Civil War in the Mountain South

By Wilma A. Dunaway
Wilma A. Dunaway. "Slavery and Emancipation in the Mountain South: Sources, Evidence and Methods," Virginia Tech, Online Archives

Southern Appalachia may have been harder hit by the Civil War than any other section of the country. On the one hand, Southern Mountain counties were deeply split politically over secession, and local populations divided their loyalties between the Union and the Confederacy. On the other hand, this region lay geographically at the heart of the Civil War. Both armies moved repeatedly up and down the valleys of Virginia and Tennessee. In addition, both armies targeted numerous sites within the region as strategic occupancy points because they were located on major rivers, were railroad junctures, or were the sites of important resources such as the national rifle works, saltworks, mineral springs, or mines. By the end of the War, eighty Appalachian counties had been devastated by major battles or campaigns or had been overwhelmed by the establishment of military facilities . . . The "official" battles between the two armies probably brought less devastation and destruction to most mountain counties than did the frequent and continuing raids and assaults by guerrillas, partisans and robber bands.

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This article is offered in honor of Veterans Day, but in the fierce guerrilla warfare which engulfed the mountains of Southern Appalachia during the Civil War, it often made little difference if one were in or out of uniform, man or woman, elderly or a child; and everyone who was caught up in the struggle became, in a very real sense, a veteran of the Civil War.

My own great grandfather as a boy of 11 in Letcher County, Kentucky had the barrel of loaded pistol shoved into his mouth by band of Confederate partisans wanting to know where his uncle, a civilian Union man, was hiding. Fortunately, they did not pull the trigger, but his uncle was not so lucky: He was eventually captured and summarily executed with a bullet to the back of his head fired by a 16 year old boy.

It was a very nasty war. All wars are nasty, but none are nastier than civil wars.