Book Review

Canada and the United States

Martin Crawford's very valuable book uses an intimate knowledge of Ashe County's agricultural society to illuminate the impact of the war. Living in the far northwest corner of Appalachian North Carolina, Ashe's people, Crawford argues, were nevertheless shaped by American values and institutions—political and economic—as much as they were by local conditions. Relative isolation may have encouraged family and neighborhood-based subsistence farming, but it did not preclude involvement in markets and politics. More particularly, as demographic pressures on farmland in the 1850s limited opportunity, the urge toward self-sufficiency gave settlers two choices: migrate or commit to more commercial farm production. Social distance increased, and town merchants and lawyers gained influence. Likewise, Ashe males enthusiastically participated in a partisan politics rooted in family and kin group loyalties but cognizant of Whig and Democratic ideology, and therefore were current with the crises of the 1850s. Political leaders, largely drawn from firstcomer, large landowning families, were likely to be slaveholders, raising wheat and tobacco for eastern markets, so the politics of slavery and the concerns of tidewater Carolina resonated in Ashe. When war threatened, Ashe, like much of the Upland South, embraced conditional Unionism; when Abraham Lincoln called for troops to put down insurrection, Ashe joined the stampede to the Confederacy. But importantly, again as in much of the Appalachian South, people and sections most oriented to markets outside the mountains were Confederate loyalists, while poorer areas still mostly subsistence oriented were, at first quietly, Unionist.

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