The Civil War broke America in two.

In Appalachia, it broke everything smaller than that.

It broke counties. It broke churches. It broke dinner tables. It broke families down to the bone — brother against brother is a phrase people use loosely, but in these mountains it was literal, documented, and personal in ways that the big-picture history of the war rarely bothers to mention.

This is the week in the series where I have to tell you something complicated. Something that doesn't fit neatly into a celebration of the 250th, or into anyone's preferred version of what the South was and what it wasn't.

Appalachia did not march in lockstep to Richmond.

Not even close.

The standard story of the Civil War draws a clean line: North versus South, Blue versus Gray, Union versus Confederacy. Appalachia scrambles that picture beyond recognition.

Unlike the plantation economies of the Deep South, much of Appalachia relied on small-scale farming, making slavery less central to the economy. Mountain families mostly didn't own enslaved people. They worked their own land, if they had land, with their own hands. The planter class of the lowland South — the men who actually owned the Confederacy's economic interest in slavery — were as foreign to a Madison County, North Carolina tenant farmer as they were to anyone in Ohio.

The primary social divisions in places like East Tennessee reflected the gap between slaveholding and non-slaveholding families. That same gap drove loyalty during the war.

You owned slaves, you tended toward the Confederacy.

You didn't, you tended toward the Union.

Not always. Not everywhere. But that was the fault line, and it ran straight through the heart of Appalachia.

In Scott County, Tennessee, Unionist Senator and future President Andrew Johnson gave a speech just before the secession referendum. Some 95 percent of Scott County citizens voted against secession — more than any other part of the state.

Ninety-five percent.

In a Southern state. In 1861.

East Tennessee had a large Unionist majority. By the time western Virginia was organizing its breakaway, East Tennessee Unionist activists were going underground or fleeing northward for their lives.

Western Virginia didn't go underground. It went further.

When Virginia seceded in 1861, Unionist leaders rallied in Clarksburg and summoned their own convention to meet in Wheeling. They didn't argue. They didn't petition. They built a new state from scratch, the way Appalachian people have always handled a government that stopped working for them.

On June 20, 1863, President Lincoln proclaimed West Virginia officially a state. The mountain counties of Virginia had simply refused to go Confederate. So they left.

There's a footnote to that story that belongs here. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson — one of the Confederacy's greatest generals, the man who stood like a stone wall at Bull Run — was born in what became West Virginia. He remained loyal to Virginia and became a top-ranking Confederate general. His sister remained a confirmed Unionist.

Same family. Same mountain. Different wars.

That was Appalachia in 1861.

Not every mountain county went Union. Not by a long way. And where the lines were drawn close, things got ugly in ways that formal battlefield history doesn't capture.

In East Tennessee, western North Carolina, and the Kentucky highlands, loyalties fractured along ridges and valleys. Some families sent sons to the Union, others to the Confederacy, and many tried to send them to neither.

The ones who tried to send them to neither had a name for it: desertion. And by 1863 there were thousands of them hiding in these mountains.

Confederate conscription officers estimated more than 8,000 deserters and draft dodgers were hiding in the mountains of Alabama and Tennessee alone.

They weren't all cowards. Some were men who had signed up for one war and found themselves in another — a grinding, starving, pointless thing that wasn't protecting their home or their family, just protecting someone else's cotton.

The mountains hid them.

And then someone came looking.

In January of 1863, a group of Unionist men rode down from Shelton Laurel into Marshall, the seat of Madison County, North Carolina. They raided the public salt store and looted several buildings, including the home of Colonel Lawrence Allen of the 64th North Carolina Infantry. Allen was away with his regiment. His wife was left to face the raiders while caring for sick children.

Salt. They raided for salt.

Because their families were hungry and it was winter and the Confederate government had done nothing for them while their men were away dying in Virginia.

The Confederate Army's response was not proportionate.

It was bitter cold on January 19, 1863. Thirteen ragged-looking men and boys walked listlessly along an old wagon track through the bottomlands of the Shelton Laurel River. North Carolina's 64th Regiment, several hundred soldiers strong, kept a close watch on the prisoners. At a bend in the river the army stopped. Five of the prisoners were lined up and shot. Then five more. Then the last three.

David Shelton, thirteen years old, was among the last to be killed, having already witnessed his father and brother's deaths. He begged to be spared for his mother's sake. Mercy was denied.

It was later determined that only five of the thirteen had any involvement in the Marshall raid.

An old woman named Granny Judy, the aunt of two of the victims, loaded the damaged bodies onto an ox sled and carried them two miles up the valley to a Shelton family cemetery, where the thirteen were laid in a single mass grave on a lonely hilltop.

A granite marker stands there today.

Meanwhile, across the region, people were organizing.

In the mountains of North Carolina and spreading through Appalachia, a secret Unionist society formed — the Order of the Heroes of America, known by the name the Red Strings, after the identifying sign its members used to find each other.

A red string. Tied somewhere visible. Enough to say: I am not with them. You are safe here.

The Heroes of America pledged support to Confederate deserters and Union prisoners of war. They moved men through the mountains the way the Underground Railroad moved people through the North. Quietly. At night. Along routes that only mountain people knew.

Nobody put up statues for them after the war.

After the war, business interests looking to attract investment to Appalachia leaned hard on the region's Unionist history. The history of guerrilla warfare, divided loyalties, and Confederate sentiment largely disappeared from the promoted version of the story.

Convenient.

The truth is messier and more interesting. Appalachia was not the heroic Unionist stronghold that postwar boosters advertised. It was not the loyal Confederate heartland that Lost Cause mythology preferred. It was a place where the war was intimate and brutal and fought at the level of the family, the holler, the county road — where allegiance was stitched together from a hundred local grievances that had nothing to do with the grand speeches being made in Richmond or Washington.

As one historian wrote, in the Southern Highlands "an allegiance was worn as a target over the heart, amid armed enemies, and loyalty could attract both dangerous friends and mortal enemies."

People picked sides because of who their neighbors were, who their fathers were, who owned the land they worked, who had done them wrong last winter. The ideology came later, if it came at all.

That's not a shameful story.

That's a human one.

And two hundred and fifty years into this American experiment, it's worth knowing what it actually cost the people in these mountains to hold it together — even when they were at each other's throats doing it.