The Tennessee Two Step not only kept the residents one jump ahead of Confederate Raiders, but allowed the folks of the coves and valleys to remain Smokey Mountain Patriots. The divide that was created by the politics of the Civil War affected neighbors, friends and families. Survival sometimes depended on the ability to play both sides of the fence. Union in some cases, Confederate in others. It also mattered whose company you were in or what army was occupying your region at the time. The Tennessee Two Step, a favorite of the Charlie Daniel’s Band, is a great song, but in other times, it referred to a dance of deception, that was endemic in Eastern Tennessee and allowed the Pro-Union factions of the Smokey Mountain Patriots, to maintain a peaceful coexistence with a brutal and sometimes deadly foe.
One question that is always asked folks of Tennessee, is why did you decide to fight and for which side, some of those answers follow;
One Confederate farmer explained,
“…life, liberty, and property…are at stake, any man in the South would rather die battling for civil and political liberty, than submit to…a northern tyrant.”
After Shiloh a Confederate wrote his wife,
“I can not express my feelings on the battle field, but I firmly put my trust in God and felt confident that He would spare me. I continually raised my heart to him, in prayer, and in the thickest of the fight, I invoked His protection. At the same time, my thoughts were upon you and home.”
A slave enlisted in the Union Army and stated,
“that I owed something in the way of duty to the government that protected me. It clothed and fed me, and had freed me from the terrible lash, so mercilessly inflicted. Though a mere boy, I could do little in helping the great military system. Yes the little I could do would be some help, and I should do it as well as I knew how.”
A Union enlistee explained,
“I have always…cherished an ardent feeling of love and admiration for my country….felt that I was but doing justice to myself, to my country, to my forefathers, and to future generations. I did not possess an extraordinarily great amount of courage or desire to fight, but I did…desire to obtain with my own arms a right to distinction while I should be defending my Country’s rights.”
After a an engagement at Shiloh a young Confederate related,
“as quickly as he could every man had his bayonet on the charge and started, double-quick up the hill, giving…a yell…Onward we pushed through that storm of bullets…until we regained our first position….we had the pleasure of seeing the enemy fall back.”
Most in Tennessee had a need to learn the Tennessee Two Step and many that did, were Smokey Mountain Patriots.
Bummer
