This article appeared in the Herald Dispatch from Huntington, West
Virginia, on April 1, 2019. Overall, it's not a bad piece. My thoughts, like
this introduction, are in red. You can read the original article here:
A
walk through an Appalachian graveyard
By DEREK HALSEY
West Virginia will forever
be connected to the Civil War. It was created when it became the first and only
state to secede from the Confederacy on June 20, 1863, after years of neglect
by the plantation-owning aristocracy in greater Virginia that was determined to
continue slavery instead of paying their southern brethren a living wage. That
is how some would view the conflict anyway, as others fought for the South and
what they viewed as their besieged homeland.
West
Virginia was also the perfect example of brother fighting brother and cousin
fighting cousin during the War Between the States. The truth is that Union
sympathizers and soldiers could be found in every Confederate state except for
South Carolina. The Free State of Jones existed in Mississippi, the
thousands-strong Hill Country Militia was located in Texas, the Mountain Feds
were based in Arkansas, the Jayhawker fighters fought in Louisiana, the Winston
County soldiers came out of Alabama, the Independent Rangers held court in
Florida, the Pickens County brethren were from Georgia, and thousands of
Eastern Tennessee fighters fought with the Union forces.
Western
North Carolina was no different, and that history includes the true story of
Sarah Malinda "Sam" Blalock. "Sam" Blalock was one of only
two female soldiers who disguised themselves as men and fought during the Civil
War. Her story is well-documented throughout history.
Only two? There are scores of
others with well-documented histories, many even more interesting than Mrs.
Blaylock's!
Montezuma
Cemetery is located on highway 181 in-between Linville, North Carolina and
Newland, North Carolina, sitting up on a hill on the southern slope of Sugar
Mountain. This area in the western third of the Tar Heel State features the
highest mountains east of the Rockies. Just a few hundred yards from the
cemetery is a turn in the road that unveils a beautiful view of nearby
Grandfather Mountain, which is 5,945 feet in elevation.
In
the old cemetery is a tombstone that reads "Sarah M., wife of William
Blalock, Born March 10, 1839 - Died March 9, 1903." Commonly known as
Malinda Blalock, she grew up in a time period when life was very hard. The life
expectancy in the 1800s was short, even during the times when there was no war.
A few feet away from Blalock's grave are headstones that tell that story.
A
couple known as L.B. and E.L Townsend, for instance, lost a nine day old infant
in 1892, lost a two year old daughter named Doshia in 1896, and they lost
another infant in 1908. A few yards away are the tombstones of the Bumgarner
family, which sadly includes four gravestones depicting the death of the
infants born to W. and C.E. Bumgarner. Wife Celia E. Bumgarner, says her
epitaph, was born in 1857 and died just 37 years later. The couple did raise a
son into adulthood named Ira, but he died just a few months shy of his 20
birthday in 1892.
As
for Sarah Malinda Pritchard, according to an article by Kelley Slappie for northcarolinahistory.org,
she met and married William 'Keith' Blalock in 1839, even though the Pritchard
and Blalock families had been feuding for over 100 years. Keith was by all
accounts a bit of a rough cob and ten years older than Malinda when they joined
forces. Once married, they lived on and around Grandfather Mountain, where
there was plenty of game and fresh water.
So, Keith and Malinda got
married the same year she was born? Also, according to the 1860 Watauga County,
North Carolina, Federal census, they were exactly the same age: twenty-two. The
1870 Mitchell County, North Carolina, Federal Census, listsKeith as being 32,
while Malinda is 29. His tombstone, right beside Malinda's, gives a birth date
of November 21, 1837.
As
the Civil War approached, both Keith and Malinda Blalock became Northern
sympathizers. What happened next has not only become a part of American lore,
it is also a matter of historical fact. An important witness named James Moore
recalled this true tale in The Morning Post newspaper in February of 1900.
Moore was a Confederate
soldier in charge of rounding up draftees as a member of Captain Rankin's
Company F of the 26th North Carolina Regiment, and that was when he came across
the Blalocks.
It is interesting that Moore's
record states something a little different. Moore was medically discharged from
Company F, 26th North Carolina, on December 6, 1861. He re-enlisted in the
company on March 20, 1862. Now, that's not to say that Moore and Colonel Vance
were not talking about new recruits for the regiment, but Moore was not in the
army until March 20, the same day that the Blalocks joined. Furthermore, everyone
who joined on March 20 was a volunteer. No one was being drafted at this time.
While there was talk of a Conscription
bill, it had not passed Congress yet, and would not be enforced until
August-September of 1862.
Keith
Blalock had a plan. The goal was to join the Confederate forces and then defect
to the Union troops once they were engaged in battle somewhere north. Joining
him in the Army was his brother Samuel Blalock and they were now led by Colonel
Zeb Vance, a future governor of North Carolina.
As it turned out,
"Samuel" Blalock was in fact Malinda Blalock, Keith's wife. She
wrapped down her breasts and cut her hair short and successfully passed as a
male soldier.
Said
Moore in his sworn newspaper account, "I was not present at the battle of
New Bern, being absent on detail at home to get recruits. I brought back with
me about 45 men, among whom was a young man who went by the name Samuel
Blalock. It turned out that he was a woman, the wife of Keith Blalock, but no
one in the company knew of it until she and her husband confided it to me in
secret at Salisbury (NC) on our way to Kingston to join the regiment. They told
me of this, as they said, because, from my remark that 'this recruit resembles
Keith's wife so much,' that I suspected she was his wife, and they concluded it
was best to make me their confidant so I would not tell anyone about it. I
never told anyone about it except my brother-in-law, Isaac N. Corpening, who
was also in the Company."
It
is safe to say that Malinda "Sam" Blalock was already well-versed in
all things firearms and holding her own, probably both due to training with her
husband and living the backwoods life of the 1800s. We know this because she
was a soldier in good standing for at least two months in the company of men.
Said
Moore, 119 years ago. "Sam Blalock's disguise was never suspected. She
drilled and did the duties of a soldier as any other member of the company and
was very adept at learning the manual and drill."
The
Blalocks never found themselves near any Union troops, however, so they decided
to find a way to leave the Confederate Army. Keith came up with an idea that
was crazy and agonizing, yet it worked. He found some poison ivy, some say
poison oak, and rubbed it all over his body. Once the welts and rash had become
horribly obvious, he played it off as a disease along the lines of small pox
and they quickly let him go. "Sam" wanted to leave as well so she
could follow her husband, but her furlough was initially denied. It was then
that she confessed to being a woman and proved it to Col. Vance.
So why not slip just a few
miles down the road towards New Bern, where the Federal army is in April 1862?
This is
a great story, and oft-repeated, but his military record says poison sumac and
a hernia. It was the latter that really got him out of the army in April 1862. In
February 1863, the Confederate government revised its enlistment policy. It now said that if you
had a "single reducible hernia" you still had to serve; you were not
exempt for medical reasons.
Once
back home, the Confederate draft enforcers soon realized that the Blalocks were
healthy as well as deceptive and they tracked them down near their hideout on
Grandfather Mountain, a craggy and thick-wooded summit. The couple escaped,
albeit with Keith getting a bullet wound for his troubles. It was then that
they became guerilla fighters, known then as "bushwackers." Some say
they crossed into Tennessee and joined another bushwacker group known as Kirk's
Raiders." Michael C. Hardy, however, the author of the book "Kirk's
Civil War Raids Along The Blue Ridge," says that there is no official
record of the Blalocks and Kirk ever meeting each other.
This paragraph kind of
compresses a couple of different events. Keith and Malinda are thought to have
been at their home in Coffey's Gap when someone (militia or home guard)
arrived. They were forced up Grandfather Mountain to hide in a hog pen under an
overhang (or rock house.) Keith's first wounding took place in August 1864,
maybe a year later. He claims in his Federal Pension application that he was
out scouting, alone.
Either way, Keith and
Malinda "Sam" Blalock engaged in lethal raids together all over
western North Carolina during the second half of the Civil War. As fate would
have it, one of their raids involved James Moore's family.
Actually, their raids were
confined to lower Southern Watauga and Northern Caldwell Counties, and maybe a
little of Mitchell, not all over western
North Carolina.
"One
night while I was home on furlough from wounds received at Gettysburg, in the
spring of 1864, her husband and his gang attacked my father's home at the Globe
in Caldwell County," said Moore, 35 years after the end of the war.
"We had a regular battle with them, in which my father was severely
wounded. And, we wounded two of them, one of whom, it was said, was this
one-time member of my Company who I enlisted, Malinda Blalock."
Malinda
was believed to have taken bullets to her shoulder. After Moore left to return
to the war, the Blalocks raided his homestead again in the fall of 1864. This
time, Keith had his left eye shot out of his head and the Blalocks soon left
North Carolina for, as Moore remembers, 'either Colorado or Montana."
I'd sure love to find where the
story of Malinda's wounding starts. Usually it is during the battle of New Bern
in March 1862. This time, it is during the raid on Moore's farm. Of course, the
Blalocks were not actually with the 26th North Carolina during the battle. How
much she was actually with Keith is a great mystery. They had a son in 1863
[Columbus]. I would hazard a guess that she was out-of-commission for at least
part of that year.
After
the Civil War ended in 1865, the Blalocks came home to western North Carolina,
settled down and started a family that included five kids. Malinda
"Sam" Blalock died of natural causes in 1903 at 64 years of age. Her
husband Keith died a decade later in Hickory, NC.
Actually, Keith killed John
Boyd on February 8, 1866. Keith blamed Boyd for the murder of his step-father
during the war. Keith was put on trial for the murder, only to have the case dismissed.
They were in Mitchell County in the 1870 and 1880 census. At some point after
that, they went to Texas for a while,
and maybe Oregon.
How
the folks of that area dealt with each other immediately after the end of the
war is left to history. It was probably hard to b e cordial to a couple that shot bullets at
you just a few months earlier. One thing is for sure, however, no matter what
side of the conflict you were on; Malinda "Sam" Blalock was a force
to be reckoned with during a very dangerous time in our nation's history.
I really appreciate the nod in
this article. Overall, the article is not bad. It is much better than the piece
that appeared in Our State during the
sesquicentennial. What solid information we have about the Blalocks is
extremely limited. Everything else comes decades after the war, like the piece
by James Moore (1900), and John Preston Arthur (1915).
Recently, I acquired
a copy of Joan Cashin's War Stuff: The
Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War.
(Cambridge, 2018). Overall, it is a good read, a short introduction to the environmental
aspects of the war. I guess my biggest objection was the overemphasis on the
surrender of the Lee's army. Lee's surrender did not bring about the end of the
war. While Lee's capitulation had much symbolic meaning, the Army of Northern
Virginia was trapped and disintegrating. Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee, three
times the size of Lee's forces, was sitting on a wealth of supplies and had
plenty of opportunities for escape. But, I digress. Cashin's tome has chapters
on how the war affected people, timber, habitat, and the subject I'm most
interested in at the present: sustenance. 
A glance at a few
advertisements in 1861 in Southern newspapers does not show any military
dictionaries for sale. Beard's Book-Store, advertising in the The Yorkville Enquirer (SC) on January
3, 1861, had Hardee's Rifle and Light
Infantry Tactics; McMomb's Militia Tactics; Cavalry Tactics, LaSal's School of Guides; Infantry Camp Duty; and
The Rifle, and How to use it. J. W.
Randolph, bookseller, advertising in the Richmond
Dispatch on July 15, 1861, had available Science of War; Cavalry Out Post Duty; Volunteer's Manual; Volunteer's
Handbook; Hardee's Tactics; and Mahan's
Out-Post Duty. No military dictionaries. There were other military dictionaries out
there. Simes Military Dictionary
(1776); Duane's A Military Dictionary
(1810); Rose's Military Dictionary
(1815); and possibly a few others. But just how many people would have had a
military dictionary lying about at home on the mantel of the fireplace?
Probably very few. 
