Review of “Echoes of Eden in Western North Carolina: The Johnstone Settlement 1852-1864,” by Craig Robert Gralley, McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers
It’s nice to read a Southern history account that challenges rather than reinforces stereotypes about the region. Many outsiders assume the only real cleavage was between slaveholding whites and enslaved blacks, and they envision a landscape dominated by sprawling plantations. They also tend to assume Southern whites were a unified bloc, although we vaguely know that westerners were less likely to own slaves and thus less sympathetic to coastal planters who relied on them.
We think of Charleston as a lovely antebellum town worth a weekend getaway, when according to Craig Gralley’s new book, it in fact was a pestilential place six months out of the year, where diseases such as yellow fever and diphtheria killed even the privileged children of the planter class, and hurricanes washed out to sea Charlestonians who were vacationing on nearby islands to escape these scourges. In the mid-1840’s, the rice crops that had made the planters wealthy were flattening, giving way to King Cotton grown inland. Without adequate transportation networks, manufacturing stagnated. Immigrants were thronging to Charleston. The ratio of foreign born to native born residents was seven-to-one, but without enough work for the flood of Irish and Germans, poverty, crime and social decay were on the rise.
As a result, some of these planters decided to relocate further inland, past Spartanburg and Greenville, and all the way into the mountains of western North Carolina. What began as a cool summer retreat for a privileged few became a growing settlement to which some moved permanently. By the mid-1850s, efforts were being made to improve transportation systems—the trip from Greenville to the retreat of Flat Rock took two days—to increase tourism as well as commerce. One watches this flurry of activity with some dread, because we know what is coming in 1861, but even in the early years of the war, these planters tranquilly continue to buy and sell property—including slaves whose plight Gralley never forgets, to open hotels, and sometimes to volunteer for the Confederate Army, although most of them are exempt because of their wealth.
Gralley’s account of the idyllic community gains traction in the mid-1840s when the Johnstone brothers take an interest in doing more than summering. One gets a sense of the Johnstones’ self-importance by learning that they had changed their name from Johnson to Johnstone to emphasize an ancestral tie to Scottish nobility. One brother, Andrew, had been vacationing there in the rustic 1830’s and 40’s; his brother Francis followed and through land purchases and reselling, built the settlement. A third brother, McKewn, was the first to move there permanently. Francis enlisted his extended family to join them in what he called a new Eden. The migration to Dunn’s Rock coincided with the worst of Charleston’s 1850’s pandemics, according to Gralley.
Gralley paints detailed portraits of the various leaders of the community, some of whom took the opportunity to reinvent themselves, not always in admirable ways. Hugh Rutledge, a patrician descendant of Founders, had abandoned his career as a medical doctor to work in the Charleston Customs House, but when he arrived in Dunn’s Rock, he survived by serving as one of two lone doctors in the region. Robert Hume moved his family to western North Carolina because of his love for nature, but turned to speculation in land and slaves to survive. His hotel opened to the public in July 1861, a few weeks before the First Battle of Bull Run. Francis Johnstone’s passion for agronomy led him to experiment with animal husbandry and new crops in the fertile river valleys, and then to ambitiously campaign to improve transportation networks to sell those crops to markets in South Carolina. Toll turnpikes were built, and the new railroad from Charleston to Greenville SC compressed a two-week trip by horse and wagon into a two-day trip instead, but only in 1853. It was not difficult to imagine that rural western North Carolina would have continued to grow and thrive had everything remained the same.
But everything did not remain the same, and the civil war would expose the fundamental weakness of the Johnstone community, namely, its isolation from the local inhabitants. A social and economic chasm separated the two groups. Because the planters used enslaved persons to take care of their family’s needs, and to work in the fields, the locals did not benefit from employment except for some incidental road work crews where they supplemented slave labor. It seems that the transplants felt no great obligation, charitable or otherwise, to the locals. Mary Barnwell, the wife of Andrew Johnson, is quoted at the beginning of the war speaking contemptuously of the people whom she considered “too cowardly a race to give (me) any anxiety” when they opposed conscription. And when the war ripped apart western North Carolina, this would boomerang on her personally.
Western North Carolina had a good number of anti-secessionists (the pro-Union elements were called “Tories,”) and antiwar factions resented the South Carolinians whom they believed had forced the rest of the South into the war. The summering center of Flat Rock—as opposed to Dunn’s Rock—had even been considered as a potential capital for the Confederacy, given its location and the presence of illustrious secessionists such as two former governors of South Carolina. But as the war dragged on, prices soared; men and farm laborers who could not afford to hire substitutes were drafted, leaving wives and children to farm, and then pay a 10 percent tax on their meager harvests to supply the army. A fascinating footnote confides that an “underground railroad” smuggled escaping slaves, deserters, and even Union soldiers from the notorious prison at Andersonville northward through Transylvania County.
Gralley concludes that, “As they were living separate lives, there was no reservoir of goodwill that could have lessened the devastation visited upon the settlement.” By war’s end, most of the transplants had fled back into South Carolina, after steady threats, the sacking and burning of their homes and property, and even their churches; and some killings. The community never reconstituted. The settlers whom Gralley profiles scattered as far as the Caribbean and Baltimore, although some stayed in nearby Brevard and grew that hamlet. Most lost their fortunes and some fell into poverty. Given the heavy reliance of the book on intricate family ties, and geography, a family tree or two, and maps of the area would have been helpful for the reader. One contemporary hand drawn map of the area is included midway through the book, but it is difficult to decipher, and one struggles to spatially figure out the importance of various land transactions as Francis Johnstone develops the community. Maps are an important way to tell a story rooted in place.
This book is a valuable and meticulously researched account of a little-known event in antebellum and Civil War history that even those familiar with that period will benefit from reading. It reminds readers that the South was a more diverse place with cleavages that ran through the white population as well. North Carolina lost more men proportionately than any other state—about 30 percent of its troops—and those casualties likely came more from the embittered locals living around Dunn’s Rock than from the planter class. That said, Gralley loses no opportunity to repeatedly remind the reader that the transplants’ wealth and vaunted status were built on the backs of what he calls “enslaved Africans.” One might question whether black people who had lived in the Americans for possibly almost two hundred years should still be called “Africans,” and not simply Americans. When asked about the usage, Gralley explained that one of the cruelties of slavery was that it deprived the enslaved of citizenship. The enslaved were not American citizens until granted that right in 1868. He says he decided to accurately describe their earlier legal status and honor their heritage by referring to the enslaved as Africans.
Sometimes those reminders are a bit anachronistic, as when he criticizes the former planters and community members for retaining bigoted views after the war, and laments that “none of the settlers appeared to disavow their earlier support for slavery.” But given their fatal disdain for their white neighbors, it would be hard to imagine that the Johnstone settlers would have been any kindlier or less condescending towards their former property, or any different from other white Southerners a hundred years before the civil rights movement emerged. Racial enlightenment would have been very unlikely to expect in the harsh times surrounding Reconstruction.
Modern readers will no doubt conclude that “gentrification” remains a divisive issue wherever wealthy outsiders move in and disregard the locals, and that no matter how elevated one’s social status or wealth, an outside catastrophe can bring one’s complacency to a bitter end. “Echoes of Eden” conveys these lessons well.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend (2020) and The Deplorable Underground (2023). She gratefully acknowledges the receipt of a review copy of “Echoes of Eden” from the publishers.