I just posted this on the site for my Memory Bandits class. As a first assignment, I’ve asked students to comment on this post with their thoughts on the theme of human rights and memory and include some of their own memories in personal statements.
I was in my thirties when I moved to North Carolina, for family reasons. What was a city person like me going to do in Durham? In the South? I was born and raised in Chicago, lived for many years in San Francisco and had just finished a three-year stay in Lima, Peru. ‘Maybe two years,’ I thought hopefully, imagining that New York might be a next step.
- The Kirks, about 1864 or 1865
When my dad’s sister learned where I was going to be living, she brightened. “We have a long history there.”
“What?” I responded. No one had ever mentioned any link before. I happened to be in her home, and she pointed to a photograph on a wall.
“I’ll send you that picture,” she promised. This image to the right is what I received a week later.
So what could I tell about this at first? Well, this image is OLD. Older than any other I had. The man in the middle was ill. The young men are in uniform while the older man looks like an undertaker. To me, his face seems to be floating a bit — pasted in, I thought?
My aunt told me what she knew. The older man is Alexander Kirk, who immigrated from Dumferline, Scotland, some time in the early 1800s. He ended up in eastern Tennessee, where he married and raised a family, among them these boys. The two I’ll write about are the men on either side of the reclining figure: to the left, my great great great grandfather, John Kirk (one word: MUTTONCHOP!); to the right, his elder brother, George Washington Kirk (yes, Alexander was one of those new arrivals who became very patriotic).
Like many families in that part of Tennessee, the Kirks were small landholders and farmers. They did not own slaves. When the Confederacy seceded, they remained loyal to the Union. I don’t know their position on slavery, but it’s likely that they felt no kinship to the wealthy coastal planters and large plantation owners who were the leading slave holders.
All of the Kirks boys volunteered (thus the uniforms, Union soldiers). The man in the middle was wounded in the battle of Knoxville (he survived). Of them, George was the most famous. Eventually promoted to Colonel, he led the 3rd North Carolina Infantry, engaging in guerrilla warfare behind Confederate lines. In western North Carolina, Kirk is still called a bushwhacker, thief and a looter. The county courthouse in Franklin, North Carolina, has a mural showing Kirk and his brother, John, riding into town with silver knives, forks and spoons hanging from their horses’ tack, “looted,” the explanation reads, from the homes of long-suffering Confederates.
- Historical marker outside the Caswell County Courthouse in NC
After the surrender, George and John knocked around for awhile. But George’s story really gets interesting during the first years of Reconstruction, immediately following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, appointed a Republican governor for the state, William Holden. Remember that Lincoln was a Republican and in the South, this was the party that supported freedom for slaves. But most of the state’s political elites were Confederates and Democrats. Like the rest of the South, North Carolina was administered under a military government.
Governor Holden had a big problem, though: the Klan. There were white men, many in positions of power (officials, sherrifs, businesspeople) who opposed the US government and the Republican leaders named to administer Reconstruction. They started to kill freed slaves and prevent them from voting. To restore order, Gov. Holden asked Kirk to lead a campaign against the Klan, which became known as the Kirk-Holden war. At the time, Kirk and Holden would have been called scalawags, Southern whites who supported Reconstruction.
The war was more of a police action, and was a miserable failure. The Democrats in the legislature ended up rebelling and impeached Holden; Kirk was jailed. The Jim Crow era of segregation and violence against African-Americans began and did not end until well after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 (and I would argue persists in important and disturbing ways). George ended up moving to California to look for gold (and died in Gilroy). John moved to southern Illinois, the state where most of my family still lives.
What I want to stress for this class is that I knew nothing about this history until my aunt learned that I was moving to the state. She shared with me a single photo, and a whole chapter of American history opened up for me, interesting not only for itself but because it was connected to me directly. But why didn’t I know about this before? Why had no one told me the story of the Kirk-Holden War? Was it because the word “scalawag” and all of its negative meanings of the time still lingered?
There are few “sites” that recall the Kirk-Holden war. One is the state historical marker outside the Caswell County Courthouse in Yanceyville. Something else was the pardon last year issued by the NC State Legislature for Gov. Holden. But amazingly the pardon wascontroversial, even though over 140 years have passed. Memories of violence and injustice are incredibly persistent and divisive, even when we think we’ve “moved on.”
Related articles
- Memory Bandits (robinkirk.com)
