Tag: Civil War

Posted on

Arkansas packing list, part 2

What we didn’t see

Even before this trip, I’ve seen a lot of Arkansas. I’ve visited the Clinton Library, and the vaccine microchip hadn’t yet told me to. I went to Fayetteville as a teenager and as an adult I’ve seen the Arkansas Delta and Washington and Hot Springs. In January we went to the new museum in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges. My parents took us camping for a week at the Albert Pike Campground, to me a magical place with sparkling clear water where we swam in the heat of the day in the river, and that in 2010 was washed away by flood waters. Sixteen campers were killed. It’s never re-opened.

I have seen the Buffalo River, the first designated National Wild and Scenic River, but only from a car from a bridge. I’ve intended to canoe the Buffalo for 30 years. I still haven’t. I should have gone there to catch my fish. I didn’t. I guess I still need to go back to Arkansas.

US Forest Service, Buffalo River

Where We Went

Other than fishing, we stopped at the Dulcimer Shoppe in Mountain View Arkansas (“Folk Music Capital of the World”). I bought a jar of wild elderberry jelly, since that seemed suitably folksy, but Kris wanted a dulcimer. Did you know that in addition to your index and middle fingers, you use your thumb to fret a dulcimer? I didn’t, so I both learned something and got us out of the shop without a dulcimer. Success! It was a nice shop, and Kris really was sold on dulcimers. The jelly is good too, whatever elderberries may be.

This trip we went out of our way to see Little Rock Central High School. Everyone knows the photo of Elizabeth Eckford walking into Central High: the dignity and vulnerability of Miss Eckford, the rage of the white students . . . In person what’s striking about Central is its size, it’s big, and also its neighborhood. In 1957 when Eisenhower enforced integration there were three high schools in Little Rock . One of the schools, Horace Mann, was black, two others, Central and Hall, were white. One of the white schools, Hall, was generally affluent, which is why integration was slated for working-class Central.

The Central neighborhood hasn’t improved since the 50s. It’s still the same small houses, now 70 years longer in the tooth. It has slipped below working class, or maybe the working class has slipped below what it had achieved in the 50s. The school itself is handsome. Its neighborhood is rough.

Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder started this week, so racially charged photographs are in the forefront, but there was another Arkansas event this week that brought Miss Eckford to mind. The Arkansas Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill forbidding transgender youth from receiving therapy, puberty blockers and hormones, that would aid transition. Many won’t notice the legislation, but it is, well, central, and certainly central to the transgender youth and their families. The proponents’ reasoning is that minors are too young to make gender decisions, and the opponents’ reasoning is that those decisions are best left to the youth, their parents, and their doctors, not the state legislature. I don’t know why anybody would be dubious about the decisions of a state legislature. The Arkansas legislature must be at least as qualified as the Texas.

Playlist

I liked the music we listened to driving around Arkansas. We listened to a lot of Lucinda Williams because, while she was born in St. Charles, she attended the University of Arkansas. I first heard her name on Houston’s nonprofit Pacifica radio station, when the DJ said she had a crush on Lucinda Williams. I’ve listened a lot to Ms. Williams since. I always thought that if I could choose someone famous to sit by on an airplane–this is my personal version of who you’d like at your dinner party–Lucinda Williams would be high on the list. I finally saw her on stage a dozen years ago, and she appeared to be just what I should have thought: a little tough, a little road-weary, a little wild. I don’t share that DJ’s crush, but I would like to talk to Ms. Williams for an hour.

Is there a better road song (or a better song about living in the country) than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road?

Currier & Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2, 1865, lithograph, Library of Congress.

Levon Helm was from Arkansas. That lets in all sorts of great music, including the troubling The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is a song I like in part because it is troubling. It is arguably about white loss with no connection to slavery, and is often heard as a South’s arising anthem. Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently wrote of the song that it was another song of the “blues of Pharaoh,” but it’s hard for me to equate Virgil Kane with Pharaoh, and it seems one of the points of the song that Pharaoh is Pharaoh and everybody else isn’t. Kane, the narrator, doesn’t mourn Dixie’s defeat, Kane suffers it; hunger, poverty, the death of a brother, and there’s no pride, no blame, only desperate endurance. As the lyrics say, you can’t raise a Kane back up when he’s in defeat. As difficult to interpret as it may be, it remains one of the great antiwar songs, and Kane could have been black or white–it wouldn’t change the song’s bleak message. Whatever happens to Pharaoh he’s still Pharaoh. The rest of us are going to be Virgil Kane.

There’s a common misinterpretation of the lyrics that explains some of the ambivalence of the song. There’s a line where Virgil’s wife calls to him: “Virgil, quick, come see,/There goes Robert E. Lee . . . “, the general. At least that’s the way the lyrics are as often as not misinterpreted. The lyrics are “the Robert E. Lee . . . “, the steamboat, which is apparently clear in the live version but a bit muddled in the original. I like the steamboat better, both as a matter of history–Robert E. Lee was never in Tennessee and the steamboat was on the Mississippi –and because the steamboat had its own fame and tragedy. It’s the sort of steamboat on which Pharaoh would ply the Nile, while Virgil Kane watched from the shoreline.

August Norieri, The Robert E. Lee, oil, 1884

In addition to The Band and Lucinda Williams, there’s also Al Green, Johnnie Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Roy Buchanan, Iris Dement, Conway Twitty, and blues musicians from the Delta: Robert Lockwood, Jimmy Witherspoon, Son Seals. If you ignore Black Oak Arkansas, Arkansas has a pretty good lineup.

Glen Campbell is also from Arkansas, which justifies Galveston and Wichita Lineman, but not Rhinestone Cowboy. Nothing justifies Rhinestone Cowboy.

Guitar

I took the old Kohno. Four years ago when we last fished in Arkansas, I sat on a balcony above the Little Red and tried to play Duarte’s transcription of Pavane pour une infante défunte. The lady on the next cabin balcony asked what I was playing–which either meant I was playing the piece well enough to be nearly recognizable or I played it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. I like to think that the name of the song–Pavane for a Dead Princess in English (though a more literal translation would be Dance that a long-dead princess might have danced)–was on the tip of her tongue, and she just couldn’t quite think of it.

This year I was still trying to play Pavane pour une infante défunte, so for me Ravel will always have a weird connection to Arkansas. I don’t know that Ravel ever went there, and I still can’t play the Pavane. I’m pretty sure there were no steamboats named The Maurice Ravel.

Posted on

Coronavirus road trip, July 27-August 3, 2020

We drove last night from Sapphire, North Carolina, to Houston. We didn’t exactly drive straight through. Around 2 in the morning we stopped in Louisiana at a rest stop on I-10 just west of the Mississippi border and I slept for an hour. I had planned to stop for the night at a motel somewhere in Georgia, but Kris had other ideas and there you have it. I dozed while Kris drove through South Carolina and Georgia, and then it was after midnight and we just kept driving, trading back and forth, through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas. It was 941 miles in about 15 hours.

We planned this trip as a car trip because we were just paranoid enough not to get on a plane, but not paranoid enough not to go, and we’d always planned to make the return trip in one long leg. Going home we were going to leave this morning around 4 am and drive straight through, but instead left last night. I hope our hosts will forgive the abrupt change in plans.

Going out was different, slower. We went north through East Texas, into Louisiana at Shreveport, in the heart of Northern Baptist Louisiana, through a bit of Delta Arkansas into Delta Mississippi. We had plugged the Robert Johnson Crossroads marker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, into the GPS because, well Satan, but neither Satan nor Robert Johnson were there, and I’m no better guitarist than before we left. It’s funny though, growing up in High Plains cotton country prepares you for the Delta. You know flat land, and you recognize cotton in the field. The Delta looked a lot like home.

Rowan Oak.

We went on to Oxford to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house near the University of Mississippi, and then camped nearby at an unremarkable state park. Rowan Oak was closed because of the virus. At the campground, I was drenched with sweat by the time I set up the tent; camping in Mississippi in July may not have been our best idea, but in the evening we drank Four Roses in memory of Faulkner and the Four Roses gave me sufficient courage to try to explain the ukulele to Kris. Kris has wanted to learn the ukulele.

“It’s the top four strings of the guitar a sixth up from the nut, so it’s D-G-B-E only it’s G-C-E-A . . .”

“Show me a chord.”

“This is wait, wait, it’s a 6th up from G, so this is E.”

“I can’t see your fingers, let me see your fingers.”

“Here, right here, this is, wait, a 6th up from G, so E.”

“Show me another chord.”

“This would be, wait, let me translate, it’s up from C so it would be A, or it could also be D-minor . And this is either B or B-flat, is it B-flat a 6th up from D or is it B? “

I thought I was being particularly lucid, but I think Kris got away from the lesson without knowing a single thing about the ukulele. That’s a good thing, since it should have been a 4th up, not a 6th.

***

To get to Shiloh National Battlefield we drove through Northern Mississippi and Southwestern Tennessee, and we started driving past Trump signs, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers. I am surprised there weren’t Trump cut-outs, or even President Trump himself, waving at us from the side of the road. It struck me that if I lived in the area and was Biden prone, I’d be leary of putting a Biden sticker on my car. It just wouldn’t seem a safe thing to do.

Whatever our discontent with one another now, that locale of the first high-casualty battle of our largest discontent is not an easy place to get to. Because it’s not easy to get to, it’s pretty much as it was in 1862. I don’t know why I feel this need to visit our battlefields, but I continue to do so. Reverence and awe is what I feel when I’m there, for young men whose deaths and bravery were a long time ago, and sadness.

Me and William Faulkner.

***

I like to travel in the South. There is always great stuff to see, and many friendly and often peculiar people, and great food. And this trip there was still great stuff to see, but we weren’t stopping to eat anyplace, not even for donuts.

It may have been my imagination but there seemed to be an overlay of hostility about, of all the stupid stuff, masks. East of Nashville we lost an hour, which we hadn’t expected. Kris wanted to stop at a McDonalds because she thought it would be clean and we could get some iced tea and use their bathrooms: corporate America she thought could manage the virus, even if we collectively couldn’t. There was a sign on the door requiring masks, but inside it seemed to be a point of honor for customers to defy the sign. The staff, stressed with the burden of protecting themselves and America, were angry and yelling at each other, and openly hostile to the customers, who, arrogantly standing maskless, deserved their hostility. We stayed, which we shouldn’t have done, then tossed the food into the trash on the way out the door.

If I die because of the coronavirus, I will blame that McDonald’s.

***

Asheville may be one of the South’s better food cities. We had a barbecue pork sandwich at Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, which was very good and which we ordered to go from the parking lot, but you can’t like anything about traveling through a good city with good restaurants and not stopping at any of them because, well, coronavirus. When I picked up our sandwiches the customers inside wore masks, mostly.

***

Kris has a new minivan. Kris loves minivans, and she traded in her ancient Chrysler Town and Country on a new Chrysler Pacifica, which may well be the smartest collection of car compromises ever. It is even a good-looking car, if you can get past its mini-vanness. I hated to drive the Town and Country because it was like driving a bowl of jello; I love the Pacifica, but don’t tell Kris.

We piled so much stuff into that car.

  • tent
  • folding chairs
  • folding table
  • cots
  • sleeping bags
  • kitchen junk
  • food
  • a case of wine
  • some more food
  • stove
  • a five gallon water jug
  • fly fishing gear, including waders and boots
  • more food
  • a Yeti cooler
  • another Yeti cooler
  • still more food
  • a guitar
  • a yukulele
  • clothes, including whites to play croquet in North Carolina, because you can’t play croquet in anything but whites
  • Some more fly fishing gear

And it was all in a constant state of disarray. It was an experiment, to see after all these years, if we could still drive someplace and camp. We did it. We camped for one night. We can do it again.

***

Driving through Mississippi last night at 2 in the morning I told Kris that we were only 10 miles from the Tatonut Donut Shop in Ocean Springs. She said let’s go there and park on the street until they open in the morning. When we checked the internet they weren’t open on Monday. We kept driving. Those are very good donuts though, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. We would have broken up the trip for Tatonut donuts.

***

The Mississippi Delta is Mississippi cotton country, and still today 60% of the population is African American because Delta cotton production was industrial agriculture that depended on cheap labor. That’s where the enslaved were brought. It is also the home of the Blues. It is now one of our poorest regions because in place of cheap labor cotton production has mechanized.

Structurally the blues are usually a 12 bar phrase, repeated again and again with variations. The Blues can be extraordinary sophisticated, think Bessie’s Blues by John Coltrane, or raw and driving, like Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson. One of the things that makes the blues different from other music is that it is cyclic, there is no chorus, no bridge, the phrase goes that 12 bars, or maybe 16 bars, and then it does it again and then it does it again and then it does it again. Folk music is cyclic as well, and one suspects that there is interplay (or at least a common human bond) between, say, Barbary Allen and Crossroads Blues.

In Clarksdale where we went to see the Crossroads Marker everyone, even people walking randomly down the street, seemed to be wearing masks. It gave me great hope for the drive. One hope, dashed.

***

Downtown Oxford, Mississippi, is charming, with cute shops, restaurants, boutique hotels, and a lovely courthouse with a Confederate soldier out front. There is a current controversy of course about the Confederate soldier, that he should be removed, but forgetting all else it is a charming vignette. It is hard though to forget he’s a Confederate sentinel for the courthouse. He will someday go I suspect, and I suppose I shouldn’t regret it, but I do, a little, but only because the statue is very pretty, and it makes me consider the War.

Current estimates are that there were about 750,000 young men, North and South, who died in the Civil War. If you include Americans both North and South among the dead, it remains our costliest war. We can only speculate at why most of those young men were fighting, but I suspect some of it was that young men fight when called by old men, or maybe, as Shelby Foote told about the answer of a random Confederate private, “because you’re down here.”

If the War was inevitable, both because of slavery and the fragility of the Union some 70 years in, then there had to be Confederate soldiers as well as Union, and the Confederates were as flawed and tragic as Hamlet, or Lear, or best of all, Othello. We may not be able to forgive them, any more than we can forgive Othello the death of Desdemona, but we can recognize their flaw and our collective tragedy. Honestly, I’d like to see that statue stay, rededicated to the dead of both sides, with an addition of a memorial to the cost of the failed Reconstruction and slavery. It would give us a better picture of our history. I suspect that ultimately it won’t stay though, and that’s ok as well.

***

I had a call last night with a young friend, a young African American woman. It started as business but we talked and I told her about driving through the majority-black Delta where everyone wore masks, even walking down the street, and then into East Tennessee, where it seemed a point of honor for the young white men in the McDonald’s to defy mask orders because the Second Amendment and tattoos would protect them. I told her that driving home the night before we had stopped at a convenience store/gas station on the edge of some city, Montgomery I think, and while I filled up the car I watched a series of young black men enter the store to buy cigarettes or beer or whatever.

“They were all wearing masks, right?” She thought that would be the denouement, that the young white men in East Tennessee arrogantly disobeyed the mask signs that the young black men in Alabama obeyed.

“Nope.”

“I thought you were going to tell me they were wearing masks.”

“Nope.” Having been one myself, I think that young men are sometimes just uniformly stupid.

Posted on

Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.

It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.

Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.

As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.

As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.

Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.

***

In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.

I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:

Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.

Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.

Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.

***

I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.

After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.

The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.

Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.

Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.

During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.

At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.

Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.

***

Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.

Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.

Posted on

North Carolina

Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

  • John Coltrane
  • Dolley Madison
  • The Dale Earnhardts
  • Cecil B. DeMille
  • Billy Graham
  • Sugar Ray Leonard
  • Roberta Flack
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • Andrew Johnson, sort of.
  • Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
  • James Taylor
  • Doc Watson
  • James K. Polk, sort of.
  • Nina Simone
  • Richard Petty
  • Earle Scruggs
  • Andy Griffith
Hugo Van Gelderen, John Coltrane, 1963.

I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

Matthew Brady, James K. Polk, Tennessean, 11th President, daguerrotype, 1849.

North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

Rebeca Wynn, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 2010,

I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

Satellite photo, The Outer Banks, 2009, NOAA.

I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

Rivers Langley, Earl Scruggs, 2005, licensed under Creative Commons license, unedited.

It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

By Ali Zifan, Wikipedia.

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.