copyright 2022 Hershel Parker
9 June 2022 revising
Obliviousness at Trap Hill, Wilkes County: The Siamese
Twins, the Roaring River Church, the Union, the Rebel Gestapo
William Sparks (1797-1880) and Colby Sparks
(1801-1869) were first cousins, grandsons of the Solomon Sparks who lived on
the shifting border of Wilkes and Surry counties (truly on it, for a border
reassignment left his property straddling the line). Solomon was a “celebrated”
(meaning notorious) Tory for his opposition to the rebellion against the
British. Why should he be a rebel? Lord Granville in 1756 or so had sold him a
land grant and he had flourished on the banks of the Yadkin River ever since.
He was not an effete tea drinker and did not need to sign his name on documents
that required him to pay a stamp tax. As the Revolution came to northwestern
North Carolina, he stayed home and kept his door barred. They might burn him
out but he would not surrender. In 1781 or so young George Parks tricked him
into going out. Parks was a sexually aggressive fellow with a daughter he was
ordered to provide for but did not take with him when, postwar, he went to
Indiana and fathered legitimate children by a Moore cousin of mine. He never
got over his pride in his cleverness in capturing Solomon Sparks. In 1832 he
bragged: “They employed a Whig from a distant neighborhood and a stranger to
said Old Tory to decoy him out of his house without his gun under the pretense
of being a traveler & enquiring the Road. They succeeded admirably.”
Solomon
Sparks (my always helpful 6th Great Grandfather) fought bravely without
weapons and “considerably injured” his assailant Parks (thirty-four years his
junior) by kicking him. This grandfather of mine “was sent down the Yadkin in a
Canoe. While tied hand and foot on his back he repeatedly hollowed ‘Hurra for
King George.’” Solomon may have been
beaten after being lifted from the canoe at Salisbury or elsewhere, but he was
not killed, for a couple of records indicate that he survived the Revolution
and lived on some of his land.
The story
delights me because I am first cousin to these first cousins William and Colby,
although a few generations removed. I
hesitate to claim to have inherited the specific gene of Solomon’s stubbornness
(or integrity), but I think he would approve of my unorthodox academic career
in which I have been blackballed from the Center for Editions of American
Authors for telling the truth, lied about in the New York Times by the Dean of
Yale College, and told by a Kentuckian that I would go to Hell for not
believing in the perfection of the text, starting with the Bible.
Solomon’s sons
were patriots. It was generational, that war, as well as a civil war, and a
particularly familial civil war at that. William R. and Colby knew about the
“celebrated Tory” and surely took pride in the obstinacy of the old man, as
descendants do, particularly as they themselves went against popular opinion. From
their early years you would never have thought that William and Colby would
attain anything like their grandfather’s status, but Colby briefly became
genuinely “celebrated,” also in the sense of notorious, whether he deserved notoriety
or not, and William during the Civil War behaved with such astonishing bravery
that might have been slaughtered, right then, and was lucky enough to leave
Wilkes County after the war and die isolated in a Republican enclave in Virginia,
away from the Sparks clan.
We know
something about the cousins over a period of years because of the records of
the Roaring River Baptist Church in Trap Hill, Wilkes County, North
Carolina. A farmer and a Baptist
minister, Cousin Colby (whose wife Sarah was a Pruitt cousin
of mine, so their children are doubly kin to me) attained his brief national
and international fame in 1843 when he united in marriage two local sisters with
two brothers. The brothers had settled as property owners in the county and had
become known as great hunters, sportsmen, a little rough-and-ready in their brawling
when angered, and not native-born Americans. A woman writing in the Richmond Southerner, her article dated Trap Hill
5 January 1848, asked the brothers why they had settled there. The reply:
“Mighty purty place, high mountains, big rocks, ’nough deer, squirrels, foxes,
and all kind of game.” She questioned: “You love to hunt?” “Mighty well, love
shoot mark, too.” She explained: they “shoot at a mark or game with their four
hands resting on the gun.” They and their families ate most of what they killed, as
their neighbors did, but they could afford to practice their marksmanship as
much as they wanted. They were richer but just as neighborly as anyone could
expect, and they shot four-handed for a good reason. They were not just foreign
born, they were Chinese, although always known by the location from which they
were brought to the United States, Siam. They were Chang and Eng, the conjoined
Siamese Twins, who took the name Bunker.
Residents of Wilkes and Surry Counties since 1839, the Twins
(1811-1874) lived there until Chang died, causing Eng’s death a few hours later.
The locals adapted pretty rapidly to their outlandish appearance because as outdoorsmen
they assimilated themselves into rural life. Colby as minister (and father of many
children) plainly thought that the brothers deserved to have respectable
sexually active lives as married men. Farmers are practical. There was
apparently no great local shock at their marrying sisters. Colby knew that one
brother could not have sex without the other knowing
it and actually feeling it, as he was being jostled. He must have been assured that the Twins would manage,
as in fact they did. Practicalities were foremost. Rather than straddling the
border as Solomon Sparks did, eventually they built one house in Wilkes County
and another over in Surry.
Would
Cousin Colby have seen anything problematical if he had been asked to unite two
unconjoined Asian brothers to two white North Carolina sisters? You would think
so. By law he could not have married a black man to a white woman, but Colby
did not see a racial obstacle to uniting the celebrity Chinese with white
sisters. Familiarity and celebrity trumped race.
A writer who signed himself “D.” in the Greensboro Patriot (16 October 1852) commented on
the children of the Twins: “Mr. Eng has 6, and Mr. Chang 5 children, all of
whom are apt scholars and remarkably well-behaved--manifesting the strongest
possible desire to learn their lessons and to secure the good will of their
teacher. They all partake strongly of the most refined Siamese cast of
countenance, form and manner of deporting themselves--in truth they are a
credit to their parents, and the community in which they live.” The children did
not inherit all their features from their mothers, but their Asiatic
inheritance was refined, and they were (to some outsiders’ surprise) as
educable as any fully white children. The editor of the Tuskegee, Alabama South Western Baptist (as reprinted in
the 26 August 1857 Edgefield, SC Advertiser)
spent two hours with the Twins on a visit to Surry County, during which he claimed
to avoid “questions of prying curiosity.” Their neighbors, he found, declared
them “much of gentlemen.” He observed that the Twins were “small men with
Eastern complexion”--Eastern as in Asiatic. However, one observer noted that while
the children were “very healthy and forward” the fathers’ features were
“clearly stamped” upon their faces. The
children were not singled out for bullying by the local children, as far as we
know. For most commentators, the celebrity status of
the Twins trumped their being Asian, and the half Asian children seem to have
encountered little racial prejudices when in due course they married into
neighboring families. Descendants flourish today.
It
was outsiders who were fiercely prejudiced--less because of the Twins being
Asian than because of their being conjoined. On April 26 William Cullen
Bryant’s New York Evening Post had
the news and denounced Cousin Colby: “The wonder is that a Baptist Church Elder
could have been found to aid in perpetrating this enormity.” The Louisville Kentuckian on 3 May quoted secondhand the
New York Aurora’s opinion: “We
entirely agree with the Courier in the opinion that this is a most beastly and
unnatural outrage upon the decencies of life, and that the father, daughters,
husbands and priest, ought to be tarred and fathered.” On 11 May the Port
Gibson, Mississippi Herald quoted
from the New Orleans Bee a rant about
Cousin Colby. For consenting “to perpetrate this piece of Beastiality” (not “bestiality”) he “should have been ducked in the
nearest horse-pond and then drummed out of the country. If our Lynch-law could
be defended, it would have been in this case, if the infamous women and equally
infamous Elder Sparks, had been hung up to the sign posts of the town in which
this outrage upon the decencies of life was permitted to be perpetrated under the
cloak of the marriage vows.” Frederick Douglass in his Liberator on 12 May blamed a slave culture on Colby’s behavior:
“None but a priest whose mind had become besotted by the impurities of slavery,
could ‘solemnize’ so bestial a union as this; and none but a community sunk
below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness, from the same cause, would tolerate
it.” On 17 May the sexually informed editor in the Elyria, Ohio Lorain Republican had fun. Bemused by a phrase
he knew for threesomes before “threesome” was a word, he exclaimed--“Thicker
than ‘three in a bed,’ by Gosh! Whew! ‘Git out!’” On 27 May the Bowling Green,
Missouri, Radical called the marriage
“about the most disgraceful affair that ever took place in any country.” There
was a local rival, James L. Davis, for the honor of solemnizing the rites of
matrimony between Eng Bunker and Sarah Yates. It’s possible Cousin Colby united
only Chang and Adelaide, but he got all the national opprobrium. Probably the
people in Trap Hill saw few of the many dozens of such articles, and if they
did their response was different from that of the remote editors.
The
neighbors in Surry and Wilkes Counties well before 1843 had become acquainted
with the Twins and had learned to distinguished between them. Because they
locals knew Chang and Eng as different men, they were less inclined than
outsiders to think only lurid thoughts. The Hillsboro, North Carolina Recorder quoted the editor of the New
York Courier and Enquirer as being
“wonderfully thrown from his propriety by this very natural occurrence, and talks raving of infamy and horse-ponds and
hanging; but if the ladies are satisfied we do not see why any one else should
complain. Why should these twins, because they are inseparably connected, be
denied a privilege enjoyed by every one else? Certainly there is no law, either human or divine, to
interpose.” This commonsensical view was shared by the neighbors of Wilkes
County, most of them farmers who saw animal procreation regularly and most of
them with families consisting of multiple children. To be sure, the locals were
intrigued and wondered and gossiped a while, as they visualized the mechanics
of the marriage, but they understood reproduction, and the questions they had
were practical rather than moral or morbid, and certainly not salacious, at
least not after the first normal titillation dissipated. No one in Wilkes or
Surry County had much personal privacy--did any farm family have a private master
bedroom?--so that a married couple regularly slept in close proximity to their
children, of whom there might be several at a given time, staying home till
they married. Parents often slept in the same bed with some of their children,
and children slept together. Chamber pots were used at night in bad (and good)
weather, and any toilet structure was outdoors. My Uncle Andrew Costner lived
to be almost 90 and was teased from the time he was three by his cry of panic,
“Mamma, Papa! Ony Lee forgot to bring the chamber in!” Part of the humor was
Andrew’s saying “Ony Lee,” not pausing to separate the older sisters’ names: it
was his panic that was funny to others. People could always be titillated, but
they learned to ignore others’ normal functions, most of the time.
Any
new visitor was curious about the sleeping arrangements and few were so
delicate that they avoided questions. The female investigator in the Southerner gave a long paragraph to the
subject: “We were, on arriving, shown into the bed-room of Mrs. Eng, (there
being no fire in the parlor, and the weather exceedingly cold,) where we saw
herself and the three children, all comfortably seated around the fire. The
first important object which arrested my attention was the ‘big bedstead’ and
the ‘big feather bed.’ They were to me objects of great curiosity, and I could
not keep my eyes from them. Finally my curiosity, (for I belong to the family
of old Eve) rose so high, that I was compelled to ask Mrs. Eng what use they
made of that ‘big bedstead and bed?’ She replied as follows: ‘Our family is
quite big when the Twins and my sister and her children all come to see me, and
the Twins made the ‘big bedstead,’ for nothing shorter would do for all on us.’
I blushed a little, and then resumed; you are quite a loving family, I added.
‘Yes,” said she, ‘it’s obliged to be so, for each on us has to sleep on the
off-side of the Twins, and then six children; all put together, it takes a
mighty ‘big fixin’ for all on us, you know.’ I told her I did not know it; but
if she said so, it must be correct. Here my attention was arrested by the sight
of the ‘big cradle,’ and I remarked, you have also a cradle to correspond with
the ‘big bedstead.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Eng, ‘we must have all big fixins here.’” She
added: “The ‘big bedstead’ and ‘big cradle’ were made by ‘Chang and Eng,’ and the
‘big bed’ by Mrs. Eng.” (A misprint in some papers may have baffled readers,
“big candle” instead of “big cradle.”)
For
most outsiders, sexual titillation trumped racial prejudice, but not always. A
writer in 1850 (in the Fall River Monitor,
7 September) used a friend’s two year old notes in an unpleasant passage on a
visit to Mrs. Eng in Wilkes County: “He found her with three children--two
girls and a boy; the latter of whom is called Decatur. Their flat, swarthy
features, black coarse hair, and low, retreating forehead, indicated clearly
their Siamese paternity. In the large room where the guest was received, stood
an enormous bed, some ten feet in width, which Mrs. Eng Bunker explained, with
all the innocence and naiveté imaginable, was brought into requisition whenever
her husband, his brother and her sister visited Trap Hill. ‘Nothin’ shorter,’
she said, ‘would do for them all.’ The woman herself was good looking, though
rather corpulent; with rich, auburn hair, fine teeth, and hazel eyes.--The
house was neatly kept; the supper spread for the visitor excellent; and
although uneducated, Mrs. Eng displayed much good sense and shrewdness in her
conversation.” Later he found the Twins in the Surry plantation where he
remarked, “As to personal appearance, the children were all much alike,” naturally
enough, since they were doubly cousins--children of sisters and [surely?] identical
male twins.
After
the Twins’ first children, and then after two children each were born, the
lickerish curiosity subsided until raised by modern biographers. Yunte Huang
called the twins’ early visits to the sisters “rutting trips,” then speculated
for pages on sexual positions and raised the intriguing possibility that the
Twins swapped wives. Such salacious, or downright vile, questions from modern
biographers were like those which occurred to Northern newspaper editors but
they apparently never occurred to the neighbors and they certainly never
occurred to the children, who spoke with perfect naturalness about their father
and their uncle. They were not confused as to who their father was. They were
an absolutely normal family in this regard.
Visitors, outsiders, none of them as vile as Yunte Huang,
were naturally inquisitive about sexual arrangements, but as abolitionism
became more commonly talked about some wanted to know how many slaves the Twins
owned and how they treated their slaves. Soon after arriving in Wilkes County the Twins had become
slave-owners, unlike most of their neighbors, where the terrain did not lend
itself to large-scale farming. Slave-owning by itself in the 1830s and early
1840s was not necessarily an issue for neighbors, although there were Quakers
in the neighborhood who had their opinions. It was less the fact of their
owning slaves that caused comment, it was their treatment of the slaves. In
1848 the widely reprinted article (and widely plundered) in the Richmond Southerner the writer asked how many
slaves and was told, “We got tirteen, big and little.” (“Tirteen” was her
attempt at accuracy.) She reported, “Mrs. Eng says her husband is very kind to
the negroes, and that Chang is very severe with them.”
The
16 October 1852 Greensboro Patriot
gave another frequently reprinted account from a visitor to the area who signed
himself “D”: “When they chop [wood] or fight, they do so double handed, and in
driving a horse or chastising their negroes, both of them use the lash without
mercy. A gentleman who purchased a black man a short time ago from them,
informed the writer that he was ‘the worst whipped negro he ever saw.’” Such
notoriety was not good for their reputations. Chang and Eng replied on 30
October 1852 (in a letter written for them): “That portion of said piece
relating to the inhuman manner in which he had chastized a negro man which we
afterwards sold, is a sheer fabrication and infamous falsehood. We have never
sold to any man a negro as described, except to Mr. Thos. F. Prather, who
denies the truth of said accusation, or of ever having told any person that
which the author of said communication says he heard. We are well aware that to
some who have not seen us, we are to some extent an object of curiosity, but
that we were to be the objects of such vile and infamous misrepresentation, we
could not before believe.”
Comment
on the Twins’ slaves died down. Much later, the Lancaster PA Express (16 March 1865) took from the
Philadelphia Ledger a piece on
“Present Condition of the Siamese Twins.” A North Carolina “medical gentleman”
had reportedly made his way North and recounted “minute and full particulars,”
which included a dubious account of warring sisters--dubious and largely
fabricated. The Twins, he said, were not in any army: “Of course no one ever
thought of drafting them, and their negroes
prospered, except that when out of temper from any cause, it was apt to work
itself off in striking the first one that came to hand, from which the best
escape was to keep out of the way.” The putative medical gentleman marveled at
his own original observations: “Each one can hold conversation with a different
person at the same time.” What a revelation that would have been to the
neighbors in Wilkes and Surry! His final comments are “interesting if true,” as
editors said at that time: “Since the breaking out of the rebellion, they have
both dressed in the Confederate gray, and they are both members of the same
church, having united with a small Baptist church in their neighborhood, of
which they have been considered very worthy members, though born Siamese.” This
could have been Colby Sparks’s Roaring River Baptist Church, but if the Twins
were actually members each of them would first have had to describe his
experience with salvation. The writer in the Southerner, a fervent Christian, was appalled at the Asian theology
she elicited from them. Northern editors still were intrigued by any new report
and were tempted to embellish it in a “Whew! ‘Git out!’ fashion about sex or
race. A shameless rehash of the Philadelphia Ledger article on 1 April 1865
(Portage, Wisconsin State Register)
declared that the Twins “own, or did own before the henceforward-and-forever-free
proclamation was issued, a considerable number of slaves of about the same
color as themselves.” This addition merely gave the plagiarist a chance for
racial slurs. The Chicago Tribune on 4 August 1865 quoted the Twins’ letter to the New York Times advertising their availability to
be exhibited in Northern cities, accompanied by some of their children. They
were now needy, for the “ravages of civil war” had swept away their fortunes.”
On 8 August 1865 the Charlotte Western
Democrat took from the Raleigh Standard
the news that the Siamese Twins had passed through Raleigh, having entered into
an agreement with “a Mr. Zimmerman” to exhibit themselves. This was “owing to
the war. The most of their property was in negroes, consequently it is lost.
Each of them was accompanied by a little son.” Earlier reports had emphasized
their secure investments in the north. Now they would not have left home if
they did not need the money. Taking sons (it would have been sons) with them
who spoke perfect Southern mountain English was sensible on many levels.
Huang
in Inseparable gives “vile and
infamous misrepresentation” (as the Twins said in the Greensboro Patriot in 1852) from a sexual and
triply racist point of view. For him, the Twins were “two Asian freaks
consorting with two white women and lording over a squad of black slaves.” He
refers to one of the men instructing a “colored boy” to “bring in some fresh
cider”; the one who gave the instruction was “simultaneously, Asian and
freakish.” Huang does not take the normal view. Typical is the letter from a
visitor written 2 September 1844 and reprinted on 19 October in the Salisbury Carolina Watchman. His acquaintances in
Wilkes County had assured him that Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Eng are “very amiable
and industrious. Each of the Ladies have presented their particular ‘lord’ with
an heir, in the person of a fine, fat, bouncing daughter!” He said not a word
about race. No visitor reproached the Twins for being Siamese owners of negro
slaves. Celebrity trumped race for most observers. And once the neighbors got
over the oddity of seeing one man doubled together but really two distinct men,
with different characters, they stopped seeing Chang and Eng merely as
freakish. The biographer Huang salaciously sees sex and race where the
neighbors did not. He sees sex with one or more witnesses, always, but all the
more lurid for being inter-racial.
Biographers,
including Irving and Amy Wallace and Yunte Huang, have ignored some of the best
evidence about race. Surviving Roaring River Baptist Church records do not show
any controversy over Colby’s performing the wedding of Chinese men and white
women. This was not a religious issue for Colby
the Baptist minister. Was the Queen of Sheba white? God did not care. Here are some records of the cousins, William and Colby,
mentioned in various ways in this period. On 4 June 1842 the church appointed
“for delegates to the association Colby Sparks, Samuel J. Gambill, and William
R. Sparks.” (Everyone had Revolutionary stories: outdoing Paul Revere was Martin
Gambill's ride of a hundred miles rousing men to join the Overmountain men to
fight Patrick Ferguson.) On 4 October 1842 the Roaring River church granted the
Double Creek church its request “for a part of the ministerial labours of Bro
Colby Sparks.” He was not being discharged, he was spreading himself thinner. It
was not easy to get five or ten miles to a church, and Colby was needed in more
than one church. In January 1843 when Benjamin Spicer acknowledged being drunk
“Daniel Brown and Wm. R. Sparks” were appointed as “a select committee for the
purpose of drafting rules of decorum for the Roaring River Church.” On 4
September 1843 Colby Sparks was granted “a letter of dismission.” On 4 January
1844 he was granted his request to have an “arm” of the church convene at
Grassy Fork Meeting House.” On 4 September 1845 the Church agreed “to send for
Brother Colby Sparks to cum back again and preach for us.” On 4 March 1847
“Brother Colby Sparks come forward, acknowledged that he had felt himself to be
wrong in taking his letter from the Church, and authorized the Church to enter
his name again on the Church book,” which they did at their first meeting in
April. Colby was merely juggling congregations, wanted by more than one little
church, it seems. Nothing in the records shows that the Baptists were concerned
about his marrying the Twins to local sisters.
On 4 August
1845 the Roaring River Baptist Church heard that “London, Sister Mary Johnson’s
black man, was guilty of a base-begotten child by a white woman. It was further
stated that he did not deny the charge. Therefore, he was excluded from the
fellowship of the Church.” The slave London may not have been guilty because he
crossed racial lines and impregnated a white woman—but he may just have been
guilty of fathering a base-begotten child. On 4 February 1848 the church
“received by experience” (that is, after a profession of personal salvation)
“Charles, Mr. Owen Hall’s black man.” Admitting a black slave to fellowship did
not require debate since he said he had been saved. Personal experience with
Jesus trumped race. The Roaring River Baptist Church was admitting black slaves
into full membership and in the minutes there is no hint of any perplexity or
anxiety about their enslavement. It was none of their business that Mary
Johnson owned London. On 4 October 1848 (ignore spellings here) “William R.
Sparks reported that James Burchet and Agness Wood had been tattling and puting
forth scandolous and slanderous tales to the ingry of his wife’s credit.” A
committee found both Burchet and Wood “guilty of falsehood and slander” and
excluded them from the fellowship of the Church. The Roaring River Baptists in
its records did not concern themselves with the morality of enslavement and may
have hardly been aware of abolitionism, but they saw blacks as equal in the
sight of God. They were oblivious to any discrepancy between not questioning
Sister Mary Johnson’s and Mr. Owen Hall’s right to hold slaves yet still
respecting their black congregants as equally children of God. (The Murrell and
Sims Baptists in Hawkins County, Tennessee, acted the same way half a century
later: see Chapter 5.)
As I noted
earlier, because of the mountainous terrain fewer whites in Wilkes and Surry
owned slaves than elsewhere in the state. No one had figured out how bands of
slaves could pay their way. In a 2007 thesis “Confederate Disaffection and
Disloyalty in North Carolina’s Northwestern Foothills, 1861-1865,” Douglas
Robert Porter, Jr., points out how opposed this region was to secession from
the Union and later to being governed from Richmond, Virginia. He says, “the foothills’
disaffected population viewed the Confederate national government and North
Carolina’s original secessionists who encouraged the war as their primary enemies.”
North Carolina’s owners of many slaves (who were the major office-holders) had
forced the state into secession and war. Counties including Wilkes and Surry (thanks
to the grand conscriptor to battle Peter Mallett) lost their share of young men
at war but in numbers made up for those deaths by deserters who returning home
and especially by refugees from other counties. Month by month, the Richmond
government was more and more threatened by open unionism in the northwestern
counties and resorted to troops of cavalry to round up deserters. Once caught
they were put in cattle cars for shipment far away where they (many of them old
and infirm) could be cannon fodder. The worst thing the government at Raleigh
did was create the Home Guard to punish disloyalty. People now talk far too
casually about Hitler-like behavior but the fact is that the Home Guard created
on 7 July 1863 became a Confederate Gestapo, sadistically routing out
conscripts, deserters, and Union sympathizers and plundering houses and
brutalizing women and children.
Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863 but had no immediate impact
in northwestern North Carolina, where (I keep noting) there were few slaves and
many of those (such as those owned by the Siamese Twins, it seems) did not
assert their freedom at once. In February 1863, months before the creation of
the Home Guards, Union men gathered in the schoolhouse by the Quaker church
near Yadkinville, some of them planning to go hundreds of miles to Union lines
despite its being winter. Some were Quakers, others men who had been
conscripted into the rebel army, a deserter or two from that army, and local
Unionists. They were raided by local Confederate militia men. There was a brief
shootout, leaving dead on both sides. Some of the men in the school made it to
Union lines, through Tennessee and Kentucky. This was a local skirmish, ignored
by surviving newspapers, but known in the surrounding counties, Wilkes to the
west, Surry to the north, Ashe and Alleghany and Yadkin. And it was known to Governor
Zebulon Vance, who had owned six slaves in 1860.
On 11 May
1863 “Vance’s Proclamation” was printed with topics all terrifyingly
capitalized, sometimes italicized, so that several inches of intimidation
prefaced the document. Here I reproduce the introductory topics:
I use the legible 20 May printing in the Standard. The Proclamation went on, and
on, far longer than this long sample, addressing primarily deserters, who were
pushing toward Wilkes, Ashe, and other northwestern counties, near northern
Tennessee: “Certainly no crime could be greater, no cowardice more abject, no
treason more base, than for a citizen of the State, enjoying its privileges and
protection without sharing its dangers, to persuade those who have had the
courage to go forth in defence of their country, vilely to desert the colors
which they have sworn to uphold, when a miserable death or a vile and ignominious
existence must be the inevitable consequences. No plea can excuse it. The
father or the brother who does it should be shot instead of his deluded victim,
for he deliberately destroys the soul and manhood of his own flesh and blood.
And the same is done by him who harbors and conceals the deserter. For who can
respect either the one or the other? What honest man will ever wish or permit
his own brave sons or patriotic daughters, who bore their parts with credit in
this great struggle for independence, to associate even to the third and fourth
generations, with the vile wretch who skulked in the woods, or the still viler coward who aided him, while his
bleeding country was calling in fain for his help? Both are enemies--dangerous
enemies to their country before whom our open foes will be infinitely
preferred. Both are foes to their own kindred and noble countrymen who are electrifying
the world by their gallant deeds, and pouring out their blood upon the field of
battle to protect those very men who are sapping the vitals of our strength.
And woe unto you, deserters, and your aiders and abettors, when peace being
made and independence secured, these brave comrades whom ye have deserted in he
hour of their trial shall return honored and triumphant to their homes! Ye that
hide our guilty faces by day, and prowl like outlaws about by night, robbing
the wives and mothers of your noble defenders of their little means, while they
are far away facing the enemy, do you think ye can escape a just and damning
vengeance when the day of reckoning comes? And yet that shelter, conceal, and
feed these miserable depredators and stimulate them to their deeds, think you,
that ye will be spared? ay! rest assured, observing and never failing eyes have
marked you, every one. . . . Instead of a few scattered militia, the land will
be full of veteran soldiers, before whose honest faces you will not have
courage to raise your eyes from the earth. If permitted to live in the State at
all, you will be infamous. You will
be hustled from the polls, insulted in the streets, a jury of your countrymen
will not believe you on oath, and honest men everywhere will shun you as a
pestilence; for he who lacks courage and patriotism can have no other good
quality or redeeming virtue. . . . I am assured that no man will be shot who
shall voluntarily return to duty. This is the only chance to redeem yourselves
from the disgrace and ignominy which you are incurring.” Vance stormed, oblivious to the fact that a
minority of slave owners, like him, controlling the high offices in the state,
had pushed secession through and joined the Confederacy. From this point on Vance
was reckless in the use of the militias at his command, few and scattered no
longer, although a sardonic man who signed himself Yadkin could pretend to be
relieved when Hodges’s lost cavalry appeared--located at last! Hodges, Ellis,
Price, one after another ravaged the northwestern counties.
Not knowing
about this 11 May Proclamation, not knowing of the Bond schoolhouse shootout,
on 21 June 1863 the Springfield, Illinois State
Register picked up from a Baltimore paper exaggerated evidence that “the
permanent secession of North Carolina and Virginia cannot be expected.”
Already, the “malcontents in east Tennessee and western North Carolina have organized
powerful forces, and are joined by thousands of deserters and conscripts from
the rebel arm, to whom protection is guarantied, for the purpose of holding the
mountain regions against the rebel government. Rebel citizens have petitioned
Gov. Vance for protection against this organization. Vance replied that he has
no troops to send; that they must protect themselves. Twenty thousand
insurgents have openly offered to join the Union as soon as a military post is
established at Raleigh.” This was exaggerated, but not wholly false.
In
North Carolina itself, everyone knew of Vance’s Proclamation. Life was going on
as best it could so as not to attract the attention of the militia. On the
Fourth of July 1863, before news had reached Wilkes County from Gettysburg and
Vicksburg, the Roaring River Baptists appointed William R. Sparks as a delegate
to the Association. Then on 31 July 1863 (after the creation of the Home Guard)
Sparks took a public political stand: he chaired a Union meeting in Trap Hill. My
Cousin William R. Sparks, elderly at 66, was a Union man who simply was not
much concerned with the morality or immorality of enslaving blacks. What he
chaired was a Union meeting, not an Abolition meeting. He might have been
signing his death warrant, for all he knew. Young Sparks and Pruitt cousins
were slaughtered a few months later.
PUBLIC MEETING IN WILKES COUNTY.
“Public
meeting held at Traphill, Wilkes county, N. C., on Friday, the 31st
July, 1863, by the Conservative party.” [Here, the Conservatives were the
Unionists, wanting to conserve the Union.]
The
committee being appointed, William R. Sparks was called to the chair, and R. B.
Bryan appointed Secretary; and the following resolutions were passed and
adopted by upwards of 200 of the citizens of that vicinity:
Resolved, That we believe the time has
fully come when the people of North-Carolina should take a decided stand and
look to the interest, safety, and welfare of themselves without the fear of
Kings abroad or Monarchs at home.
Resolved, That the course of the
Confederate government towards North-Carolina from the beginning of the war,
has been any thing but fair and honorable; and that let her blood flow ever so
freely, not a word is said or charitable act done, to honor the valor or
patriotism of her sons. [In fact, injuries and deaths among North Carolina
soldiers was disproportionate.]
Resolved, That we are opposed to paying
Mr. Bradford any other man one-tenth of our products, for we do not have it to
spare, and also we are opposed to the law. [This resolution is a protest
against Major Edward Bradford, a Virginian, who had been imposed as Tithesman
upon North Carolina by the monarchial Jefferson Davis, acting as if the South
were a conquered country. Sparks is reminding the Confederacy that the
Northwest counties had been reluctant to secede, unlike the counties where
planters grew prosperous or downright rich on the labor of slaves. Lincoln's
determination to free the slaves is not at issue here: Sparks does not mention
slavery, but he sees economic unfairness for people like him.]
Resolved, That owing to the scarcity of
men to labor, as we have but few slaves in this poor mountain country, and the
vast quantity of rain which has seriously injured our crops, we have nothing
above what will supply the poor widows and orphans of our community. [Again,
the morality of slavery is not at issue: it was hard to find sufficient food
and good help.]
Resolved, That we are opposed to sending
any more troops, except such as are in favor of prosecuting the war.
Resolved, That we have a peace
Convention forthwith for the peace and safety of the people.
Resolved, That we fully endorse the
course pursued by W. W. Holden in defending the rights and liberties of
North-Carolina. [Holden despite raids on his press was keeping alive a
pro-Union newspaper in Raleigh, the Standard.]
Resolved, that these proceedings be
published in the Standard.
WM.
R. SPARKS, Chm’n. R. B. Bryan, Sec’y.
My cousin’s chairing of the meeting was an
act of great courage which determined the direction his life took.
Speaking
out could be fatal. Young George Brown [say
from where], imprisoned by Vance in Castle Thunder in Richmond (see the
Hill chapter for this notoriously vile prison for deserters, Unionists, and
others) “learned that his offence was that he had made a speech at a Peace
Meeting, and said that he would rather make his way to the North and enlist in
the Union armies than consent to fight against his old flag in Virginia.” (Raleigh
Constitution 23 August 1876).
The
Secretary of the meeting Sparks chaired, Robert B. Bryan, lived out his life at
Trap Hill, dying there at almost 70 early in 1890. He left land to each of his
sons as well as 73 acres in Surry County, some more in Wilkes County, and some
land “in the mountains.” Any unpleasant consequences for the public meeting did
not destroy his life in Trap Hill. He was lucky. Soon after the Union meeting
Sparks chaired, hell broke out in Wilkes County.
In
the April 1961 North Carolina Historical
Review vol. 38 Ina W. Van Noppen published “The Significance of Stoneman’s
last raid,” Part II. There she quoted James Gwyn, a Wilkes County diarist:
“Union sympathizers had been very active in Wilkes County,” for at least two
years before 1865. On 1 September 1863 “Gwyn had written of a Union meeting in
Wilkesboro gotten up by deserters and citizens in Trap Hill, Mulberry, and
Roaring River areas, tho ‘Marched into Town and rode together (some of the
company being mounted) sent out pickets upon all the roads leading to Town--and
then raised the Union flag.’” Then they made “Union or peace speeches.” They
“will rue the day I guess before long,” Gwyn concluded. The Stars and Stripes
waved in Trap Hill a month after Cousin William chaired that a Union Meeting.
The
Raleigh Progress (7 September 1863)
headlined a piece “Organized for Resistance.” A gentleman had described “a sad
state of things in Wilkes county”: “He has been informed and believes that
there is an organized band of deserters and tories [here, meaning men loyal to
the Union] at or near Trap Hill, composed of deserters from that section, from
several of the States South of us, and some citizens who have never been in the
army. They are said to number about 600, have regularly elected officers and
have all taken the oath to support the Lincoln government. They are armed and
express a determination to resist all State and Confederate authority.”
The
Progress on 13 September told just
where deserters in Iredell County were headed: “About one hundred and sixty
deserters were on their way to the rendezvous, but would not advance nearer
than Warren’s bridge, (three miles distant from the place of meeting,) on
learning of the presence of the Guard. The supposition was that they were
waiting for reinforcements from Trap Hill, in Wilkes county, and intended
attacking the next day; but the Guard were disappointed on reaching the place
of an anticipated battle the following morning, the deservers having skedaddled
to the mountains in Wilkes.” (The “Guard” is the new Home Guard, sadistic
fanatics who brutalized families and destroyed their food in hunting down
deserters and Unionists, learning fast to act very like (this is not an
exaggeration) a Confederate Gestapo.)
On 28 September
1863 the Fayetteville Observer
printed a letter from a man in the 56th Regiment, “dated at Trap
Hill, (foot of the Blue Ridge,) Wilkes county, Sept. 22d.” He had made two
expeditions into the mountains: “During the first (which kept us out two or
three days) the deserters ambushed us in the mountain gorges and fired at us,
but no one was hit. During the second we were unmolested. We have caught some
80 or more deserters and conscripts; but the mountains are full of them, and it
is almost impossible to catch them, as they can move from mountain to mountain
as we approach.” The piece concludes: “I had a grand view yesterday of the
Pilot Mountain, which is 40 miles distant.” No one could be wholly oblivious to
natural beauty whatever the moral issues raging about.
A writer in the
Raleigh Progress (17 April 1864),
reviewing the summer of 1863, understood that deserters from the Confederacy,
not just from North Carolina but also those from states to the south, might
have banded together to fight the Home Guard. “Their object, it is believed by
a very large majority of the good and loyal citizens, was nothing more or less
than to keep out of service and avoid fighting a war in which they believed
they had little or no interest at stake. This is, I think, a true history of
the Trap Hill Rebellion, ‘a mole hill
magnified into a mountain;’ but it served the purpose of certain men in the
country for certain purposes and enabled them to play upon the credulity of the
governments, both Confederate and State, and to unduly alarm them by greatly
exaggerated pictures of ublic opinion and actual danger. These men are well
known and understood by the people here. A majority of them were furious
secessionists and war man, ear marks that Gov. Vance told the people
distinguished that hybrid race of animals generally; and I will add who shout
loudest and do less that is useful or good than any similar number of the human
race. . . . But silent contempt was all that good and loyal men would have
visited upon them had they not invited other and greater evils upon their
country--namely military tyranny and a reckless soldiery to insult and trample
upon the rights and feelings of a whole community--affixing a hideous mark upon
them, pointing the Parthian arrow of the malicious with envenomed poison
against the innocent in future history. What is now the condition of Wilkes
county? Since the advent of an army into her borders last summer, with the
failure in a great degree of last year’s crop, with impressing officers from
Tennessee and almost every part of the compass, artillerymen, cavalry and
roving bands, whether of actual soldiers or freebooters, God only knows, I am
told, and truly I doubt not, that this county and others adjacent to the Blue
Ridge have been skinned, gutted, quartered, and generally bereft of nearly all
that is necessary to the sustenance of the human or brute creation--and this in
direct violation of the positive law of Congress governing the impressment of
provisions.” The writer had examples of misery inflicted by officers, as taking
“the only work oxen of a widow woman--of women whose husbands and sons are in
the army.” as taking “oxen out of the plow” and driving off milk cattle. The
army had invaded Wilkes County in the summer of 1863, the summer William R.
Sparks chaired a Union meeting in Trap Hill. That must have been part of the “Trap Hill Rebellion.”
On
17 October 1863 the New Orleans Times-Picayune,
a month late, quoted from North Carolina papers (its “Northern exchanges”): “a
severe battle was fought by Lieut. Roberts, with forty Confederate soldiers . .
. resulting in the capture of four and the killing of two or three of the
traitors, who have sent to Trap Hill for reinforcements. The Charlotte Bulletin was quoted there as proposing
“to Hang Tories”--the word more and more regularly used for Unionists. On 22
December Holden’s Standard reported
“Outrages by the Military”: “We continue to receive complaints as to the bad
conduct of some of the Confederate troops in the Western part of this State.
The ladies of Wilkes County complain that a detachment of troops in the
neighborhood of Trap Hill, instead of arresting deserters in a proper way, are
plundering houses, taking grain, stock, and provisions from women and Children,
getting drunk, fiddling, dancing, &c. And a friend writes us from the same
County that some of the soldiers have recently driven from thirty to forty head
of cattle to Jefferson, Ashe County, sold them to the highest bidder, and
pocketed the money. Can this be possible?”
“Can
this be possible?” is a question to be asked in the Raleigh Constitution (on 26 October 1876) about
a detailed account of “The Laurel Spring Massacre. Old Men and Young Boys
Hanged” dated from Mulberry Township, Wilkes County, 21 October 1876. The occasion
is Zebulon Vance’s run for re-election. The writer says he has just visited the
neighborhood, in 1876, and talked to everyone, Democrat and Republican, and
that they all agreed that (year not specified) Vance’s “subordinate, Price” had
“hanged seventeen Union men at Laurel Springs” because Price falsely claimed
that they had raped his sister. He says that Vance claims this rape in 1876
speeches. He admitted uncertainty: “Seventeen or eighteen men and boys were
hanged by Price and his company at Laurel Springs. It is in Ashe county, near
the Wilkes and Alleghany lines--three miles beyond the Blue Ridge on the road
from Wilkesboro to the ‘Mouth of Wilson,’ in Virginia. It was the headquarters
of Price after he organized a company of mounted men to carry out Vance’s
policy of ‘fire and sword.’” (Isaiah
66:16 KJV.) Here, he continues, “this miscreant brought men and boys from
the three counties and hanged them for no other offence except ‘lying
out’--that is to say, keeping out of the way of the conscript officers.” I
would not verify the details, but that is not surprising, records are so few. I
found John (old Jack) Holloway and his son David of the right age, but that
David lived on far past 1865. Could someone else identify most of the names, so
you can put discrepancies down to simple mistakes with names? So many outrages
occurred that they blurred together and many went unrecorded or mentioned and
quickly forgotten.
Take the headline
“The Laurel Spring Massacre” to Google and
what you get is the Shelton Laurel massacre in Madison County. This is what
Settle, the rival candidate for Governor, said in 1876. Weekly
Constitution (Raleigh, North Carolina) · Thu,
17 August, 1876 [but ck ]After quoting the “fire and sword”
as to what would happen to deserters or their friends, Settle said, “When you
go [to] the county of Wilkes and learn how seventeen Union men were hanged on
one pole, and house after house was burned, and man after man was shot down,
you will learn how the spirit of this letter was carried out there.”
Washington National
Republican 15 September 1876 listed some of Vance’s atrocities against men
with Union principles: “Thomas Ray was shot because he cut himself loose and
attempted to escape from the soldiers, who were forcing him into the rebel
service. Vance’s troops murdered W. H. Brown, of Wilkes county, a Quaker and a
peace man, for the sin of refusing to fight for the rebels. He treated all the
Quakers in the most cruel manner: t[h]reatened them with fire and sword: asked Lee
for troops to quarter on them. Brown was 70 years old, very fleshy and unable
to walk with comfort. They drove him ten miles on the double-quick, prompted by
bayonets, comelled him to wade the river, threw him into jail, from all which
he died. In Wilkes county alone he arrested, or caused to be arrested and punished, over one hundred Union men, or men who were conscientiously opposed to
war, and especially a war to perpetuate slavery. Fire and sword were his instruments. A record
of his atrocities would shock the moral sense of the civilized world.
The National Republican
on 25 September 1876 cited many of the atrocities committed by Vance’s men: “No
savages ever turned with more cruel hatred against their foes than did these
people against their neighbors, solely because they were Union men or
non-combatants. Quakers, whose scruples all civilized nations respect, come in
for their share of the cruelties inflicted.” He added: “The same spirit is now
manifested towards the colored men. If in power to-day, in their present mood,
we could hope for nothing like justice. Men who will not tolerate an honest
difference, will murder and burn for that difference, will not be mollified by
race and color added. And, therefore, it is not best to trust them with too
much power until well tried.” Vance had, already, been well tried.
In Wilkes
County Sketches J. Jay Anderson calls Trap Hill “a haven for Union
sympathizers led by John Quincy Adams Bryan,” who conveyed almost a thousand
men from Wilkes County into Tennessee where they could join the Union Army. On
21 November 1863 Bryan was leading fifty-some men to Union lines when they
paused to eat at Limestone Cove, in Tennessee, some eighty miles from home. In
the group were Pruitt and Sparks cousins of mine from Trap Hill (there may have
been other connections, but Colby’s wife was a Pruitt). John and William Sparks
were great grandsons of Solomon Sparks the “celebrated Tory” and their [grand?]
father Reuben (1799-1878) was a first cousin of Colby and William R Sparks.
Over in Tennessee, Bryan’s band was eating breakfast, not on the watch when
they were surprised by Confederate cavalry. Most escaped. My cousin Matthew
Pruitt of Trap Hill was shot in the stomach but survived. When Jacob Pruitt
applied for a pension after the war he got a doctor’s explanation that the ball
truck him “on the left side of spinal column, passing out through the stomach
about one half of an inch above the navel.” The raiders used their gun butts on
my twenty-year-old cousin Preston Pruitt after shooting him, so that his brains
were spilled out from the skull. Word was that he implored the fiends to send
word to his mother than he was dead. My cousin John Sparks, also 20, was shot
in the head. The bullet “completely tore the top of his head off, leaving his
brains perfectly exposed,” says Hardy. His brother, a young William Sparks,
being ill already, was indoors when the raid started, and hidden under a loose
floorboard until he could escape, in women’s clothing.
This
was a massacre, although the details are suppressed or disputed. Would you believe how Parson Brownlow, the fanatic of my Chapter 10,
described the massacre in the Knoxville Whig
on April 16, 1864? Would you believe the refutation by Madison T. Peoples in
the Bristol TN Gazette for a month
later, 6 May? Even the name of the murdering squad is disputed. The names of
the injured and dead are not disputed, but the grisliest details are often
denied. Without always taking credit for authorship,
my Schlemp cousin Frederick Slimp (on my mother’s side, not kin to the Sparkses
and Pruitts) wrote much of the 1903 History
of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry. In “The Massacre at
Limestone Cove” he tells the story but refuses to tell all he knows: “We have
omitted some details of cruelties in the foregoing account, it being bad enough
in the mildest form we are able to relate it.” (Like me, the actor Campbell
Scott is a Schlemp, and politicians named Schlemp still are active in Virginia,
where the family first settled.) Being Union men was a life or death affair.
Did the Pruitt and Sparks boys attend when their grandfather’s first cousin
chaired the Union Meeting in July? Did anyone in the family blame Cousin
William for chairing the meeting?
While
never carrying news of the Limestone Cove Massacre, the Standard re-used the title “Outrages by the Military” on 17
February 1864: “We continue to receive letters from citizens and the wives of
soldiers, complaining in the most earnest terms of depredations committed by
roving bands of soldiers in the Western part of this State. A reliable
correspondent had reported on “the depredations and injuries inflicted by Gen.
Hodges’ cavalry brigade,” a portion of which “visited Wilkes County, and
scourged the people terribly, especially in the Trap Hill neighborhood,” where
the people are “comparatively unarmed and defenceless,” at “the mercy of those
roving bands.” General Hodges’ cavalry raid has all but disappeared from
history but he rampaged in Wilkes County about January and February 1864.
The Raleigh Constitution (28 September 1876) wrote “in
addition to these horrors in Wilkes county in 1874 [an error for 1864], Capt.
Price, with a band of Home Guards from Ashe and Alleghany counties, made a raid
on the Union people of Wilkes, entering the county about the head of Mulberry
creek, ‘with fire and sword,’ in
accordance with Gov. Vance’s letter to Dr. Calloway. They burned Johnson
Candle’s dwelling and outhouses, and hunted him like a wild deer; and they show
Lewis Sebastian, Esq., one of the worthiest men of the county, a member of the
Special Court. They also shot several of his neighbors, and captured a number
of persons, and returned to Alleghany county with them as prisoners. Two of these they hung on the way, and left
them hanging, denying them burial . . . .”
On 23 August 1864 the Charlotte Western Democrat reprinted “Trouble in
Wilkes” from the Statesville Express:
We learn that a report was brought by an officer from Wilkes county, one day
last week, that the troops sent to arrest deserters in the neighborhood of Trap
Hill, had quite a severe skirmish with a large number of these miscreants in
that section on Tuesday and Wednesday last. Some four or five of Capt.
McMillan’s company are reported to have been killed, likewise two or three of
the Home Guard. If such is the case, and we have no reason to doubt, this is
truly a sad state of affairs in our neighboring county. We hope that every
possible means will be used to drive these worse than Yankees from the State
and render it too hot for them to return. We have heard no particulars more
than that a fight actually did take place and that the troops were compelled to
retreat with the loss stated.”
In 1876 Judge Settle reviewed this when
he ran against Vance for Governor, as the Constitution reported (17 ck ?19 October 1876):
“During the war he sent his militia and home guards throughout every nook and
corner in North Carolina, and conscripted men in many instances, unfit for
duty, and were carried to the capital, right under his eyes, and taken to the
camp of Peter Mallett, where cattle cars stood ready to receive them.” [DATE
this] Col. Peter Mallett, “Commanding Conscripts, N. C.” was charged with
notifying owners of captured runaway slaves (“MARGARET, aged about 14 years,
black complexion, 5 feet 1 ½ inches high, property of Samuel Woodley,
Washington county, N. C.”). His grander wartime duty was to collect all men
between eighteen and thirty-five years of age under the conscription act and sent
them to war. A resourceful man, he thought of using cattle cars for his
conscripts: “They were rushed into these cattle cars, rushed across the line
into Virginia, and into the forefront of battle . . . . He rushed through these
men with such indecent haste as practicably to deny them all benefit from the
laws of their country.”
Dating Vance’s policy
of fire and sword is difficult. For what it is worth, the Raleigh Constitution
on 17 August 1876 as a boxed-in six line reminder:
Perhaps
1864 is safer.
In a
letter dated 15 September 1864 Vance wrote: I think it time the loyal citizens
of Wilkes should know their own minds, and should put down desertion by all
means and at all hazards. If the deserters in Wilkes, that are daily
reinforcing Kirk, were at their post, regular troops could be spared for your
defence.” Vance is fantasizing here. George Kirk, a Union man from Tennessee,
was raiding Confederates in northwestern North Carolina in competition with
Confederates raiding Union sympathizers in northwestern North Carolina. Did the
twain meet? Vance continued: “No countenance of favor must be shown to a
deserter or his friends. It is my fixed
purpose to visit them with fire and sword, if they refuse to surrender by the
25th of this month, and their friends will fare little better.”
After those italics he added: “With the 68th regiment, and the Home
Guards, it seems to me that Kirk ought to be kept back” (that is, driven out of
western Tennessee). “It is all the chance any how.”
On 23 June 1866 Holden printed in the Standard three letters from northwest counties. From Surry a friend
wrote that “secession still rules in a dead Confederacy with whip and spur.”
The rebels “have no respect for the rights of Union men, but hate and persecute
them. . . . The militia has been organized, and the rebels are again armed with
the sword and musket to murder Union men.” Last May, he remembered, “these same
rebels begged for their property and lives, but now they are as bitter and
overbearing as ever.”
In the second
letter, a friend wrote Holden from Ashe County at the request of other Union
men. He had bad news from “this mountain country.” Men boasted “that they were
stronger rebels than before.” It was “not safe for a Union man to acknowledge
his principles. Murders who boast of their deeds in slaying Union men during
the rebellion, walk about unmolested.” Worse, he knew something darkly
malicious was at work but had no name for it: “I have been told by one who
knows, that the rebels have secret meetings, for what purpose I know not.” He did
not have a name for what became the KKK.
A friend from Wilkes
County wrote: “We are passing through a terrible bread crisis up here in the
mountains. Many poor families have neither meat nor bread, but live scantily on
vegetables salted, but not otherwise seasoned. Our famers were panic-stricken
at the appearance of ruse in the wheat a couple of weeks ago, but in spite of
appearances wheat and rye will be pretty good. Oats never looked better, and
corn is promising. Harvest will give some relief, but there are many too poor
to share in it. The government ought to extend help, as it has done in Georgia
and elsewhere. There has never been a government ration issued to any one in
the loyal and oppressed County of Wilkes--not as much as a peck of meal or pound
of bacon to a single one of her sons and daughters. How have disloyal Counties
fared? Will not the authorities send us some grain to Statesville, exclusively
for the very poor and helpless?” He continued: “If the rebellion had never been
set on foot all these sufferings, with thousands of horrors, would have been
averted from our people; and if the leaders in this State, with Gov. Vance at
their head, had united with us in 1863 to arrest the war and make peace, our
condition would have been a paradise compared with what it is now. And yet
these men of blood, who have beggared, starved, and ruined our people, are
still to be our rulers and masters!”
On 11 September 1866 the Standard published “Public Meeting in Wilkesboro” on 1 September, a
“large and respectable portion” of the Union citizens of Wilkes County to
nominate candidates for the next Legislature. The 4th and 5th
resolutions demonstrate the citizens’ attempt to grapple with a problem that
had hardly caught they attention, day to day, before the war, except for the
Quakers and surely some others. They resolved that “secession was abolition,
unsuspected by its votaries, but nevertheless abolition; and that for the evils
growing out of emancipation we are not in any way responsible; and having had
but few slaves, are comparatively exempt from the evils affecting the other
sections, yet our judgments are awakened to a conviction that the peace and
prosperity of the Southern country requires that the white and black races be
separated.”
The Union voters of
Wilkes County at Willesboto showed themselves (we would say) as dense,
ignorant, and naïve. Resolution #5 is worse: They resolved that “we earnestly
advise that, by bounties, the colored people be induced to emigrate to their
father land, Africa, and that the United States government tender to the
American Colonization Society idle war vessels to be used in their transportation
to Liberia; and that the Secretary of this meeting communicate a copy of this
resolution to the Secretary of the Colonization Society, with a request that it
be laid before Congress.”
The
Sparks and Pruitt boys who were slaughtered just over in Tennessee in November
1863 were staunch Unionists who knew that rich (slave-owning) citizens
elsewhere in North Carolina were in power and therefore able to push through
the vote on secession, and some of the Confederates, most conspicuously Zebulon
Vance, punished them--had for years injured and killed them at will and had
destroyed crops and burned their houses. The survivors just could not realize
that they were not so isolated as to escape facing up to financial and political
and moral issues involving blacks whom they had never seen, day to day (except
when some white Baptists sat new a black man or woman or two in church). They
could not imagine the problems, and certainly not possible solutions.
Perhaps
William R. Sparks was at the Wilkesboro meeting. If he did, what did think when
John Q. A. Bryan was nominated for the House of Commons? Did the Sparks and
Pruitt families and their connections blame Bryan for not keeping pickets at
Limestone Cove? Did William R. Sparks’ chairing the public Union meeting
inspire the boys to make they way to Union lines? Given all we know about
Vance’s raids on Trap Hill, it seems that Sparksmust have been a marked man
since his chairing the public meeting on 31 July 1863.
After
the war, the Roaring River Baptists punished some of the Confederates (while
outside the church Unionists were being punished). On 4 October 1865, the
Church sent out two men to “invite Marshel Brown to attend our next Church
meeting and render his excuse for being with a ban[d] of rob[b]ers and other
bad conduct, and for being rebil and a great manny other things.” That is, he
is accused of being with a Confederate group of raiders. In November they met,
being able to prove the charges against Brown. He refused to admit his acts,
and “was then excluded by the Church for a disorderly member.” He was not wrong
merely for being a rebel but for being one of a group of raiders. This had
repercussions. On 4 January 1866 “Brother Alford Johnson . . . withdrew from
the Roaring River Church on the account of being disatisfide with the dission
of the Church against Marshel Brown.” As late as March 1866 Samuel Johnson came
forward and made acknowledgment for voliertiern in the rebellion.” The church
was united against rebels who had volunteered--though anyone who had been
drafted might have been forgiven? Was the Church torn apart by the war?
In
November 1865 William R. Sparks and his wife asked for letters of dismission
from the Roaring River Baptist Church. He was in his late 60s, but he left his
lifelong home and made his way to Floyd County, Virginia, the second county
north, with his wife and at least two of his grown children. (Martha, 21, and
Whitfield, 20, were there in 1870; others may have come, at first.) Why go
there? Wikipedia has the answer just waiting for us: “Floyd County is an
anomaly in Virginia politics, being a solidly Republican county even during the
height of the Democratic ‘Solid South.’" The "county's inhabitants
largely deserted the Confederate army during the Civil War, so that it was
one of very few white areas in antebellum slave states to endorse Radical
Reconstruction.”
Rand Dotson rigorously covers the topic
in “‘The Grave and Scandalous Evil Infected to Your People’: The Erosion of
Confederate Loyalty in Floyd County, Virginia” (Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 108, No. 4 (2000),
393-434). Desertion from Confederate armies were high, especially in 1863 and
1864. Then, says Dotson, “In 1867, when Virginia called for local delegates to
a constitutional convention, the county’s former Unionist sheriff, Ferdinand
Winston, decided to run for the position as a Radical Republican. . . . Even though
the Republican Party floundered elsewhere in southwestern Virginia, on election
day Floyd County’s voters delivered a coup
de grâce to their antebellum leaders by sending Winston to Richmond.” Having
worshipped in church with black slaves, Sparks now in all likelihood dealt for
the first time with black local officials.
In August 1869 William R. Sparks wrote to
his daughter, Fanny Vannoy, in Wilkes County. He could not help Fanny just
then, “being purty hard run about money” himself. He regretted “the confused
state of the churches” in Wilkes County: “I am sorry to hear it. I am sorry to
hear that the Old Roaring River Church which has been a mother church about one
hundred years and now has no parson.” In
what must have seemed like exile for his Union principles during the war, he died
in 1880 far away from his troop of kinfolks in Wilkes County. Words, he knew,
could get you killed, or get young kinsmen killed. He was braver to speak than
we can easily realize, and those great nephews were braver to try to get to the
Union lines than we can easily realize. Judging Colby and William, judging
Chang and Eng--well, leave that to purer souls than ours.
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