For the past
three years, Our State magazine has
been publishing a series of articles on the War. The ones that I have read have
not been the most factual pieces, but usually, there is just an error or two.
The newest piece is on the Blalocks. I've been researching their lives for a
number of years, and the recently published article is wrong on many aspects. (You can also read it here.)
So, let's break it down, shall we?
The Great Adventure of the Outlaw Blalocks
It begins with an unlikely wedding in April 1861 at the
Presbyterian church in Coffey’s Gap, near Grandfather Mountain.
First, the Blalocks are
already married when the census taker comes by in 1860. According to Keith
Blalock's Bible, the couple was wed on June 21, 1857. Furthermore, the first
Presbyterian church in Watauga County was not established until 1886. The Blaocks were married by Larkin Hodges, a Baptist minister..
On that day, William McKesson Blalock — from boyhood known simply
as Keith — marries Malinda Pritchard. The Blalocks and the Pritchards have been
feuding for more than 150 years — first in Scotland, then in the Blue Ridge
Mountains — over property boundaries and politics.
Keith is a modern name.
According to the family, he was known as Keese.
The hard culture of the mountains holds nothing extra. Justice is
not entrusted to courts, packed with relatives of the enemy, but sought
according to the Old Testament law of an eye for an eye.
The courts in Watauga
County met once a quarter.
When Keith was an infant, his father disappeared into the woods to
hunt, and only months later was his body discovered — killed either by wild
animals or feuding bushwhackers.
His mother married Austin Coffey, a well-to-do farmer, when Keith
was a boy. Keith gets his nickname from a local bare-knuckle boxer named Alfred
Keith — the boy is a natural and fierce fighter.
He is 6 feet 2 inches tall, lean and strong, his face long and
clean-shaven, his eyes full of humor. A shock of dark hair is swept back from
his forehead. He wears a starched white shirt and dark frock coat, a suit he
will rarely be seen in again. He is 23 years old.
Malinda is four years younger, round-faced and pretty, almost a
foot shorter, her slight build accentuated by the long white skirt cinched at
the waist under a green blouse. Her dark hair is spangled with blue flowers
that bring out her blue eyes.
According to her
gravestone, she is about a year and a half younger than her husband, not four
years.
Malinda Pritchard grew up just five miles from Keith’s home in the
shadow of Grandfather Mountain. They attended the same one-room schoolhouse and
roamed the woods together. When Keith was 17, he carved their initials in the
trunk of a towering pine that straddles their families’ property line.
After the couple takes their vows and the wedding party begins, in
between fiddlers’ reels, a bagpiper skirls the old tunes that summoned the
clans to war.
The Pritchards are Secessionists. The Blalocks are mostly
Unionists. The Coffeys are split. Keith is a known Unionist — and so is his
stepfather, Austin Coffey.
The wedding guests include many Coffey step-uncles and cousins, as
well as Boyds — another family who married into the Blalock-Coffey clan. John
Boyd, a fervent Secessionist, is among those present. Before long, they and
other guests will be hunting each other to the death.
Present also is a powerfully built mountain lawyer and U.S. congressman
named Zebulon Vance. There’s much talk of the crisis at Fort Sumter, of
Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion. Vance
corners Keith: In the event of war, will he join the fight for his home state?
This fanciful description
sounds an awful lot like Steven's Rebels
in Blue, a book that has come under sharp criticism from the academic and
historical communities, and which no thoughtful historian grants any amount of
credence. Even the publisher has disowned it. See Appalachian Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 2001).
If the date of 1857 (from
the family Bible) is correct, Vance was not a U. S. congressman. He was not
sworn in as a congressman until December 7, 1858. Of course, Vance's being
present at the Blalock wedding cannot be substantiated, and this far-fetched
notion only appears in Steven's discredited book.
“That was the start of our great adventure,” Malinda later
recalls.
For better, for worse
Four thousand volunteers from the mountain counties join up in the
first call, and tens of thousands more will sign up before war’s end.
Recruiters canvass the countryside and the pressure mounts on able-bodied young
men to enlist. Eighteen Coffey cousins join the Hibriten Guards.
Terrell Garron, in his
book Mountain Myth, list more than 27,000 Confederate soldiers from western North Carolina.
Keith’s step-uncle William, at violent odds with his brother
Austin, harangues Keith, accusing him of being a shirker.
Unwilling to fight for the Confederacy, Keith hatches a scheme. To
avoid conscription, he will enlist. When his unit is shipped to Virginia, he
will quietly slip across the lines and be free of the war.
In June, he travels from Blowing Rock to Lenoir to enlist in
Company F, 26th North Carolina Infantry. Carrying his new gear — haversack,
musket, and bayonet — and wearing a stiff new wool uniform, Keith trudges with
21 others to the railroad depot at Newton for transport to Camp Carolina for
training. Keith has been elected sergeant.
One of the men — a slightly built soldier standing just 5 feet 4
inches tall, swallowed up by the baggy uniform, face hidden under a forage cap,
approaches Keith on the road. “I’m going to fight with you,” the soldier tells
him. It is Malinda — hair cropped, masquerading as Sam Blalock, Keith’s little
brother.
Initially, the regiment is posted not to Virginia — the front
lines — but to New Bern, where it fends off two assaults by troops of Gen.
Ambrose Burnside. But the Union lines are too distant to make a break.
On patrol crossing the Neuse, the company is ambushed while still
in the river. Malinda is shot in the left shoulder. Keith carries her back to
camp. There, the regimental surgeon discovers her secret. Colonel Vance — who
saw her married — discharges her from the service, and she returns her
$50 enlistment bounty.
The battle of New Bern
takes place on March 14, 1862. According to documents from the National
Archives, the Blalocks do not enlist until March 20, 1862. Her compiled service
record states that Malinda did duty for two weeks before being found out and discharged
on April 20, 1862. Hence, they would have arrived in the camp of the 26th North
Carolina around April 6.
Keith doesn’t want to remain without her. In darkness, he slips
out of camp and finds a patch of poison oak, rolls in it, and soon is feverish
and covered with livid red welts. Fearing smallpox, the surgeon arranges a
medical discharge for him — and Keith even keeps his bounty.
According to Volume 7, of the North Carolina Troop book series, Keith is discharged on the same date
by reason of "poison from sumac" and a "hernia."
Keith swears in his
post-war Federal pension application that he was never properly enrolled as a
Confederate soldier. If that is true, he mostly likely never received his
bounty money.
It is here that the story
of Keith Blalock's being a Unionist and wanting to enlist in the Confederate
army to get close enough to the Union army to desert, falls apart. At this
time, the Union army is only 35 miles away. Or, if we believe the story of
Malinda's being wounded, they are just a few yards away.
The two journey home together to their cabin near Grandfather
Mountain. Keith soaks in tubs of brine until the welts disappear and his fever
subsides.
With his official discharge papers in hand, Keith is confident
that he is now safe from conscription. All he wants is to be left alone.
But his Coffey and Boyd relatives have other ideas. Once his rash
is cured, they report him to the Home Guard, and Keith and Malinda’s real war
begins. They engage in a cat-and-mouse game with the Home Guard patrols, spying
the conscription agents from high on Grandfather Mountain. Keith disappears
into the rugged forest, shot with caves and ravines, while Malinda politely
welcomes the men to the Blalock cabin.
The Home Guard does not
exist until July 1863.
They devise a set of signals — hog calls, a certain quilt hung out
on the clothesline, a candle burning in a certain window after dusk. In this
manner, Keith eludes capture and roams the countryside. He even pays occasional
visits to Austin Coffey’s house, stealing in through a secret tunnel that opens
in a thicket 100 yards from the back door.
Keith grows a rakish mustache and goatee, living up to his outlaw
image.
So far, the Watauga Home Guard has been disorganized and
ineffectual. In summer 1862, Maj. Harvey Bingham takes command. A young,
twice-wounded veteran of the 37th North Carolina Infantry, Bingham establishes
his headquarters at Camp Mast, close to Boone, and whips his troops into shape.
He is determined to round up every deserter, outlier, and shirker in the area —
starting with Keith Blalock.
Once again, Governor
Vance (who does not become governor until September 8, 1862), does not
authorize the home guard until July 1863. Bingham is serving as a lieutenant in
the 37th North Carolina Troops. He is wounded in the battle of Second Manassas,
Virginia, on August 29, 1862. Bingham is not promoted to Major until sometime
in 1864.
Bingham’s tactic is simple. When the Guard encounters an
able-bodied man, they command him to surrender. If he runs, they shoot him
down.
By the end of August, Major Bingham’s troopers surround the
Blalock cabin before Keith can rabbit out the back into the woods. The Home
Guard contingent includes his step-uncles, William and Reuben Coffey. Keith
talks them into camping outside overnight so he can get ready. Before dawn,
bearing rifles and provisions, he and Malinda sneak past the dozing guards and
climb deeper into the wilderness they know so well.
Once again, this event
between Bingham and Blalock in August 1862 is a fabrication of Stevens that no
historian would credit. But this romanticized treatment continues with more
that makes Keith and Malinda's story sound like Errol Flynn meets Bonnie
Parker.
Persistent
Twice more Keith is cornered and
captured, but each time he makes his escape. A man alone is at a disadvantage
in fighting off determined pursuers. He recalls, “I saw the need for men we
could trust and who could shoot.” By now, more than 1,200 Confederate deserters
are hiding out in the Blue Ridge, and some find their way up the mountain.
Thus Keith becomes the leader of a
ragged outlaw band spread out in caves on Grandfather Mountain, sharing lookout
duties and foraging for food. Bingham attacks up the mountain with 50 men, and
the gang holds them at bay long enough for Keith and Malinda to escape to the
summit, then down to Shull’s Mill on the Watauga River. They ford the river and
head for Banner’s Elk. From there, “Uncle Lewis” Banner guides them over nighttime
trails into Tennessee.
Keith throws in his lot with the
Union Army, though he doesn’t sign official papers until mustered in as a
private in company D, 10th Michigan Cavalry, on June 1, 1864. For the time
being he claims the rank of “scout captain and recruiting officer” under Col.
George W. Kirk — a Tennessee-born Confederate deserter who has made it his
mission to drive out Confederate partisan units operating on both sides of the
Blue Ridge.
If
Blalock is such an ardent Unionist, why does he wait until June 1, 1864, to
join the Union army? Furthermore, when he was applying for a pension after the
war, Blalock's superiors in the 10th Michigan Cavalry didn't actually know what
became of him after he enlisted, and even used the term "deserter" in
reference to Blalock.
Kirk recruits Keith as a “mountain
pilot,” establishing an escape route for Unionists, deserters, and Union
prisoners into Union-held territory in Tennessee. Keith and Malinda now go
armed with new Spencer repeating carbines and Colt revolvers.
So the couple returns to North
Carolina at the head of a troop of 25 well-armed riders. They deliberately
avoid attacking the conscription patrols as they gather intelligence and scout
invasion routes. But when word reaches the Blalocks that Bingham has shot down
one of their neighbors for failing to halt on command, the troops break up into
squads seeking retribution.
In their first ambush, the squads
kill three of the Home Guards. Later, Keith goes hunting for Robert Green, a
compatriot of the Coffey brothers. Keith shoots down Green but leaves him
alive.
Watauga
County Home Guard records have no mention of this event.
The war becomes a desperate local
feud. Keith and his Yankee scouts ambush a company of Home Guards, who
retaliate by killing a Unionist man or burning his farm. No one is safe — if
the Blalock band doesn’t come after you, the Home Guard will.
A flimsy truce
Through it all, as the death toll
mounts, farms go up in flames, innocent men and boys are found hanging from
trees or decomposing in laurel thickets. The Coffeys have honored an uneasy
truce: If Keith’s mother and Austin Coffey — and their property — are left alone,
then so will be the persons and property of his brothers William, Reuben, and
McCaleb Coffey.
Keith’s band of a dozen scouts
attacks the home of Carroll Moore — a prominent officer in the Home Guard —
along with his brother James and four nephews. Unfortunately for Keith, all the
Moores have assembled, loaded for bear, with a plan of their own to come
hunting him. In the early morning gunfight, Carroll Moore has his leg blasted
out from under him by the Sharps rifles and becomes permanently crippled. But Malinda
is also wounded in the forearm and shoulder.
When she reaches the surgeon in
Knoxville, Malinda learns she is pregnant. Until the birth of Columbus, the
first of their four sons, she will sit out the war in Tennessee.
According
to Blalock's family Bible, Columbus was born January 15, 1863. According to
court records (January term, North Carolina Supreme Court, 1867), the attack at
the Carroll Moore farm took place in January 1865.
Meanwhile, near the end of October
1863, Colonel Kirk leads 800 men along mountain trails scouted by Keith and
others to Warm Springs, near the Madison County seat at Marshall. They aim to
force Gen. Robert E. Lee to send valuable regiments west to counter an imminent
incursion by Union troops in force. A troop of 150 Home Guards, under the
command of Maj. John Woodfin, rides into Warm Springs, convinced they will face
only a small band of raiders.
According
to his Compiled Service Record, Kirk was not promoted to colonel until 1865. According
to Trotter's Bushwhackers, Kirk's
force is estimated to be between 600 and 800.
But instead Woodfin’s troop meets a
barrage of fire from the Spencer carbines. Woodfin is shot out of the saddle,
dead. Kirk retreats back across the Blue Ridge, as Governor Vance, fearing
invasion, orders the 64th North Carolina home from Tennessee to defend the
mountain border and dispatches battalions of cavalry west to Warm Springs.
In another skirmish, Keith is shot
through the left hand.
Hunting enemies
The depredations continue in
“Bloody Madison,” Watauga, and other mountain counties. One of the victims is
Malinda’s young cousin, Thomas Pritchard, also working as a Union scout.
He is captured by a guerrilla troop
under R.C. Bozen, jailed at Elizabethtown, and beaten for several days, then
marched to the woods beyond town, where Bozen’s men shoot and club him to
death. According to a witness, “They then left him and rode on up the road, laughing
and talking as if the bloody tragedy in which they had just been participating
had afforded them the most pleasant and agreeable diversion.”
What little restraint Keith and the
other scouts showed earlier now vanishes. They ambush Home Guards wherever they
find them — on patrol, at home, working in their fields. There is no longer
even the pretext of a fair fight. Keith explains their cold logic: “We all
tried to do to them before they did to us.”
When Gen. George Stoneman leads
6,000 cavalry troopers, split into two columns, into the state from the
west to free the prisoners at Salisbury, Keith rides with him, wearing a
double-breasted officer’s frock coat and canary-striped trousers. To one
Confederate observer, they resemble “as much Cossacks as soldiers.”
There
is no credible source that states Blalock rode with Stoneman.
In January 1864, the Coffey-Blalock
truce comes to a bloody end. Keith and his men capture William Coffey, Keith’s
step-uncle, and hold him captive at a sawmill. One of Keith’s men, George
Perkins, at last puts a pistol to the 62-year-old man’s skull and pulls the
trigger. Partisans on both sides will long dispute Keith Blalock’s role in the
killing, but neighbors generally agree that, whoever pulled the trigger, Keith
gave the fatal order.
In January 1865, Keith and his men
once again assault the Carroll Moore farm. Again they stumble into an armed
camp. In the attack, a round from one of the Moores’ rifles catches Keith in
the right eye, blinding him and smashing the socket and cheek. The Union men
retreat in disorder, but Keith survives to fight another day.
In February 1865, Major Bingham’s
Home Guards, supported by a company of regular troops under Capt. James Marlow,
known for his ruthless pursuit of outliers, surround Austin Coffey’s home. They
suspect he is harboring Unionist fugitives. In his basement they find one:
Thomas Wright. They arrest him, but Austin is nowhere to be found. John Boyd
arrives with another squad, bearing the news that Coffey has been seen at his
brother McCaleb Coffey’s house — vacant since the murder of William Coffey.
Traditional
sources do not include the Watauga County Home Guard as a part of this attack.
Current research shows that this act was committed by men under the command of
Capt. John Carson (McDowell County), of Avery's Battalion.
The troops mount and ride hard for
McCaleb’s farm. There they arrest Austin Coffey, bind him with rope, and lead
him away on a horse, while Keith’s mother watches from the woods. They stop to
spend the night at the home of Tom Henley, another guardsman, on the Blowing
Rock road. While the men cook a meal, white-haired Austin Coffey dozes by the
fire.
Suddenly, Captain Marlow orders one
of his men, John Walker, to execute Austin Coffey. Walker, stunned, refuses.
Marlow orders a second soldier, Robert Glass, to shoot Coffey. Glass falls to
one knee, raises the barrel of his revolver to Coffey’s temple, and fires.
Marlow orders the body taken outside, where his men dump it onto the snow.
Who
is "Captain Marlow"?
When Keith learns that his revered
stepfather has been murdered — and that John Boyd had a hand in his capture —
he vows he will kill Boyd “if it took 40 years after the war to do so.”
Keith and his band join an assault
on Camp Mast, hoping to find Boyd and others who participated in the murder of
Austin Coffey. They surround the camp and force its surrender, but the men they
seek are not there.
Once
again, there is nothing to tie Blalock in with the capture of Camp Mast.
Furthermore, the date of Austin Coffey's death is February 26, 1865. The
capture of Camp Mast took place February 4-5, 1865, almost a month before the
death of Coffey.
At the end of February, the band
stages a brazen daylight raid on McCaleb Coffey’s house — the site of Austin
Coffey’s capture. Again they miss the men they are hunting, but they burn the
house to the ground.
With Gen. Joseph Johnston’s
surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman at the Bennett farm on April 26, 1865, the
war in North Carolina comes to an official close. But for Keith Blalock, it is
far from over.
Blind in one eye, wounded in the
hand, worn out from years of living on the run, he receives a medical discharge
from the army.
But he has not forgotten about his
vendetta with Boyd. He tracks Boyd, waiting for his chance.
On February 8, 1866, Boyd is traveling
to Blowing Rock in the company of William T. Blair. Keith and his companion,
Thomas Wright, confront the men “in a narrow path at the head of the Globe.”
Blalock calls out, “Is that you,
Boyd?”
“Yes,” Boyd says, swatting at
Keith’s head with his walking stick. Keith catches the blow on his arm, then
steps back, raises his Sharps rifle, and fires. Boyd sprawls on the ground,
face-down. Keith orders Blair to turn the body over so he can make sure Boyd is
dead. The vendetta satisfied, Keith goes on his way.
What
about Keith being arrested and tried for murder? Only to be acquitted by Govern
Holden? What about Blalock continuing to rob and plunder after the war is over,
only to have to flee to Texas for a while? What about Blalock and his family lying to the
pension office about the extent of his injuries and having his pension reduced
because of it? These are actually well-documented historical events which are
not mentioned in favor of conjecture, fantasy, and legend.
Betrayed
Malinda dies in her sleep on March
19, 1903. Keith temporarily goes out of his head with grief, and his son,
Columbus, assumes legal guardianship of his affairs. The two live together in
Hickory. But Keith recovers and lives another decade.
On April 11, 1913, at the age of
75, still vigorous, he is pumping a handcar along the railroad tracks outside
Hickory, when he approaches a sharp curve carrying too much speed. The car
jumps the tracks and catapults into a gorge, crushing Keith underneath it.
Keith
Blalock does die in a railroad hand-car accident in 1913. But it took place
along Goose Hollow Road in Avery County. One can still talk to people today
whose grandparents and other relatives were riding with Blalock when this
happens. While he might have moved between 1910 and 1913, the 1910 census shows
Columbus living in the same township as Keith - the Linville Township of
Mitchell (present-day Avery) County.
Some claim that members of the Boyd
and Moore families were spotted in the vicinity just before his death — but it
is never proven that Keith’s death is anything more than a violent accident.
Keith Blalock, who fought with such
spirit, courage, and brutality for the Union and against the Confederacy, is
finally betrayed by his headstone. His epitaph reads “Soldier, 26th N.C. Inf.,
CSA.”
Actually,
the marker does not have the word "Soldier" on it.
Keith does not fight
"with such spirit, courage, and brutality for the Union." Keith only
fights to perpetuate a family feud. He is was little more than a robber and
murder who uses the guise of Unionism to take revenge on his neighbors and
extended family with whom he disagrees. Blalock waits until the Union army is
in his backyard (East Tennessee) to cross over the mountain to join the Union
army. And even then, his "Unionism" is suspect to his superiors. He
never rides off to fight for the Union, only remaining behind to battle in the
place he calls home. He is a fascinating character (not as fascinating as
Malinda), but essentially a rascal.
The
article above relies heavily on Steven's Rebels
in Blue, a book that has been shown to fabricate sources and blend in non-relevant
events to attract a greater audience. It is such a shame that a good magazine
like Our State would publish such rubbish
in the guise of history. Historians can make mistakes, new materials can come
to light and change assumptions, and sources can be discovered that change
previous interpretations; but anyone who spends years with a story and
carefully analyzes all its verifiable components is unlikely to be taken in by
falsehoods and fabrications, and is also unlikely to mislead others with the
same. Unfortunately, there will be hordes of readers who will believe this
highly colored version of a very real, very different story without realizing
how far it is from the truth.
