Southern Dissenters

Tennessee teenager Melvina Stevens became the symbol of the "Nameless Heroines" who aided escaped prisoners. This illustration of her daring feat appeared in The Secret Service, the Field, The Dungeon, and the Escape (1865).

The Kindness of Strangers

As thousands of escaped prisoners spread across the southern landscape, they soon realized the daunting task that lay ahead of them. The hundreds of miles of land between them and their destinations was unfamiliar, hostile territory. The prisoners were already malnourished from their time in the prison camps, and their clothing and shoes had been tattered and frayed long before they escaped. It was clear that if these fugitive Federals wanted to reach Union lines, they were going to need help.

The Yankees interacted with enslaved people and white southerners under conditions very different from that of their comrades, who marched as part of invading armies. These escapees were vulnerable, disoriented, and totally reliant on the goodwill and aid of enslaved people, deserters, and Unionists operating to undermine Confederate authority. These interactions challenged Yankee’s prejudices and stereotypes about the South, and those reporting to Union lines were quick to credit the brave men and women who had helped them navigate the collapsing Confederate state.

Enslaved People

During the final years of the Civil War, enslaved people were already working to undermine Confederate operations. Escaping granted personal liberation, but slowing down production and various acts of defiance served to disrupt the very institution of slavery itself. Once escaped Union prisoners began showing up on their doorsteps in droves, enslaved people knew that the Confederacy was vulnerable and began to ramp up their operations. They used their existing prewar resistance infrastructure to ferry prisoners from place to place along hidden paths and hid them in areas previously used to shield runaways and truants. When southern patrols would set up pickets to catch escaping fugitives, enslaved people would set up counter pickets to warn them away. When Yankees showed up at their homes, enslaved people would share their already meager food stores with them; fugitives arriving to Union lines at Hilton Head reported that they “would divide their last mouthful with us."

Published narratives of escaped prisoners often featured an illustration of enslaved people providing food. This one appeared in Albert D. Richardson's The Secret Service, the Field, The Dungeon, and the Escape (1865).

Fugitives that made contact with enslaved people would often fall to their ingrained assumptions about racial superiority, believing them to be innately loyal and generous to the whites who led them. This mentality did not necessarily make escaped prisoners likable, but enslaved people knew that helping the Yankees would ultimately hurt the Confederacy. Every prisoner that made it back to Union lines added to the strength of the army that would bring slavery to its end. In addition to a military act, many enslaved people saw their assistance as a religious undertaking. Their Christian faith tied the aid they gave escapees to the coming of jubilee: the time that God had ordained to free them from bondage. Willard Glazier, an escaped cavalry officer, and the rest of his party participated in a prayer meeting led by a slave named Zeb, who asked God to be with them on their journey, lift them through all danger, and for the “year of jubilee come for sure.” The arrival of Yankees into their homes signaled that God’s promise was being fulfilled, and in order to bring about jubilee, the Confederacy had to be defeated.

The slave’s resistance quickly became organized, and soon escapees were being ferried between established stops and hiding places by multiple slave guides. This was the slave’s greatest service to the Yankees, and their guidance to Union lines through hostile territory was paramount. Fugitive Benjamin Hasson fondly remembers the deeds of Ben Foster, a slave who carried him from hiding place to hiding place when he was too weak to walk. Alonzo Jackson, a slave whose stable was plundered by Rebel cavalry, used his flatboat to ferry fugitives down the Pee Dee River, utilizing his knowledge of Confederate picket locations and Yankee gunboat routes to get them to safety. Many Yankees were amazed at the remarkable knowledge enslaved people possessed of the physical and human geography of their neighborhoods, down to individual stones, trees, and paths. They had vast communication networks that would keep track of Union and Rebel troop movements alike, helping them to warn escapees about patrols and gauge the chances of Union victory in a region. Fugitives that reached Union lines universally gave credit to the enslaved people that had helped them, and as escapee J. L. Paston succinctly put it, “We could not have got along without them.”

Deserters

As the conflict dragged on and more and more men were conscripted into the military and away from their communities, southerners began to feel the pains of war. The Confederate government had commandeered many community’s foodstores and production capabilities to support their war machine, leaving little left for the people who lived there. In South Carolina, the manpower situation in the state was so dire that there were not enough men in some areas to produce even basic subsistence, and food had to be imported. Because men were needed on the front lines, there were few left to defend interior southern communities, and townspeople were forced to organize themselves to maintain some semblance of order. Diminished production on farms, starving communities, and a plague of escaped Union prisoners on the home front forced soldier’s hands, making them choose between their loyalty to the Confederacy and their loyalty to their families. For many, the choice was an obvious one.

Entire companies of soldiers deserted and returned home to protect their families. While many deserters hid in the woods close to their homes, others formed bands in the mountains, numbering up to 500. They drilled regularly, patrolling for and fighting against conscription officials and state Guard for Home Defense units that were created to hunt them down. Regions became battle grounds as deserters conducted raids and stole from Rebel families. Attempts by state governments to take more serious action against these deserters only served to embolden them and escalate the conflicts. Soon, conscripts no longer reported when drafted, as they saw how helpless the state was against these gangs.

The deserters did not operate alone. Confederate authorities would come to realize that without the aid of women and children, their resistance would not be as effective and widespread. Women like Mary Estes became essential to the conflict. Mary was a forty-one year old wife and mother of five who supported a gang of deserters led by her husband, William Estes, in North Carolina. Although her husband was the one who carried arms, authorities considered Mary to be just as dangerous to their cause. Mary supplied the men with food and clothes, carried messages, and piloted men through remote mountain passages. Her activities were so important that the Guard for Home Defense watched her for days at a time, raided her home, and tortured her children to get information out of her; Mary never conceded. The assistance women provided to the fighting was vital, and soon they became targets of state troops, who frequently tortured them and destroyed their homes to get information. Authorities knew that in order to beat these deserter gangs, they had to defeat the women that fueled them.

Escaped prisoners who came across deserters did so cautiously. Deserters were suspicious of anyone they did not know, and the mutual distrust between parties made for some of the most dangerous moments of the fugitives' journeys. However, prisoners who successfully made contact found that deserters were willing to provide aid to their cause. They hid Yankees in their mountainous or swampy lairs, their wives fed, clothed, and guided them, and children scouted ahead to warn them when danger was approaching. Many of these deserters may have been secessionists when the war began, but the food shortages and failure of the Confederate state to properly defend their homes forced their hand. Aiding escaped Union prisoners only expanded hostilities, serving as a clear act of disloyalty and showing that deserters and their wives did not just desire to withdraw from the state for their families, they were actively working to undermine it.

Portrait of William Estes from Fast and Loose in Dixie (1880).

Unionists

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the lines between “combatant” and “noncombatant” became blurred as the Confederacy found itself waging irregular warfare on multiple fronts. Self-constituted bands of Unionists waged a war of resistance and self-defense, working to destabilize Confederate authority at the local level. While these Unionists were not combatants in the eyes of the state, the war continued because of their support. Companies of the Guard for Home Defense destroyed their property, arrested and held them indefinitely, intimidated women and children, and killed suspected guerrillas. In these battlefields of suspicion and distrust, Unionists had to adopt masks to survive.

Secret societies were formed, using codes to identify each other through the course of daily business. Members infiltrated the state militia and Guard for Home Defense, alerting deserters and draft dodgers about incoming patrols and raids. They served as sheriffs, justices of the peace, and magistrates in their communities, making prosecution under Confederate law impossible. They would even provide food to deserters, encouraging them to terrorize loyal citizens. The geographic scale and number of Unionist secret societies were a substantial threat to Confederate conscription efforts.

Robert Hamilton, Unionist deputy sheriff and justice of the peace for Transylvania County, NC. Image online at Transylvania County Library.

When the fugitive Federals began to arrive into their region, Unionists would act to ensure that they safely returned to Union lines. These average people risked everything to help strangers navigate the hostile battlefront that lay before them. Jack Loftis, a Unionist in Transylvania county, kept an autograph book with signatures of all the escaped prisoners he had assisted, hiding them in nearby empty houses and letting them drink from his famous applejack buried underground. Men like Robert Hamilton, the Deputy-Sheriff and Justice of the Peace for Transylvania county, would warn others when his unit was conducting patrols; he and his wife Rhoda hid fugitives and deserters in a hiding spot that its guests came to call “The Pennsylvania House,” where they would stay for several days until Hamilton secured them guides to make the dangerous trek across the mountains. These guides, like Gilbert Semple and Henry Davis, took huge risks guiding parties of escapees and deserters across desolate, guerrilla-infested territory, facing imprisonment or worse if they were caught.

Women were a vital part of the chaotic struggle in the Confederate home front. Some sustained local resistance without contributing to warfare, like Martha and Alice Holinsworth, who acted under the noses of their own family and hid and clothed prisoners despite the captain of the local Guard for Home Defense regularly eating at their home. Others, such as Mary Estes, actively enabled violence, providing intelligence and carrying messages to gangs to conduct raids and plan ambushes. These “guardian angels” were fascinating to the escaped Yankees, as they were unlike any other women they had ever known.

Fugitives admired unionist southern women’s feminine qualities of loyalty and devotion to their families, although they initially found it difficult to accommodate the highly unconventional manner in which these values manifested. Soon, however, the resourcefulness, assertiveness, and courage of the guardian angels who helped them on their journey challenged the fugitive Federals' prejudices of what femininity meant, helping them to reconcile it with behaviors they had traditionally reserved for men, such as independence, power, and militancy. With their perspectives irrevocably changed, the accounts of former fugitives depicted Unionist southern women as the greatest heroes of the Civil War. The eloquent fugitive Junius Henri Browne summarized this idea well, having said “They could do for us what our own sex could not, and they did it with a silent and unconcious heroism that made it all the more beautiful.”

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