Civil War North Carolina and Today's Unrest

 

Lately I’ve been reading The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman. Being a fairly new North Carolina transplantee, I am slowly acquainting myself with state history. Given that North Carolina was a Confederate state, the implications of that I have been unaware of until picking up this book.

There were separate pockets of Confederate and Union sympathizers, often within the same community and neighborhood. In general, most of the Union sympathizers were in the cities and the Confederates were in more rural areas. However, often even families had divided sympathies, which led to the assertion that the Civil War was “brother vs. brother”.

As the Union Army won more of the battles, Union sympathizers migrated north to cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, the Union Army Headquarters. Some family members urged their family members who were Confederate soldiers, to desert. Even though Confederate Army deserters were often shot or hanged, as time went on, they often eluded capture as the Confederate Army was unable to apprehend the masses of deserters lining the roads.

The brutality shown deserters, enemy soldiers, and even non-military residents, was shocking. In January 1863, a group of about 50 local men raided storehouses in Marshall in Madison County. Since the Confederate Army had demanded most of the farmers’ crops and livestock for army use, local residents were too often starving, so it is easy to understand why the food was stolen. Colonel Garrett was ordered to arrest the men and prepare them for trial; however, a Lieutenant Colonel had 19 of them shot, and even tortured some of their wives, as well.

The key issue being fought for, slavery, was not generally forefront in this struggle, according to Dykeman and several other sources, at least to the North Carolinians whose lives were being disrupted, their farms raided and destroyed by occupying armies, and their family members killed and wounded in a war they didn’t fully comprehend. As the war progressed, many of the mountain men who, early on, had joined up with the Confederate Army, went over to the Union side. It could not have been easy to accept that wealthy landowners who owned at least 20 slaves, could get out of serving in the Confederate Army.

I see a parallel with the current political situation we see today, and, for example, the angry mob incited by Trump to storm the Capitol on January 6th. The dissatisfaction felt by Civil War Era North Carolinians whose livelihoods were destroyed by the occupation army can be likened to the masses of folks in this country now who are struggling to survive. Most people are experiencing some measure of financial insecurity with the high rate of homelessness, exorbitant price of prescription drugs, insurance company fraud, high rents and real estate costs, lack of affordable housing, lack of affordable childcare, and the list goes on…

One per cent of the population controls 80 percent of the wealth in this country. While I don’t condone the tactics used by Trump’s rioters, I do feel that there is a wave rising up within the population that enough is enough. Given that the United States has never been a true democracy, at least we have had more prosperous times, and conditions in which citizens could demonstrate in the streets against injustice much more freely. The number of mass shootings and violence against people of color is escalating. My question is: What are we going to do about it?