged Edge is a study of post–Civil War western North Carolina, with lessons for the wider state and region. Also missing from the title is “Appalachia,” an indication of a resolve to move beyond debates about mountain exceptionalism into “a new, postexceptional phase” where historians focus less upon images and stereotypes and more upon discovering how the area's actual experiences mirrored that of the rest of the country (p. 6, emphasis in original). The underlying story is familiar. Nash charts western North Carolina's emergence from the cauldron of sectional hatred in which familial, neighborhood, and class relationships were subjected to the severest strain. Although sensitive to the area's distinctive character, he establishes from the outset its shared postwar history, contending that on most major issues “western North Carolina stood near the center of the state's experience” (ibid.). Thus unfolds the familiar narrative but located in largely unfamiliar territory, at least so far as our understanding of mountain Reconstruction is concerned. An early chapter on the aftermath of slavery sets the pattern. As elsewhere, African Americans in the western counties possessed clear ideas about freedom and its constituents; mountain whites, for their part, were ill-inclined to concede any fundamental change in relations between the races. Nash's key word in this and other chapters is “loyalty”: in every community and every sphere of activity, the war's upheaval subverted existing allegiances.