Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South

Abstract

Noting southern Appalachia's “detachment from the main contours of Southern plantation and Northern free-labor society,” Martin Crawford offers a careful case study of the Civil War's impact on a little-studied area of the Confederacy. Ashe County is located in western North Carolina on the Tennessee border. On the eve of the war only 7 percent of households owned slaves. Farmers concentrated primarily on the production of foodstuffs and were concerned preeminently with household self-sufficiency. No railroad penetrated the area, nor was there even a single newspaper in the county at the close of the antebellum period. And yet Ashe County differed significantly from the traditional stereotype of southern Appalachia as a land of isolation, ignorance, and egalitarian poverty. Households valued self-sufficiency but sought to obtain it in part through commercial involvement in local and regional trading networks. Access to land was relatively widespread, but the proportional distribution of wealth was significantly concentrated. The community was “diverse, competitive, and potentially conflictual,” but the greatest threat to social stability stemmed not from the intrusion of the marketplace, but from the pressures of rapid population growth against a severely limited supply of cultivable land.