been accustomed to depend for support upon their slaves; they suffered the less, therefore, from the sudden disappearance of slaves." According to John Spencer Bassett's 1899 history of slavery in North Carolina, those who did own slaves in the western counties often worked side by side with their slaves in their fields, making slavery there "a milder type" than elsewhere in the South. In that regard, Mrs. Emma Shoolbred, a widow whose sons were serving in the C.S.A. in Virginia, wrote to "Colonel" Joseph Cathey, prominent in Haywood County, North Carolina, asking to buy corn "at a reasonable price." She explains that "the war has greatly reduced my circumstances, and I find it hard to live. I have many small negro children besides their parents to feed."
There were practical reasons that North Carolina's western counties had fewer slaves than other places in the South. The topography and cultural mind-set of the Smoky Mountains region during the 1860s contrasted with the vast bottomlands of the Deep South, which were historically associated with plantation and slave-labor culture. Controversial slavery historian Ulrich B. Phillips attributes the Appalachian difference to the fact that cotton, a labor-intensive crop, "never throve there so greatly" as in the bottomlands of Georgia or South Carolina. Slaves would not have been efficient for the white farmers of the Smoky Mountains region to hold even if they could have afforded them.
The fact that the farmers, chiefly Scots-Irish in ethnicity, did not have many slaves did not prove they harbored abolitionist sentiment or held progressive racial views. In 1797, opposing a Quaker petition to the House of Representatives that would have put an end to the slave trade nationally, North Carolina Rep. Nathaniel Macon was reported to have said that "there was not a gentleman in North Carolina who did not wish there were no blacks in the country. . . . but there was no way of getting r...