Margaret Mitchell is for many Americans, especially Georgians, a household name. Her Civil War epic holds a prominent place in the modern American literary and film halls of fame, and quotes from her novel still come out of the mouths of many Americans. In contrast, one would be hard-pressed to find a bookshelf in any home or public library that bears the name Christian Reid. Despite this, the author Christian Reid, whose real name was Frances Fisher Tiernan, deserves a similar place of prestige in the Southerner’s, and especially the North Carolinian’s, library.
Tiernan was born in 1846 in Salisbury, NC into a prominent family for the region. Her father, Colonel Charles Frederick Fisher, was an industrious man who connected the western part of North Carolina to the Piedmont through the North Carolina Railroad. When the War broke out, he was killed at First Manassas, and his early death in the war inspired his friends to name North Carolina’s famous coastal Fort Fisher in his memory.[1]
After her father’s death, Tiernan, then Frances Fisher, was raised by an aunt on her father’s side who educated her. Her aunt frequently vacationed in western NC and taught Tiernan the love of those ancient mountains. She also instructed Tiernan in faith, where in 1868 Tiernan and her siblings entered into the Catholic Church.[2]
Tiernan had written stories since she was a child, but during the Reconstruction era, she began to do so with the intent of publication. She started with novels that reflected the heroic and genteel antebellum Southern ideal of love that she understood from childhood. Like modern knights saving dames in distress, her first works were described as “delicate,” “genteel,” and “virginal.” Her most prominent novel of this time was Land of the Sky about adventures and love in the mountains of North Carolina. This title would, as many readers may already have noticed, go on to be adopted by the city of Asheville as its official nickname and a tourism slogan to this day. A columnist at The Sewanee Review cleverly noted that at this time, as Asheville was gaining renown as the South’s resort city, Tiernan’s exaltation of the region connected it to the rest of the country in a similar fashion as her father’s railroad did before.[3]
As her career progressed, her writing evolved, became more technically advanced, and reflected some of the realities of the post-bellum world. Her novels took on themes from Greek tragedy. Her protagonists were not heroes; rather, they were individuals with faults and were in turn punished for those faults by circumstances outside their control. This era of her writing has been characterized as “gently ascetic,” and those themes stem from the chaos of the Reconstruction era.
The last era of Tiernan’s writing, one sees her narrow her focus to her two deepest-held beliefs: her Catholic faith and her family’s Confederate legacy. The Sewannee Review notes:
Her home bears all the marks of a regime of classic courtesy and culture. The memorials of the Confederacy and of her gallant father which adorn the walls; the books and magazines which fill the study; and the Roman Catholic Chapel which stands at the northeast corner of the yard, epitomize the profound and absorbing interests of her life. For she is a devout and zealous Roman Catholic, and her fidelity to the Lost Cause has led her to proclaim her faith in that cause, even from a public platform.
That fidelity to the Lost Cause drove Tiernan to write a small play Under the Southern Cross, a short, action-packed story of a family caught in the middle of a Civil War skirmish on the home front and the Southern women who accidently commit counter-espionage, unintentionally out-maneuvering a Yankee transplant who was spying for the Union while pretending to be a loyal Southerner. In the short, 100-page play, Tiernan presents a strong case for the Constitutionality of secession as well as a portrait of the strength of Southern womanhood.
The proceeds from the sale of that play were used to fund Fame, the beautiful Confederate monument in Salisbury. This monument, which still stands today, was one of the most beautiful and expensive in North Carolina. Tiernan, whose play funded a large portion of the monument, read a poem she wrote for the unveiling titled Gloria Victis, which is an alternate name for the monument itself, translating to “Glory to the Vanquished.” I unfortunately cannot find the words to the poem. She also composed the elegiac inscriptions on the granite base of the monument which read:
IN MEMORY OF ROWAN’S CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS
THAT THEIR SUBLIME SELF-SACRIFICE
AND UNDYING DEVOTION TO DUTY AND COUNTRY
MAY NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
SOLDIERS OF THE CONFEDERACY
FAME HAS GIVEN YOU AN IMPERISHABLE CROWN
HISTORY WILL RECORD YOUR DARING VALOR
NOBLE SUFFERINGS AND MATCHLESS ACHIEVEMENTS
TO THE HONOR AND GLORY OF OUR LAND
THEY GAVE THEIR LIVES AND FORTUNES
FOR CONSTITUTION LIBERY AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY
IN OBEDIENCE TO THE TEACHINGS OF THE FATHERS
WHO FRAMED THE CONSTITUTION
AND ESTABLISHED THE UNION OF THESE STATES
DEO VINDICE
Tiernan, who remained humble despite her commercial success, was recognized in her lifetime for her contributions to the literature of this country. She was the first Southerner to receive the Laetare Medal awarded by The University of Notre Dame to one Catholic each year who has an outsized impact on the arts of the country.
However, despite her fame in her own lifetime, with some of her 46 published works even being translated into French and Italian, Tiernan’s work is today largely forgotten, and her books are not commonly found outside the public libraries of the western Piedmont of North Carolina. Her legacy today is largely contained in two structures in Salisbury, neither of which is in its original location. The first is the previously mentioned Fame monument which used to stand prominently downtown and now watches over the Confederate section of the Old Lutheran Cemetery. Tiernan’s second legacy is Sacred Heart Catholic Church which is now outside the downtown area but was originally built on land donated by Tiernan.[4] Her two passions, her Catholic faith and her Confederate heritage, still live on in her native city due to her generosity and dynamism.
In death, she has also been memorialized. In front of the public library in her native Salisbury is a large granite monument in the shape of a book noting her contributions to the culture of western North Carolina. Additionally, there was a monument to her in the former Open-Air Westminster Abbey of the South at Calvary Episcopal Church which was disassembled in 2020.[5]
I first discovered Tiernan a few years ago when looking for a poetic description of the pinelands of eastern North Carolina, and the first paragraph of her novel Miss Churchill reads as follows:
To one unaccustomed to their aspect, there are perhaps few things more melancholy than the great pine-forests of the South. Their vast extent, their absolute monotony, the total lack of other growth or picturesque features connected with the landscape, render then oppressive in the extreme to one who journeys through them for the first time, or who takes up his abode among them reluctantly. But to one who has lived long in their midst, or to the new-comer of poetic soul, there is a strange fascination in this region of apparent gloom. Stateliest of all the evergreens, the giant trees rise to an immense height, giving a great sense of space below. Between their splendid trunks one walks as through the pillared aisles of a vast cathedral, while overhead the sea-like murmur of their plumy branches fills the air, and underfoot their fragrant needles, interspersed here and there with resinous cones, cover the earth as with a carpet. Balsamic odors are inhaled with every breath, and some aspects of beauty strike the observant eye so strongly that they can never be forgotten — serried ranks of spear-like pines, ranged like embattled Titans against a stormy sunset; deep-green crests stretching with solemn majesty toward a far, golden horizon; or a close-girdling wood, full of the suggestion of infinite melancholy, as the trees lift their dark boughs against a cold, gray sky.[6]
This passage struck me with its emotive prose and gave me a new appreciation for the eastern pinelands. Her beautiful descriptions, deeply rooted in this region, earn her, I believe, a place of prestige in the Southern library akin to that awarded to the great Margaret Mitchell.
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[1] ‘Fisher, Charles Frederick | NCpedia’. Accessed 6 October 2024. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/fisher-charles-frederick.
[2] ‘Tiernan, Frances Christine Fisher | NCpedia’. Accessed 6 October 2024. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/tiernan-frances.
[3] Henderson, Archibald. ‘Christian Reid’. The Sewanee Review 18, no. 2 (1910): 223–32.
[4] Report, Staff. ‘Sacred Heart Catholic Church History’. Salisbury Post, 30 November. https://www.salisburypost.com/2009/12/19/sacred-heart-catholic-church-history/.
[5] ‘Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina’, 19 March 2010. https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/999/.
[6] Reid, Christian. Miss Churchill; a Study. New York, D. Appleton, 1887. http://archive.org/details/misschurchillstu00reid.
if what i have found is true, shadrack (aka shade) thompson and others from i think a co. K out of duplin county nc surrendered at fort fisher.