By Victoria Bynum
As readers of Renegade South know, many Southerners opposed secession and the founding of the Confederacy because of political, religious, or economic principles. Others came later to oppose the Confederacy after facing economic ravages and the threat of death on the battlefield. In North Carolina, a Whig political majority, large yeoman population, and several antislavery or pacifist religious minorities, including Quakers, Wesleyan Methodists and Moravians, all contributed to the state’s strong Unionism, which held throughout the Civil War.
As noted in my first book, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South, many “Abolitionist and Lincolnite” citizens were early on reported in the Randolph County area, which included portions of several counties but was centered in southern Randolph, northeastern Mongomery, and northwestern Moore, all “hotbeds” of Unionism and desertion. Known as “outliers”, deserters led a precarious existence in the thick woods that surrounded their communities. Of fifty traceable Montgomery County deserters and evaders, most were men between twenty-one and thirty-five years old, married with one to three children, and the owners of modest farmsteads. About a quarter were teenagers in 1860 who lived in households headed by widowed mothers. For the most part, these were struggling farm families bonded by kinship and religion.
In 2010, I expanded my research on Southern Unionist families in The Long Shadow of the Civil War. At the same time, I recounted many of North Carolina’s Unionist stories on this blog, including about the Wesleyan Methodist Hulin/Moore family, Bill Owens, leader of a deserter band that terrorized the region’s pro-Confederate community, and the plight of Unionist women. Most Unionists, however, were mindful of being arrested, tortured, or executed and kept a low profile, appearing only fleetingly in public records. In this essay, I focus on one such family: the Lathams of Montgomery County.
In 1860, Harvey Latham was a 25-year-old farmer with combined real and personal property valued at $325. Two years earlier, he had married Amy Nichols, a young woman from his community. The following year, the couple welcomed their first child, a daughter named Lon. Like most rural families of the antebellum South, the Lathams were not literate, nor did they use enslaved labor. As their parents did before them, they produced most of their own food and reared their children on land that they owned. On 12 April 1861, these arduous but familiar rituals of life were upended by the declaration of Civil War between the North and the South. Despite North Carolina’s strong support for the United States, its legislators voted to join the Confederacy after President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down South Carolina’s rebellious firing on Fort Sumter. On 9 September 1861, Harvey joined many of his neighbors in enlisting as a private in Company K of the 34th NC Infantry of the Confederate army. Almost exactly one year later, he deserted his unit.
Harvey Latham’s desertion plunged the family into the maelstrom of divided communities in which deserting men went into in hiding, while Confederate troops and vigilantes went on the hunt for them. Women from both sides of the divide were forced to take charge of farms and raise children alone. While many wives and mothers of deserters shielded their husbands from capture and complained bitterly to Governor Zeb Vance about Confederate abuses of Unionist families, Confederate women complained just as bitterly about deserter depredations.
The wartime court records of Montgomery County reveal arrests of many men and women who had never before been publicly charged with a crime. For example, on 15 July 1864, Harvey Latham, his brother James, and his brother-in-law, Gilbert Nichols, joined a gang of men charged with assaulting John Brewer, a stalwart Confederate, “near the highway”, where they also took his gun from him. Hiram Hulin, the pro-Union patriarch of the Hulin family, served as a witness for the men’s defense. That same year, Harvey Latham’s brother Enzor was charged alongside several other men, including Hiram’s sons, John and William, with robbing William Burney of several personal items. Court records show that several Confederate authorities retaliated in March 1964 by robbing nine Unionist men, including Harvey Latham. Ongoing attacks and counter attacks culminated in January 1865 when all three of Hiram Hulin’s outlier sons, John, Jesse, and William, were murdered. Although Hiram identified Henry Plott as his sons’ killer, Plott was never brought to justice.
As early as August 1864 the inner civil war that raged throughout the Randolph County area prompted one militia officer to exclaim, “the women is as bad as the men down here.” As the Civil War approached its end, women’s retaliation against Montgomery County’s Confederate elite increased even more. On 27 January 1865, just days after Confederates killed the Hulin brothers, Martha Sheets was arrested for threatening to enlist deserters to punish Sheriff Aaron Sanders, one of the county’s richest men, unless he provided her family with four bushels of grain. Martha’s threat against the Sheriff was no isolated case. On 1 May 1865, ten women from the same community, including Harvey Latham’s wife Amy and Amy’s sister, Ally Nichols, rioted “with sticks, staves, & clubs” at Sheriff Sanders’ flour mill. Like Martha, the women were promptly arrested.
Just months before the war’s end, Emsley Beckerdite, a Randolph County justice of the peace, implored newspaper editor M. S. Robins to consider whether “the people, the bone and sinew of this once great country, were ever legitimately consulted on the question of secession”. Although Robins’ response to Beckerdite is unknown, history has answered his question. In waging a war to save slavery from extinction under the shield of constitutional authority, the Confederacy devastated the lives of innumerable families of farmers and laborers. The people fought back with a vengeance, hastening the fall of the Confederacy and with it, the institution of slavery.
