| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. (Civil War America.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 368. $39.95.

Popular stereotype has viewed Civil War Appalachia as an all-white bastion of simple, sturdy, and reliably Unionist mountaineers. The reality, at least in that portion of Appalachia that lay within the boundaries of the state of North Carolina, is, as John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney ably demonstrate, far more complicated. 1

The antebellum population of western North Carolina was diverse, with wealthy and refined planters (and their slaves) living in the fertile river valleys and poorer, more or less backward farmers living on the less desirable lands, tilling a portion of their acreage and running livestock on the rest of it. Overall, it was an economy far more diversified and involved in regional markets than stereotype has hitherto depicted. Western Carolina's reluctance to plunge into secession along with the cotton states of the Deep South indicated not a questioning of the institution of slavery (much less anything like abolitionism) but rather an attitude of waiting and watching to see if the Abraham Lincoln administration would passively accept secession. The Unionism of this stage of the crisis in western North Carolina was extremely conditional. If Lincoln did not passively accept the secession of the Deep South, the people of the Carolina hill country were prepared to see that as sufficient provocation for their own secession. . . .

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