May 16th, 2016 – Our 86th meeting!! We continue our seventh year.
The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, May 16th, 2016, in the visitor’s center of Ft. Negley Park, a unit of Metro Parks, Nashville, TN. This is located off I-65 just south of downtown between 4th Avenue South and 8th Avenue South on Edgehill Avenue/Chestnut Avenue. Take Exit 81, Wedgewood Avenue, off I-65 and follow the signs to the Science Museum.
The meeting begins at 7:00 PM and is always open to the public.
Our Speaker and Topic - “The Civil War In Appalachia” (based on his book “Contested Borderland – The Civil War In Appalachian Kentucky And Virginia”)
For the four years of Civil War, the Appalachian borderland was a place of constant struggle. There, the geographic features combined with political uncertainty and military invasion by both of the opposing armies to create a largely partisan conflict with bushwhacking and civil disorder as important elements.
The complex nature of regional loyalty appeared from the first days of the conflict when a divided Kentucky refused to call a secession convention while Virginia vacillated between union and disunion. By summer 1861, however, that question had been settled with Kentucky remaining loyal to the Union and Virginia joining the young Confederacy. Along the border, many avowed Unionists and Confederates stiffened their backs in expectation of the long struggle ahead. But at the same time, large segments of the contested region’s population chose to either take a neutral stance or to waver between both armies in an effort to avoid being dragged into the conflict as active participants. It was out of this borderland mentality of warfare that the bushwhacking tradition grew.
As the war progressed, these irregular participants began growing more attached to whatever army occupied their region. In eastern Kentucky, future President James Garfield’s victory at Middle Creek proved the deciding factor in ensuring popular support for his cause. Across the mountain in southwestern Virginia, however, the Confederacy enjoyed substantial strength until well into 1864. Even that support would erode, however, as the Union’s tide swept through the mountain gaps and into previously secure territory. By the last days of the war, many formerly loyal Virginians refused Confederate soldiers’ requests for food, clothing, or shelter.
Despite the close of the conflict, partisan violence remained a constant on both sides of the Cumberland Mountains. In the years that followed, state militias sometimes had to be ordered into mountain counties to maintain order and ensure that local courts functioned. It is little wonder that a year after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, some mountain residents still wondered if the war was finally over.
Brian McKnight is Professor of History and a Founding Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at UVa-Wise. He is a specialist in contested and coerced loyalties and is the author of Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, which won the James I. Robertson Literary Award; and Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, which won the Tennessee Library Award for best book in Tennessee history. His most recent book is titled “We Fight For Peace”: The Story of Twenty-Three American Soldiers, Prisoners of War, and Turncoats in the Korean War. His other writings have been featured in the New York Times and his work on Korean War prisoners of war was profiled in the New Yorker.
Brian is currently at work on a volume of writings on guerrilla warfare in the Civil War and is coauthoring with Gary Robert Matthews a biography of Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner.
Brian grew up in Virginia’s westernmost county and received his undergraduate degree from UVa-Wise and his Ph.D., from Mississippi State University. When he is not teaching or researching, he is usually on his farm planting fruit trees, building fences, and keeping bees.