Many believe that the Appalachian mountain people were non-slaveholding family farmers who remained loyal to the Union even while surrounded by the Confederacy and its great iniquity. Look at how West Virginia came into being. Remember that east Tennessee was so Unionist that it supplied Lincoln with Andrew Johnson, his reelection running mate. From facts such as these, the myth has grown of a solidly Unionist east Tennessee and even the same in western North Carolina, north Georgia, and other parts of Appalachia.