old man from the piedmont county of Cumberland, widely familiar with
the countryside, and a hunter. ‘‘C’’ asked, ‘‘What has become of our birds?’’
and proceeded to answer his question: habitat destruction for agriculture,
of course; conceivably climatic change; but certainly farmers’ systematic
killing, and the idle, wanton shooting for ‘‘sport.’’ ‘‘C’’ went on to defend not
only woodpeckers and songbirds but bats and crows, reminding readers
that decades earlier, the eccentric but wise John Randolph of Roanoke had
forbidden the killing of crows on his plantation, preferring to put out a bit
of food for them at planting time, until crops were up and crows might as-
sist in controlling insects.^14
Such enlightened, conservationist sentiment grew after the war, in the
South as well as the Northeast. But—ever the sad case—conservation came
loaded with class and racial biases heated by Reconstruction. Here is where
white fear of armed freedmen joined elite sportsmen’s long-announced
desire to end market hunting and restrict subsistence and recreational
hunting. The end of slavery, in other words, multiplied enemies of conserva-
tion—real or imagined—and thus fueled the cause. Southerners were slow,
apparently, to join northeastern organizations, but gradually, toward the
end of the century, there were southern Boone and Crockett clubmen and,
early in the twentieth century, Audubon Society chapters and avid Ducks
Unlimited members. By this time so-called fencing reform was complete or
nearly so, foresters and agronomists campaigned for criminalizing woods-
firing, and the broad stage was set for climactic battles for the future of men
and animals.
tThe battles—the term does not exaggerate—were initiated by women
and by their allied cultural agents, principally evangelical ministers, who
were men. In , one will recall, it was pious women who at last converted
Alvin York from the wild ways that had made him a hero among rowdy boys
and men. (His bloody mature international heroism was Christian and bib-
lically sanctioned.) Alvin’s patient mother and his young romantic inter-
est on the larger neighboring farm (whom he married when he returned
from France) disapproved of his carousing and led him to their pastor,
who became Alvin’s spiritual adviser. The conversion was no small accom-
plishment. York was a creature of an old southern world in which a man’s
status, often termed his honor, derived from manly regard, or how one
was perceived by other men. To embrace instead an inner-directed code of
discipline, restraint, and piety, doctrine almost universally understood as
feminine, was serious business indeed. So in microcosm, Alvin’s salvation