Women and the Homefront in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee During the Civil War

¶ … Women and the Home Front in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War

This paper examines the living conditions and attitudes that shaped the lives of the women in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during and after the American Civil War. The thesis statement should deal with the breakdown of long standing ties between the people of the mountains as they chose to fight for the Confederacy or the Union. In the pre-war years, these close ties had become strong out of a mutual attempt to try to built a life in the rugged environment they encountered. Based on primary and secondary documentary evidence, this paper will investigate how could friends and family become bitter enemies and how this process played out in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee to better understand what the women went through while their brothers, husbands and fathers were away fighting. A historiographical review of the setting is followed by a critical review of primary sources. A review of life on the home front in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Historiographical Review.

Background and Overview: Antebellum North Carolina and Tennessee. Virtually any war, particularly those fought in the past where men comprised the vast majority of the fighting force, will have a profound and lasting impact on the wives and families of the men who march off to battle. Nevertheless, households have managed to operate efficiently in spite of wartime shortages and women have assumed responsibilities on farms and in family businesses that, except for the war, would have been shouldered by men. By all accounts, life in the Old South in general, and western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in particular, was just plain hard work for all concerned, both whites and blacks. Compelling the stubborn soil of the Old South to yield her crops each year was a labor-intensive enterprise and the life of a white wife of a plantation owner was certainly no exception.

Furthermore, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, North Carolina was viewed as an economic backwater, known even among its own inhabitants as the "Rip Van Winkle State," the "Ireland of America." Without a major seaport and a system of easily navigable rivers, the state was never able to sustain great plantations like those of its neighbors, South Carolina and Virginia; however, the state's fortunes were nevertheless shaped by the economics of slavery. "Political power rested in the hands of eastern slave owners who held the great bulk of their wealth in the form of human rather than real property. Unlike land, that investment was movable, and its value bore little relation to local development."

Consequently, North Carolina's governing elite did not give much attention to improving the countryside through the construction of railroads, canals, villages, and factories. Rather, these affluent members of Southern society sought to maximize the return on their hefty investments in slaves. When the soil wore out, planters, especially the less affluent ones, simply packed up and moved to the more unexploited lands elsewhere in the state or to the fertile fields of Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee.

Between 1790 and 1860, that cavalier attitude about the land resulted in the population of North Carolina being reduced from the fourth to twelfth largest in the nation. The white planters who remained sought their fortunes with crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice; these crops helped to orient them toward the coastal export trade rather than inland commerce. As a result, these planters provided only limited support for efforts to connect the state's interior with plank roads and rail lines. While local investors and the state legislature financed a fledgling rail system on the coastal plain during the 1830s and 1840s (primarily to service the cotton and tobacco economy), no track extended farther west than Raleigh, the state capital, which lay just one hundred and fifty miles from the shore, until 1856.

Underdevelopment resulted in most North Carolinians in the upcountry Piedmont and mountain regions living in rural isolation. Inadequate transportation constrained commercial agriculture and reinforced a system of general farming and direct exchange among local producers. "White yeomen and a smaller group of tenants raised corn, wheat, and other grains to feed their families; in the woods and meadows that surrounded their fields, they herded cattle and hogs, hunted wild game for the table, and harvested timber for fuel and shelter." According to Leloudis, in rural North Carolina, "People found dignity in working with their hands, treasured control over their labor, and considered ownership of land -- or at least access to the means of subsistence -- a common right. Although they were not unaware of events in the outside world, they grounded their identities in a familiar circle of family, neighbors, and friends. The first state superintendent of common schools, Calvin Henderson Wiley, who assumed office in 1852, viewed North Carolina as less a state than "a confederation of independent communities." According to Wiley, "Whoever travels over North Carolina," he observed, "will meet with great apparent diversity of character, manners, and interest; and if he be much attached to the ways... Of his own community, will hardly ever feel himself at home from the time that he crosses the boundaries of his county." Almost 30 years later, another traveler found most North Carolinians to be "independent and happy, but very far from the rest of the world."

Further, in other fundamental ways, the antebellum system of public instruction remained relatively unaltered in North Carolina. According to Leloudis, in the years immediately following the Civil War, schooling in black and white communities alike continued to stand on what one observer described as a foundation of "home rule and self-government."

According to Noel C. Fisher, the position of East Tennessee in the antebellum South was ambivalent. For example, the mountain ranges that enclosed this area on all sides also served to cut East Tennessee off from ready communication with other regions; it also created a sense of isolation, and produced a set of distinct economic and cultural characteristics. "East Tennessee was relatively poor in comparison with other parts of the Confederacy, and staple crop agriculture was largely absent. It relied little on slavery, and there are indications that by 1860 a free labor ideology had begun to take hold."

During this period, East Tennessee's rural structure was similar to that of other regions of the state, its manufacturing sector was still small, and its transportation systems provided links not with the North but rather with its Southern neighbors. Furthermore, East Tennessee's political leaders, both Whig and Democrat, proudly identified themselves as Southerners, defended the institution of slavery, and supported Southern interests in Congress. East Tennessee's location in the Appalachians did not in itself separate it from the rest of the South. As John S. Inscoe and Kenneth Noe demonstrated, western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, Appalachian regions with economic structures similar to East Tennessee's, fully supported secession and supplied thousands of recruits to the Confederate army.

According to Barret and Yearns, the election in November 1860 of the "Black Republican" Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States sent a shock wave through the states of the Lower South. "By 4 February 1861, seven cotton states stretching from South Carolina through Texas had held conventions, seceded, and met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a southern confederacy. To them their entire way of life was so threatened that the only recourse was refuge in a truly southern nation."

Critical Review of Primary Sources.

When the Civil War first started, the overall military strategy of the Southern Confederacy was primarily defensive. "All we want is to be let alone," President Jefferson Davis said in his first message to the Confederate Congress in April 1861, and was essentially the attitude of the Confederate army as well. Later on there was a change to the actively aggressive as Lee burst across the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania; however, the army was generally understood to be designed to fight on the southern home front, in fact, if it was required to fight at all. The Confederate army was to assume its stand on its own side of the border separating the seceded states from their northern counterparts, and there to wait for and repel any attempt at invasion by an armed force. "Many of the Southern people, indeed, labored under the delusive belief that this was all that would be necessary, that the Yankees would be willing to let the seceded states go in peace if they showed that they were prepared to resist invasion." This perception would be dashed, particularly for Southern Appalachia, where there were high concentrations of Union Loyalists.

Southern Appalachia is that region comprised of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, East Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northern Alabama; this region 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.

Except for northern Georgia, the Southern Appalachians were a sideshow in the conventional war. Perhaps for that reason, they have also constituted one of the last battlegrounds in Civil War historiography. Until recently, the mountain regions outside West Virginia and northern Georgia received only brief mention in general accounts of the war and were of little interest to Civil War scholars. Even today, one can find more works on the Battle of Gettysburg than on this entire area. The few existing accounts of the war were largely state and county histories, dissertations and theses, and local records. It was not until the late 1970s that the Southern Appalachians became an object of serious interest to Civil War historians. Not coincidentally, that interest coincided with a wave of social, economic, and cultural studies of the mountain regions by such scholars as Dwight Billings, Durwood Dunn, Ronald Eller, Paul Salstrom, Henry D. Shapiro, and Altina L. Waller. These works significantly altered the stereotype of primitive, savage Appalachia and provided a more sophisticated basis for exploring patterns of loyalties and wartime behavior.

According to Noel C. Fisher, "The American Civil War had many faces. The first and most familiar was the conventional struggle between the Confederate and Union armies, a conflict that was fought under the authority of national governments, conducted by commissioned officers and organized forces, and, in theory at least, waged according to a recognized code of conduct." This aspect of the Civil War has been the subject of hundreds of accounts of campaigns, battles, mobilization, army organization, command, strategy, politics, and diplomacy. However, a second face of the war was the unorganized conflict between Unionist and secessionist partisans. "This struggle pitted region against region, community against community, and members of the same community against each other. It was decentralized, local, and often surprisingly detached from the conventional war, and its character varied from place to place." Fisher reports that in Middle Tennessee, secessionists formed partisan bands to deter the Unionist minority from challenging Confederate rule and fought an increasingly effective war of sabotage and ambush against Federal forces. In many parts of North Carolina, loyalists encouraged soldiers to desert, harbored draft evaders, harassed Confederate authorities, resisted conscription, and fought against the state militia and Confederate troops.

Furthermore, both of these dimensions of the Civil War are describe as being "remarkably savage." Partisans on both sides of the conflict shot, hanged, beat, and whipped their civilian and military enemies, plundered and burned homes, executed prisoners, and on occasion raped women and assaulted children. "The partisan conflict allowed the worst human impulses to flourish, and guerrillas used the war to justify the harshest measures. Yet, as recent studies of Civil War combat have made increasingly clear, the fighting on the battlefield was also vicious and often marred by atrocities."

East Tennessee was the site of particularly intense fighting between Unionist and secessionist partisans. In June 1861 East Tennesseans rejected secession by a margin of more than two to one. Although the remainder of the state overwhelmingly supported separation, the loyalists refused to accept Confederate rule. "They defied Confederate officials, assaulted Southern troops, evaded conscription and war taxes, and intimidated and drove out secessionists. The Confederate government responded with increasing repression, and local secessionists fought back against Unionist violence." The resulting conflict quickly spread to every county in East Tennessee as well as neighboring regions in Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

The division between East Tennessee Unionists and the Confederacy proved unbridgeable. Despite evidence to the contrary, loyalists were convinced, as were President Abraham Lincoln and many other Republicans, that the majority of Southerners actually opposed separation from the Union. In their view secession was a conspiracy, developed in the 1850s by Southern radicals and imposed on the Southern states through fraud, manipulation, and intimidation. Unionists therefore concluded that Tennessee's act of secession was invalid and argued that their resistance to the Confederate government was justified. Confederates, in turn, were baffled by Unionists' obstinate refusal to join their war in defense of Southern rights. They concluded that Unionism originated in the lies and manipulations of loyalist leaders, who turned the region's population against the Confederate government to preserve their own power. Southern officials viewed East Tennessee Unionists as ignorant and deluded and were unable to see that their loyalties were deep and enduring. Thus, Confederates never understood Unionist fears of Southern rule, while East Tennessee loyalists had little sympathy for Southern grievances. The result was a tragic conflict that could be resolved only by force.

In fact, a good portion of Tennesseans, particularly in the eastern portion of the state, had at first been reluctant to separate from the Union. According to James Welch Patton, Tennessee was singularly free from secession propaganda before 1860. "The geographic location of the state, the social and intellectual background of its people, and the economic situation alike made secession from the Union undesirable." A number of misguided scholars and theorists wrote that the days of the Union were numbered, that the South would no longer submit to the tyranny and oppression of the North; however, the popular leaders of the state were those who supported the Union. "Tennessee was the stronghold of the conservative Whig party, which was devoted from its inception to the theory that the preservation of the Union was the summum bonum of American endeavor."

The fact that the popular leaders of the state were nationalists is particularly highlighted by the case of John Bell, without a doubt the most popular man in the state and prior to 1860 a constant supporter of the Union cause. "Entering Congress in 1826, he frequently referred with pride to the fact that his majority had been increased by the suffrages of several free Negroes. He united with Chase and Sumner in their fight against the threatened 'Crime against Kansas,' and he was the only Southern senator to oppose the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Yet in spite of all these considerations he remained popular in Tennessee and was the choice of the people of that state for president in 1860."

The state's geographic proximity meant that the social and economic interests of Tennessee were inextricably connected to the North as they were to the South. The economic interests of the state were such as to make its continued existence in the Union both profitable and desirable. Tennessee could by no means be classed as a typical cotton and plantation state of the era. For instance, the ratio of slaves to white people in the state in 1860 was less than one to four, and was constantly decreasing. Out of a population of 1,109,801 there were only 36,844 slave owners, and of these only one man owned more than three hundred slaves. Furthermore, only forty-seven men owned over one hundred slaves each.

In addition, a large portion of the state was better adapted to the production of live-stock and food stuffs than to cotton raising, and while these goods found a ready market in the large plantations of the South, they were also finding other markets among the growing population of the North and West. The importance of this fact was emphasized by Dr. Felix Robertson in an address to the people of Tennessee in 1861, and the Knoxville Whig asserted in 1860 that the state was in no position to secede because of the dependence of its population upon the North for manufactured goods.

The secession sentiments were inflamed to the boiling point, however, by the President's call for troops. Tennessee Governor Harris responded to Lincoln with his characteristic style: "Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand if necessary for the defense of our rights or those of our Southern brothers." The governor's defiance was initially applauded and supported by most of the people. According to Horn, as soon as the legislature could be convened, it voted to submit to the electorate a "declaration of independence" from the United States.

As a result, apart from eastern, Tennessee where the population, then and throughout the war, remained preponderantly Unionist in sentiment, the overwhelming majority quickly turned to favor separation from the Union and alliance with the Southern Confederacy. The formal ordinance of secession was not submitted to a vote until June 10, 1861, when it was carried by 108,511 to 47,338.

In the meantime Governor Harris had proceeded as vigorously with his mobilization of resources as though secession were an accomplished fact. "Volunteer military organizations had blossomed spontaneously throughout Tennessee. They had drilled and paraded and been presented with silk Confederate flags. Drums had beat and fifes shrilled in the streets. Bands had played the Bonnie Blue Flag and Dixie. The people were ready to fight." The outcome of that fight to forge a "truly southern nation" is well-known, but less well-known is the impact that this would have on the women and families who remained behind on the home front. Indeed, as Steven E. Woodworth points out, "The most pressing challenge facing Civil War scholarship today is the integration of various perspectives and emphases into a new narrative that explains not only what happened, why, and how, but also why it mattered."

Frances "Fanny" Anne Kemble did not come to America in 1832 for pleasure; she came to save the family fortune. She was a novice English actress from a theater family. After her father had lost a great deal of money, and after a successful acting debut in London, he decided they could make more money touring in America. She published her book over the objections of her husband who deleted all the proper names before he would allow the book to go to press. In this book, Kemble provides an excellent overview of life on the home front, and describes her household duties to her own family, as well as the fact that white women of this era were frequently involved in ministering to the healthcare and hygiene of their black servants:

have had several women at the house today asking for advice and help for their sick children: they all came from Number Two, as they call it, that is, the settlement or cluster of Negro huts nearest to the main one, where we may be said to reside. In the afternoon I went thither, and found a great many of the little children ailing: there had been an unusual mortality among them at this particular settlement this winter.

Shopping, of course, represented another household duty for which the typical southern woman was responsible; however, the Southern wife had her job cut out for her during this period of history because of the inflationary condition of the South and the lack of consumer industries. "We have had occasion to make only two trifling purchases since we have been here; but the prices (if these articles are any criterion) must be infinitely higher than those of the Northern shopkeepers; but this we must expect as we go further south, for, of course, they have to pay double profits upon all the commonest necessaries of life, importing them, as they do, from distant districts.

The economic conditions of the individual plantation of course had a major impact on the ability of the white women of this era enjoy what comforts were available. Clearly, a plantation whose economic conditions were such that the white owners could afford to treat their slaves well did not always mean that they would, only that they could afford to do so. The individual personalities of the slave owners predicated the quality of lives of the slaves they owned in every way -- every bad mood and fit of anger -- every bit of temper and meanness -- could be inflicted upon a slave with no legal (and in view of the times) or even moral implications. However, to the extent that a white woman would mistreat her slaves was the extent, by and large, to which the slaves would devise ways of sabotaging the success of the enterprise in which the owners were involved, which only served to perpetuate the view of slaves as being "rebellious."

An insightful description of life on the home front in the antebellum South is provided in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's observations concerning the realities and the morality of slavery indicates that the institution, was of the.".. mildest form. The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and gradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure that are called for in the business of more southern districts, makes the task of the negro a more healthful and reasonable one; while the master, content with a more gradual style of acquisition, has not those temptations to hardheartedness which always overcome frail human nature when the prospect of sudden and rapid gain is weighed in the balance, with no heavier counterpoise than the interests of the helpless and unprotected." This pastoral setting in the Old South at least provided opportunities for compassionate slaveholders to afford their chattel with better living conditions and education. According to Stowe:

Mrs. Shelby was a woman of high class, both intellectually and morally. To that natural magnanimity and generosity of mind which one often marks as characteristic of the women of Kentucky, she added high moral and religious sensibility and principle, carried out with great energy and ability into practical results. Her husband, who made no professions to any particular religious character, nevertheless reverenced and respected the consistency of hers, and stood, perhaps, a little in awe of her opinion. Certain it was that he gave her unlimited scope in all her benevolent efforts for the comfort, instruction, and improvement of her servants, though he never took any decided part in them himself. In fact, if not exactly a believer in the doctrine of the efficiency of the extra good works of saints, he really seemed somehow or other to fancy that his wife had piety and benevolence sufficient for two people, to indulge a shadowy expectation of getting into heaven through her superabundance of qualities to which he made no particular pretension.

Women in the Old South were responsible for a number of other household duties, as well, including supervision of the house staff and coordination of a variety of domestic duties. Gradually, changes occurred in the way masters looked on both their slaves and themselves. Wives of plantation owners in these circumstances generally did not view themselves as being cruel mistresses charged with inflicting a demeaning lifestyle on their property. Rather, such women looked upon themselves frequently as being kindly benefactresses who, like benevolent despots, ruled their people firmly but fairly and looked after their needs.

However, slavery remained harshly repressive and slaveholders continued to rely heavily on the lash for discipline, and few if any slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed themselves to be. Nevertheless, many white women of this era accepted the notion that they should treat their slaves humanely. Frances Anne Kemble describes a typical home environment during this period as follows:

Now, in all establishment whatever, of course some disparity exists between the comforts of the drawing room and best bedrooms, and the servants' hall and attics, but here it is no longer a matter of degree. The young woman who performs the office of lady's maid, and the lads who wait upon us at table, have neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down upon themselves. The boys sleep at night on the hearth by the kitchen fire, and the women upon a rough board bedstead, strewed with a little tree moss. In the North we could not hope to keep the worse and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our Negro servants are forced habitually to live.

Originally visiting America to study prison reform, Alexis Tocqueville became fascinated by the lifestyle of the Americans. His work, Democracy in America, addressed America's love for equality over freedom; materialism; religious mores; and the American educational system. He provides first-hand, insightful descriptions of the country in 1831-32 from New York to New Orleans and had the opportunity to visit the interior of some American homes and recording his insights into the lifestyle and people of the age. Intrigued by the everyday life of Americans, in his diary de Tocqueville described the inside of one home in eastern Tennessee:

The interior of these dwellings attests the indolence of the master even more than his poverty. You find a clean enough bed, some chairs, a good gun, often books, and almost always a newspaper, but the walls are so full of chinks that the outside air enters from all sides with... You are hardly better sheltered than in a cabin of leaves. Nothing would be easier than to protect oneself from bad weather and stop the chinks, but the master of the place is incapable of taking such care. In the North you see reigning an air of cleanliness and intelligence in the humblest dwellings. Here everything seems sketchy, everything a matter of chance; one would say that the inhabitant lives from day-to-day in the most perfect carelessness of the future.

Another personal encounter of Tocqueville follows:

It was in one of the many forested valleys of the region, he wrote, that we discovered one evening a cabin, made of wood, whose poorly joined walls allowed one to see a great fire flaming in the interior. We knock: two great roguish dogs, big as donkeys, come first to the door. Their master follows close, grips us hard by the hand, and invites us to enter. You push open a door hung on leather hinges and without a lock... Here you find a family of poor people leading the lazy life of the rich.

The rustic charm apparently impressed Tocqueville and the ambiance is described as:

Not event the most miserable planter of Kentucky or Tennessee but represents marvelously the country gentleman of old Europe. A fireplace as wide as half the room and with an entire tree burning in it, a bed, a few chairs, a carbine six feet long, against the walls of the apartment, a few hunter's accouterments which the wind was bowing about as it chose, and the picture is complete. Near the fire is seated the mistress of the lodge, with the tranquil and modest air that distinguishes American women, while four or five husky children rolled on the floor, as lightly clad as in the month of July. Under the mantel of the chimney two or three squatting Negroes still seemed to find that it was less warm there than in Africa.

The social graces were not completely absent, even in the poorest of the Old Southern homes, according to Tocqueville:

In the midst of this collection of misery, my gentleman did not do the honors of his house with the less ease and courtesy. It's not that he forced himself to move in any way; but the poor blacks, soon perceiving that a stranger had entered the house, one of them by orders of the master presented us with a glass of whisky, another, a corn cake or plate of venison; a third was sent to get wood. The first time I saw this order given I supposed that it was a question of going to the cellar or woodhouse; but the axe strokes that I heard ringing in the wood told me soon that they were cutting down the tree that we needed.

Another author describes the scene in the typical rural Southern home as being pastoral and leisurely: "While the slaves were thus occupied, the master, seated tranquilly before a fire that would have roasted an ox to the marrow of his bones, enveloped himself majestically in a cloud of smoke, and between each puff related to his guests, to make their time seem less long, all the great exploits that his hunter's memory could furnish him." Based on such observations, Tocqueville summed up the Tennessee peculiarities: "They are southerners, masters of slaves, made half wild by the solitude, and hardened by the hardships of life."

The historians note that Tocqueville's first-hand description of American home life were not a reflection of the reality of the domestic life of the time. "Romantic representations of well-dressed, refined couples and elegant mothers were rarely a reflection of real life experience in the early nineteenth century." According to Tocqueville, most white women of the Old South were responsible for the everyday jobs of cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, laundry, care of the poultry, dairy work, butter churning, spinning, child care and more in an unending cycle of domestic work. Much of the work of the early nineteenth century took place in the kitchen. Historians note that the cabins and rural homes that deTocqueville visited would more likely have retained the kitchen of old that served as a common room and which utilized the fireplace for much of the food preparation.

Stoves were common in wealthier homes, however, as sources of heat as well as cooking. The stove served as the center of family life, and altered accordingly over time for the convenience of the homemaker. Tocqueville's timely observations of everyday life, in reference to daily activity in the busy city of New York, included:

All the customs of life show this mingling of the two classes which in Europe take so much trouble to keep apart. The women dress for the whole day at seven in the morning. At nine o'clock one can already make calls. At noon one is received everywhere. Everything bears the stamp of a very busy existence. We have not yet seen any fashionables. I even have the notion that good morals are here the result less of the severity of principles than of the impossibility in which all the young people find themselves of thinking of love or busying themselves seriously with it.

However, this comment on New York does not give a true sense of the daily routine of an average white woman in a rural Southern community. The focus of the day for these rural women was need to work to live, not the order of visitation of friends or the frivolities of the social scene. In fact, in spite of the popular nostalgic view of the farmhouses and plantations of the past, the fancy homes of the cities were few and only for the most wealthy members of society. Farmhouses were described in 1818 by William Cobbett as, "a sort of out-of-door slovenliness... You see bits of wood, timber, boards, chips, lying about, here and there, and pigs tramping about in a sort of confusion." The white picket fence and manicured yard of popular memory was seldom a reality. Domestic animals had free reign (both inside and out) of homes, churches and businesses.

Sanitation and hygiene were of minimal concern and the stench can only be imagined by modern students of this era. Within early nineteenth century homes, furniture was general sparse and this was particularly true in rural houses of the Old South. The historians record that such furniture was designed for durability and to meet the essential needs of the family. Living quarters frequently consisted of just one large room, with all of the activity within households taking place within sight and sound of the other members of the family. In fact, it was not until the Victorian Era that furniture (in middle class households) became frivolous and that partitioned rooms become an everyday luxury for less affluent families.

Maintaining discipline on a plantation was a brutal undertaking. Kemble describes one incident in which punishment was being dealt out to a miscreant slave by a foreman: "He did not, however, think proper to exceed in her punishment the usual number of stripes allotted to the nonperformance of the appointed daily task, and Mr. Butler pronounced the whole transaction perfectly satisfactory and en regle." According to the rules of a plantation, the "common drivers" or slave foremen, were limited in their powers of punishment. For example, they were not allowed to administer more than a certain number of lashes to their fellow slaves. On the Kemble plantation, "Headman Frank, as he is called, has alone the privilege of exceeding this limit; and the overseer's latitude of infliction is only curtailed by the necessity of avoiding injury to life or limb. The master's irresponsible power has no such bound."

Kemble describes her moral outrage at this particular incident and appeals to the white foreman's sense of masculinity in the face of wanton cruelty to a black female slave:

When I was thus silenced on the particular case in discussion, I resorted, in my distress and indignation, to the abstract question, as I never can refrain from doing; and to Mr. Butler's assertion of the justice of poor Teresa's punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced labor; the brutal humanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her, toil, which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man.

Life on the Home Front in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War. The Census of 1860 showed North Carolina to have approximately 30,000 free Negroes and 331,000 slaves, the large majority of both being concentrated in the eastern and northern counties. Between 1835 and 1860 most of the state's liberal treatment of its Negroes had vanished, and when war came the increased fear of Negro insurrection provoked even tighter controls. In 1861 the legislature ordered a mandatory death sentence for encouraging discontent among slaves and free Negroes. When the legislature refused to provide for other controls, the state's municipalities did so by means of local ordinances. Part of their overall objective was to reduce the number of free Negroes, to prevent them from associating with slaves, and to control them by means of permits, licenses, curfews, and hiring them out for minor infractions of the law. The intent of the city ordinances regarding slaves was to restrict even further their mobility while living and working. "The effectiveness of these laws and ordinances is indicated by the fact that government authorities did with all blacks about whatever they wished and there was no insurrection."

According to Barret and Yearns, there were three types of people who became particularly unfortunate victims of the war: refugees, blacks, and the families of soldiers. "As the war coursed through the South it turned thousands of Confederates into homeless wanderers. Union sympathizers might welcome the approach of enemy forces, but others found life under enemy occupation unthinkable and either fled their homes as Union troops approached or left soon after they had arrived." Families would frequently have to flee several times, and wherever they stopped they created problems for themselves and others. Friends and relatives who took them in soon found their generosity strained by the overcrowded home life and the rapidly dwindling food supply. The less fortunate refugees frequently became problems to the law and even to the military authorities. Confederate home front morale suffered as a consequence.

According to Barret and Yearns, those at home, as well as they could, attempted to keep the family's affairs operating as usual. This endeavor proved an almost impossible task for the thousands of rural yeoman families. "Most of these humble people lived in badly furnished houses, owned only a small amount of arable land, were lucky to have even one slave, and desperately needed their men at home." Few men of the small farmer class were exempt from military service, children and older men were of limited use, and even husbands who deserted could only occasionally come out of hiding and help with the chores. The woman now ran the home. The majority of their families probably had enough food and clothing for basic survival, but the cost of everything made life grim. The people of these states could ill afford coffee, cane sugar, fresh meat, new clothing, and the dozens of other simple needs that made life comfortable. Likewise, tools and implements wore out and could not be easily replaced, livestock dwindled for various reasons, speculators preyed on those left behind on the home front, and the war in general now appeared to be most inglorious.

The correspondence form these proud, capable, yet frequently poorly educated women to their husbands in service, lacked the subtleties of polite exchange and simply attempted to relate what was happening at home. "They expressed fear of hunger and cold, worries of sickness, thoughts on the weather and crops, comments on neighbors and relatives, tragedies in the community, and ordinary occurrences that meant so much to their men in distant places."

The best collection of such letters in print today is "The Correspondence of David Olando McRaven and Amanda Nantz McRaven, 1864-1865" in Volume XXVI of the North Carolina Historical Review. The following letters (Documents A, B, and C) are from wives of slightly less affluent circumstances than Amanda McRaven, but they poignantly communicate the loneliness and hardships of these patient women.

A. October The 19, 1862.

Dear husbin take the opportunity this eavning to rite A few lines to you I am not well I was very sick last sunday and monday and Tena has bin very bad with the sore throat tho he is better now tho his throat is sweld mitelen yet I heard to day that you was very sick it trubles me almost to deth if it was so that I culd get A bout you mout look for me thare if you get very bad and have to go to the hosptle I want you to tri you very best to get A furlo and come home and if you can't get A long by your self rite to me and I will tri to get some one to come after you I went down to see John Canner yester day and he sed if William Flynt haden to come after him he wouldden to got to come A toll He looks very bad he doant look like he would be able to go back this winter nat terry is at home on A sick furlo he past here last weak he looks ver bad he went to dockter bitting and dock tery is ded I heard that Rubin Burrough got home to day I made sertin I would get A letter from you yester day all I want now is to see you come home I haven got no wheat soad yet I have had alford to hall out the manur and A hard bargin to get him and have to pay A dollar a day it looks like culd get him when every I wanted him at that prise I pute up the hogs last weak but hant got no corn up yet to fead them they have had another battle at ole allen flynts latela old nancy got slitela wounded I have never have left the house A lone since you left. -- your affectionate MA ZIMMERMAN.

B. This December 30 [1863].

Dear husban I take my pen in hand to drop you A few lins to let you know that I am well at this time an the chrildren is well an I hope that these few lins may reach an find you the Same. I recived A letter from you yesterday morning rote the 15 of December an was glad to here from you an here that you ware well an I recived one hundred dollars in it of Confedrate. An I war glad to get it for I am in det for provision an it will take it all excepting five or ten dollars. I bought A hog from mr charles tetterton wade 100 an 25 pound I had to give him fifty dollars for him Dear James I have Sent you tow letters that I have had no answer from. I rite to you every chance I have it is A bad chance for me to get A letter to you for there is not much passing that I know of an when there is I never know of it until it is too late. I have not had no letter from you before sence Acquitch [?] Woolard come in Dear James the time is A geting very Strict about here if the time Should come that I can't rite to you must not think hard of me. I intend to rite to you as long as I can. I have got A little meet an bred now an have one big hog an A Shoat to kill an that will not last me long but it will [be] all I shall get. If it was not like it is an I did have the rite sort of mony I could fare very well. It is A bad chance for me for your wages is So low an every thing So high I don't See how I can live here much longer. I don't get no help now I did get 25 dollars about the last of August an that was not half A nuf but I under Stand there is no more to come. Dear husban you rote me about the chrildrens haveing Shoos. they have had Shoos all along untill now but uncle Dick Daniel has promist to make the two girls Shoos. An Caleb Cleat was to make Charles Shoos but he has broke his arm an if I can't get John to make them I don't know how I Shall get them.... -- [CAROLINE S. ALLIGOOD]

Wflliam Slade Papers.

C. At Home July 8th 1864.

My Dear Husband

Yours of the 10th came to hand last saturday. you can image my feelings pretty much I suppose as you have lately experienced the same that I have, that is not got a letter in so long a time, I felt so good that everything went right with me I do not think any person could have made me mad for two or three days if they had of spit in my face. It is now just dark supper is over the children asleep and I have seated myself to write to my "dear old boy" a pleasant task when Minnie is not up to torment me, need I say how much more pleasant it would be to have him here with me, if you would come riding or walking up I would give you some nice light bread, butter, and milk, for supper, and then invite you to sleep with me, do you suppose you would take the invitation as an insult? If you did I would ask your pardon and invite you as politely as I could to take a bed up stairs.

I believe I have nothing of much importance to write, I will therefore in the first place endeavor to answer your questions as near as I can. I will take them as they come so that I will be certain to answer all. Fannie likes to go to school tolerably well is learning pretty well, Mrs. Mc Loud is the teacher, Dee is still at home, speculating I recon, as that is generally the case these days when a man is at home, he and Henrietta were here wednesday.... The wheat and rye is not very good I will have it cut monday if nothing prevents, the oats is no account, Trim is cutting them and feeding them to the horses. we have the new ground and the old field by it, the piece at the gate that was sowed in wheat, Sallies wheat patch two patches next to Fords and a little patch across the branch where flax was sowed and the patch Arter had last year in corn. I think I will have a clover patch by next year, as to your timothy it is about like Batey's clover I think all the seed you put there has come up we will try and save the seed, and maybe we will get it thick enough in a year or two. there is about a half of an apple crop not many peaches. my horses are fatter than any of my neighbors work horses, Trim is a very good hand to manage horses. Bob Slagle does what little blacksmithing I have done we have not had much done.

A like my darkies better I believe, than I did at first, I have found out that Trim can cut and make his own clothes and that suits me very well, he can cut a pair of pants out of less cloth than any body I ever saw cut. I have plenty of lettuce but the moles worked on the onions until they will be of no size. we have beans and potatoes to eat now, will have plenty if we can have rain occasionally I think if the season is suitable I will have a good crop of irish potatoes, but no sweet potatoes I planted two bushels but between the chickens and dry weather they will do no good. I have a pretty good crop of cane and some peas. we still have old rye for coffee. The cows look pretty well the white heifer is a nice thing the pasture is tolerably good will be better now we have had some rain. we got a right smart of milk and make some butter and upon the whole I recon we have about as much to eat as most any person else, if we get no scarces we have no need to grumble....

Believe me as every your own.-- MARY [BELL].

As noted above, life during this period was clearly frantic, but the correspondence from the day suggests that women attempted to maintain morale for the sake of their husbands and families to the best of their ability. For instance, in a letter to her cousin from August 22, 1863, Mrs. L.J. Johnson wrote:

We have lost only 27 negroes and nearly all of those left when Roanoke fell. Hester is the only woman I had to leave me. She & her five children, ones that had been more human [?] [sic] than almost any. I regret losing her little children. The strength of our farm has gone but we still have many left -- Cousin you don't know how desolate we feel here, so cut off. The Yanks have drawn in their lines and thrown us in despair and the water separates us from the mainland so we are in quite a strait. We never see anyone... nothing but Yankee papers so you may know we don't [sic] see the right side of our cause. Now for home matters.... All unite with me in sincere love.... your affectionate cousin [emphasis added].

With much of the region in Union hands by the spring of 1862, President Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly, a native of North Carolina then living in California, to become the military governor of the state. Stanly assumed office on 26 May and quickly discovered that he faced an impossible task. He not only had numerous disagreements with the Union authorities in New Bern, his capital city, but he also had to endure the scorn of his own people who looked upon him as a traitor. Soon, moreover, he was in trouble with the antislavery forces because of what was termed his prosouthern attitude. Stanly also found it impossible to protect private property from what he considered the shameful pillaging of the Union troops. The last straw was Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to which Stanly was bitterly opposed. On 15 January 1863, the governor tendered his resignation, returning to California in March.

One of the first problems Stanly encountered upon his assumption of the governorship was a school for Negro children that had been established in New Bern. When the governor announced that he intended to withdraw official support for the school, he experienced severe criticism from all sides. In a lengthy letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Stanly attempted to explain his position on the school and discussed the slavery question in general:

One person came to me yesterday who had four slaves taken from him, and told they were free by a rude soldier, who cursed his wife. I suggested, first, he must take the oath of allegiance; this he agreed to do. Then I gave him authority to look for his property, advising him to use mildness and persuasion. He did so, and one servant voluntarily returned to the home of a kind master. This has already excited some evil-disposed persons and will be misrepresented.