ETSU prof examines complexity of Civil War Reconstruction in region

East Tennessee State University history professor Steven Nash is challenging popular narratives about the Civil War and Reconstruction era through research that reveals the complexities of political divisions and ideologies in Appalachia. Nash's book "Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains" earned the Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Nonfiction and places the region at the center of the Reconstruction story. His recent projects also include a collaborative statewide study of reconstruction in North Carolina with Appalachian State professor Bruce Stewart and an edited volume about Virgil Lusk, a Confederate officer turned Republican prosecutor of the Ku Klux Klan in the Asheville area. Drawing on extensive archival research, Nash traced how white anti-Confederates and formerly enslaved people briefly formed political alliances, which were often met with violent backlash from entrenched elites seeking to reclaim power in the emerging market-driven New South. His research draws on community history methodology, citing historian Darrett Rutman's approach that studying one place in depth can illuminate broader historical patterns. "When you understand one place really well, its local dynamics and its uniqueness, that can also shed a lot of light on these larger issues," Nash said. Nash's work reveals unexpected federal presence in mountain communities during Reconstruction, particularly through the Freedmen's Bureau, an organization typically associated with the Deep South plantation belt. The bureau operated in communities like Asheville, Jonesborough, Knoxville and Abingdon, Virginia, handling labor contracts, court cases and intervening when African Americans or white Unionists faced unfair treatment. "These Freedmen's Bureau agents were often people who were able to intervene, where they thought that African Americans or even white Unionists were being treated unfairly," Nash said. The Journal of American History called Nash's work "deeply researched and engagingly written" and "further evidence of the upland region's escape from the margins." His research contradicts simplified regional narratives that emerged after the war, including portrayals of a united South under the Confederacy. Nash pointed to a diary from one Knoxville woman that shows the violence and division that existed in East Tennessee during and after the Civil War. In one story, two men who had known each other their entire lives—one a Union soldier, the other Confederate—encountered each other in a store around Knoxville in the war's immediate aftermath. They said hello to each other, then one turned his back and the other shot him. "You had that sort of inherent violence and over time, those things get swept under the rug," Nash said. "In some ways, that's human nature. You want to move on, you want to sort of move past the unpleasantness. On the other hand, it's also political." Nash said political motivations for historical revisionism and creating new narratives led to downplaying Unionism in Appalachia and across the South. "Over time, parties change and viewpoints change and it becomes part of the reunion story of downplaying some of the divisiveness and the violence and things that permeated the Civil War era," he said. A closer look at the region's history shows that areas like Washington County, for instance, were more supportive of the Union, while other neighboring counties leaned more toward supporting the Confederacy. "When you really dig into the heart of Southern history, you find that it's never that solid and it's never that united, and there's a lot of dissension and different viewpoints, not just in Appalachia but across the South," Nash said. Nash's work shows Appalachia as a place where national policy often intersected violently with local loyalties, and where the region's history reveals complex and contradictory positions on slavery. He cited the life and work of Elihu Embree, who lived in the Jonesborough-Telford area and published one of the first abolitionist newspapers in the South despite being himself a slaveowner. "People are complicated," he said. "You can have people like Embree who were opposed to slavery but also tied to the institution. You have people like [President Andrew] Johnson, who was no abolitionist and certainly not somebody who held by his time what people would have seen as 'enlightened' views regarding African Americans, yet he wanted to stay in the Union." Nash said his experience working as an interpreter at a National Park Civil War site and teaching has shown that people can handle learning about the complexities of human nature and history generally. "People can understand and appreciate when you [acknowledge] layers of how people understood their world, and I think that is true today," Nash said. "If you study history and you appreciate history in an area that was very divided like Appalachia, and if you pay attention to the complexity, it can teach you a lot to appreciate that people are complicated." Nash emphasized that understanding Appalachian history shows how grassroots local dynamics intersect with national policy and how historical narratives can feed into political polarization in today's social climate. "You have national policy and sort of top level ideas and decisions but when they end up having to be applied at local levels, you have to pay attention to what the internal dynamics and beliefs and cultures and things are at that grassroots level," he said. "The internal demographics of the region can really shape that in interesting ways."