When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Appalachian region was as divided as the country was. I found the research I did for my historical novel, Uprooted by War, set in the North Carolina mountains during this time, interesting. For example, Cherokee, Haywood, Jackson, and Macon counties in North Carolina were divided near half and half into those who supported the Confederacy and those who supported the Union. This was true in much of the region.
Just across the state line in Eastern Tennessee, support grew overwhelmingly in favor of the North. The counties of Blount, Cocke, and Sevier had only 20% supporting the Confederacy and 80% who supported the Union. In fact, citizens there were so upset with Tennessee for going with the Confederacy that they started a movement to have Eastern Tennessee break off from the rest of the state and form their own state much the way West Virginia did.
Many of these mountain-dwellers also saw the conflict as a rich man's war that expected the poor man to fight it for them. These people wanted little to do with the war, but of course this soon became impossible. Conscription (the draft), laws like the ones to make citizens give 10% of what they produced to the Confederacy, and the increasing shortage of available goods pulled everyone into the war.
Although Watauga County, North Carolina, where Luke Moretz's farm is located in my book, leaned more heavily toward supporting the Confederacy, Luke decides not to do that. To avoid being conscripted by the Confederates, he travels to East Tennessee to join the Union Army. After some skirmishes in that area, he's sent to Virginia where he's involved in some of the major battles. I tried to show the hardships of the Civil War for the mountain people without the novel becoming too depressing. The readers I've had so far tell me I did.
(All my profits go to scholarship fund for missionary children.)
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