A third generation had grown to manhood at Pall Mall.
In Fentress county, the polling of the vote upon secession was marked
with bloodshed. The county was on the military border between the free
and the slaveholding states. Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder, but
few of the mountaineers were owners. Slavery as an institution did not
appeal to their Anglo-Saxon principles; poverty had prevented slavery's
advance into the mountains as a custom, and as racial distinction was
not to be clearly defined into master and worker, the negro's presence
in the mountains was unwelcomed. A war to uphold a custom they did not
practise did not appeal to them; so as a great wedge the Alleghany
mountains, extending far into the slaveholding states, was peopled with
Union sympathizers.
Fentress county on the slope of the great mountain range and on the
border between the territory firmly held by the North and by the South
became a no-man's land, subjected successively to marauding bands from
each side, a land for plunder and revenge.
Before the war the county had been sharply divided politically, and with
few exceptions that alignment held. Those who were Union sympathizers
went north into Kentucky and joined the Federal forces, and those on the
side of the South went for enlistment in the armies of the Confederacy.
Pages:
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77