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Two generations have passed since the publication of Wilma Dykeman’s landmark environmental history, The French Broad. In Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time, John Ross updates that seminal book with groundbreaking new research. More than the story of a single river, Through the Mountains covers the entire watershed from its headwaters in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains to its mouth in Knoxville, Tennessee. The French Broad watershed has faced new perils and seen new discoveries since 1955, when The French Broad was published. Geologists have learned that the Great Smoky Mountains are not among the world’s oldest as previously thought; climatologists and archaeologists have traced the dramatic effects of global warming and cooling on the flora, fauna, and human habitation in the watershed; and historians have deepened our understanding of enslaved peoples once thought not to be a part of the watershed’s history. Even further, this book documents how the French Broad and its tributaries were abused by industrialists, and how citizens fought to mitigate the pollution. Through the Mountains also takes readers to notable historic places: the hidden mound just inside the gate of Biltmore where Native Americans celebrated the solstices; the once-secret radio telescope site above Rosman where NASA eavesdropped on Russian satellites; and the tiny hamlet of Gatlinburg where Phi Beta Phi opened its school for mountain women in 1912. Wilma Dykeman once asked what the river had meant to the people who lived along it. In the close of Through the Mountains, Ross reframes that question: For 14,000 years the French Broad and its tributaries have nurtured human habitation. What must we start doing now to ensure it will continue to nourish future generations? Answering this question requires a knowledge of the French Broad’s history, an understanding of its contemporary importance, and a concern for the watershed’s sustainable future. Through the Mountains fulfills these three criteria, and, in many ways, presents the larger story of America’s freshwater habitats through the incredible history of the French Broad.
Despite officially joining the Confederacy in 1861, Tennessee provided the Union with nearly 32,000 troops during the Civil War. Representing a Southern opposition to secession and loyalty to the Union, many of these Tennesseans served as cavalry or as mounted infantry. Among those serving on horseback were Samuel P. Carter, who temporarily left his post in the U.S. Navy to command a cavalry brigade; Pres. Andrew Johnson's son, Robert Johnson, who served as colonel of the 1st Tennessee Cavalry; and James Brownlow, son of Tennessee's Reconstruction governor, who led his command in a naked charge across the Chattahoochee River. Labeled traitors and renegades by Confederate Tennesseans, these men risked reprisals on their homes and families as they dutifully served the Union cause. This volume draws upon photographs from the collections of the Tennessee State Museum, the Library of Congress, the United States Army Military History Institute, and other public and private collections to tell the story of these loyal cavaliers.
In June of 1863, Col. William P. Sanders led a cavalry raid of 1,300 men from the Union Army of the Ohio through Confederate-held East Tennessee. The raid severed the Confederate rail supply line from Virginia to the Western Theater and made national headlines. Until now, this incredible feat has been relegated to a footnote in the voluminous history of the American Civil War. In Yankee Commandos, Stuart Brandes presents readers with the most complete account of the Sanders raid to date by using newly discovered and under-explored materials, such as Sanders’s official reports and East Tennessee diaries and memoirs in which Sanders is chronicled. The book presents important details of a cavalry raid through East Tennessee that further turned the tide of war for the Union in the Western Theater. It also sheds light on the raid’s effect on the divided civilian population of East Tennessee, where, unlike the largely pro-secession populations of Middle and West Tennessee, the fraction of enlisted men to the Union cause rose to nearly a quarter. Colonel Sanders remains an enigma of the American Civil War. (He was a cousin of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and his father and three brothers donned Confederate gray at the outbreak of the war.) By studying the legend of Sanders and his raid, Brandes fills an important gap in Civil War scholarship and in the story of Unionism in a mostly Confederate-sympathizing state.
At the start of the Civil War, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a population of just over 4,000, was considered a prosperous metropolis little reliant on slavery. Although the surrounding countryside was predominantly Unionist in sympathy, Knoxville itself was split down the middle, with Union and Confederate supporters even holding simultaneous political rallies at opposite ends of the town's main street. Following Tennessee's secession, Knoxville soon became famous (or infamous) as a stronghold of stalwart Unionism, thanks to the efforts of a small cadre who persisted in openly denouncing the Confederacy. Throughout the course of the Civil War, Knoxville endured military occupation for all but three days, hosting Confederate troops during the first half of the conflict and Union forces throughout the remainder, with the transition punctuated by an extended siege and bloody battle during which nearly forty thousand soldiers fought over the town. In Lincolnites and Rebels, Robert Tracy McKenzie tells the story of Civil War Knoxville-a perpetually occupied, bitterly divided Southern town where neighbor fought against neighbor. Mining a treasure-trove of manuscript collections and civil and military records, McKenzie reveals the complex ways in which allegiance altered the daily routine of a town gripped in a civil war within the Civil War and explores the agonizing personal decisions that war made inescapable. Following the course of events leading up to the war, occupation by Confederate and then Union soldiers, and the troubled peace that followed the war, Lincolnites and Rebels details in microcosm the conflict and paints a complex portrait of a border state, neither wholly North nor South.
"Groce offers a gracefully written, impressively researched narrative account of the experience of East Tennessee Confederates during the Civil War era. His analysis raises provocative questions about the socioeconomic foundations of Civil War sympathies in the Mountain South."--Robert Tracy McKenzie, University of Washington "Scholars of Appalachia's Civil War have long awaited Todd Groce's study of East Tennessee secessionists. I am pleased to report that this ground-breaking study of Southern Mountain Confederates was worth the wait."--Kenneth Noe, State University of West Georgia A bastion of Union support during the Civil War, East Tennessee was also home to Confederate sympathizers who took up the Southern cause until the bitter end. Yet historians have viewed these mountain rebels as scarcely different from other Confederates or as an aberration in the region's Unionism. Often they are simply ignored. W. Todd Groce corrects this distorted view of East Tennessee's antebellum development and wartime struggle. He paints a clearer picture of the region's Confederates than has previously been available, examining why they chose secession over union and revealing why they have become so invisible to us today. Drawing extensively on primary sources--newspapers, diaries, government reports--Groce allows the voices of these mountain rebels finally to be heard. Groce explains the economic forces and the family and political ties to the Deep South that motivated the East Tennessee Confederates reluctantly to join the fight for Southern independence. Caught in a war they neither sought nor started, they were trapped between an unfriendly administration in Richmond and a hostile Union majority in their midst. When the fighting was over and they returned home to face their vengeful Unionist neighbors, many were forced to flee, contributing to the postwar economic decline of the region. Placing the story in a broad context, Groce provides an overview of the region's economy and explains the social origins of secessionist sympathies. He also presents a collective profile of one hundred high-ranking Confederate officers from East Tennessee to show how they were representative of the rising commercial and financial leadership in the region. Mountain Rebels intertwines economic, political, military, and social history to present a poignant tale of defeat, suffering, and banishment. By piecing together this previously untold story, it fills a void in Southern history, Civil War history, and Appalachian studies. The Author: W. Todd Groce is executive director of the Georgia Historical Society.
By placing the conflict between Unionists and secessionists in East Tennessee within the context of the whole war, Fisher explores the significance of the struggle for both sides.
In January 1863, in the isolated mountains of western North Carolina, Confederate soldiers captured and murdered thirteen victims they suspected of being Unionist guerrillas. First published in 1981, Victims traces the lives and personalities of both killer and victims, illuminating the pressures that can bring men anywhere to commit atrocities more heinous than war itself.
Colonel Frank Wolford, the acclaimed Civil War colonel of the First Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry, is remembered today primarily for his unenviable reputation. Despite his stellar service record and widespread fame, Wolford ruined his reputation and his career over the question of emancipation and the enlistment of African Americans in the army. Unhappy with Abraham Lincoln's public stance on slavery, Wolford rebelled and made a series of treasonous speeches against the president. Dishonorably discharged and arrested three times, Wolford, on the brink of being exiled beyond federal lines into the Confederacy, was taken in irons to Washington DC to meet with Lincoln. Lincoln spared Wolford, however, and the disgraced colonel returned to Kentucky, where he was admired for his war record and rewarded politically for his racially based rebellion against Lincoln. Although his military record established him as one of the most vigorous, courageous, and original commanders in the cavalry, Wolford's later reputation suffered. Dan Lee restores balance to the story of a crude, complicated, but talented man and the unconventional regiment he led in the fight to save the Union. Placing Wolford in the context of the political and cultural crosscurrents that tore at Kentucky during the war, Lee fills out the historical picture of "Old Roman Nose."