High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  On this multicultural frontier, not only were cultural practices in a state of flux, but personal identity was also fluid. Hunting provides an illustration of that merging and transformation of culture and identity in the region. Europeans increased the killing efficiency of the hunt with their gunpowder technology, and both they and Africans in the backcountry learned from the Indians how to dress, track, and decoy game and live off the land while hunting. Outsiders regularly commented on how difficult it was to differentiate white hunters from Indian not only in behavior but also in appearance.16 But Indians in turn borrowed from Europeans and Africans. They adopted some of the new crops brought by the outsiders and began raising livestock; this led them to protect the crops in their fields by building European-style fences. Embracing another European custom, Cherokee men took over responsibility for farming from the women, who had traditionally done it, thereby dramatically altering traditional sex roles.17

  This shared stockman-farmer-hunter economy was organized on the basis of family farms. Its staple grain crop was corn, often planted among the stumps of deadened and burned trees, supplemented by wheat, rye, and oats. Farmers also raised a variety of vegetables in kitchen gardens, such as potatoes, beans, peas, onions, squashes, and cabbages. Livestock consisted primarily of hogs and cattle, which were largely left to fend for themselves, and lesser numbers of sheep, horses, and mules. Animals remained outside most of the year, feeding on unfenced forest and wastelands, which farmers treated as a communal grazing area; to support their animals, farmers as late as the mid-nineteenth century continued to leave four-fifths to three-quarters of their land unimproved, primarily in forest. Cattle and sheep often were herded to pasture on high mountain balds during the summer, and free-ranging hogs were rounded up in the fall and butchered for meat. Various fowl such as chicken and ducks were also kept. The forest also provided food: meat, fish, fruits, nuts, and sweeteners from maple tree sap and honeybees.18

  The goal of Appalachian settlers in the antebellum period was to own their own land, thereby achieving economic independence (and fulfilling Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a country of yeoman farmers). But not all succeeded. Recent scholarship has shown that significant numbers of farmers in antebellum Appalachia never achieved land ownership. Land in Appalachia was first “privatized” through an orgy of speculation beginning in the late eighteenth century; by 1800 a small number of absentee owners had bought from the new states about three-quarters of the land. Those large land speculators were eager to sell, but only at a profit. Increasing population growth on the frontier meant steadily rising land values, which priced many settlers out of the market, ensuring that land ownership became very inequitably distributed. One recent exhaustive study calculates that by 1860 about 40 percent of agricultural households still owned no land; they survived as tenants or landless laborers.19 Tenancy and wage labor had become entrenched on the southern Appalachian frontier.

  Tenancy took several forms. One form required renters to make improvements—such as clearing land and building structures and fences—that would increase the land’s value for the owner. A more common form required the tenant to share his crop, often between a third and a half, with the landlord. Tenancy was not a dead end for all farmers. Some tenants were able to accumulate savings, which they eventually used to buy land. Other tenants rented land from their fathers or fathers-in-law in anticipation of eventually inheriting it. Tenants tended to be somewhat younger than farmers who owned land. They also were more mobile than owners, often disappearing from county census rolls from one decade to the next. Despite a few success stories, however, most tenants were not upwardly mobile and did not achieve their dream of land ownership.20

  Appalachian farming households produced mainly for their own consumption, but contrary to stereotype, few were completely self-sufficient. A significant minority of households made no effort to be self-sufficient; they specialized in cultivating cash crops such as tobacco and cotton for market sale and purchased most of their household goods. But even farm households that came close to self-sufficiency produced at least a small surplus of grain or livestock, which they bartered with neighbors or sold to local storekeepers or itinerant merchants and drovers. Those whose crops fell short of supporting them—most often those who farmed less than 100 acres—survived by selling their labor to their more prosperous neighbors, becoming dependent on wage earnings to supplement their needs. Although growing food was the highest priority for most farm families, they produced other items for domestic consumption such as clothing, tools, and home furnishings, and of course they constructed their own farm buildings.21

  Although the majority of Appalachian farm households supplied most of their own needs, it was not because they were isolated or cut off from the outside world; that persistent stereotype has long been proven false. Beginning with the earliest European hunters and traders who entered the region in the seventeenth century, mountaineers wanted to be and remained firmly connected to an external, or “world,” market economy. Appalachia initially became enmeshed in that world economy through Britain and France’s New World rivalry. Their main interest in the region was its forest products, especially deerskins to supply the European leathermaking industry. First Indian and then European hunters provided skins to British and French trading companies in exchange for guns, axes, knives, beads, pottery, clothing, and cooking utensils. This hunting became so intense that it threatened the survival of deer as a species in the Southern mountains.22

  As the farming stage of Appalachian history succeeded the hunting stage, mountaineers strengthened their trade links with the world economy by adding crops and livestock to a growing list of forest products that they shipped out of the region. James Patton, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in 1789, exemplified the steady expansion of that trade.23 A weaver in Ulster, he brought to America neither the skills nor the desire to work the land, preferring to become a “drummer,” or itinerant merchant, instead. His territory eventually stretched along the backcountry Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia through the Valley of Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina.

  The primary cash crop that mountain farmers raised for the market was livestock, primarily hogs, which Patton and others drove out of the mountains in large numbers. An expanding web of drovers’ roads such as western North Carolina’s Buncombe Turnpike, Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road, and the Federal Road from Nashville to Augusta, Georgia, linked inland farmers with coastal ports and enabled drovers such as Patton to establish Appalachia as a substantial provider of livestock to eastern markets (the Buncombe Turnpike was soon collecting tolls on more than 150,000 hogs per year). Other commodities that Patton bought from mountain farmers included furs, feathers, beeswax, and ginseng and snake root for medicines. In exchange for those forest products he traded cotton fabric and clothing, buckles, buttons, and silver lockets.

  William Holland Thomas operated several stores in western North Carolina near the homeland of the Cherokee in the early nineteenth century. His inventory also illustrates how trade connected Appalachian farm families to the world market. In addition to corn and livestock, he shipped butter, tanned hides, and ginseng to markets in Savannah, Charleston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Ginseng linked Appalachia to far-off Asia, for after shipment to London it was reexported by the British East India Company to China. Thomas’s stores offered a wide selection of goods ordered from those cities, many of which had originated in Europe: hardware, cotton and wool cloth, yarn, shoes, liquor, drugs, bonnets, silk goods, and a large selection of books including Bibles, histories, biographies, textbooks, almanacs, dictionaries, and etiquette books. Most farm households regularly purchased salt, coffee, refined cane sugar, tea, spices, chocolate, and rum from merchants such as Thomas.24

  On the western side of the Continental Divide the commodities of Appalachian farmers found their way down various tributaries to the Mississippi River. Even before 1800 Cumberland Plateau farmers shipped cotton, oat
s, wheat, corn, tobacco, hemp, and ginseng to New Orleans. Later Nashville became an important market.25

  These trade patterns clearly reflect Appalachia’s integration into a market economy. Despite its high level of farm tenancy, Appalachia in the antebellum period had become a productive supplier of agricultural commodities and a comparatively wealthy region of the nation. Farmers who owned land did especially well. One historian has estimated that most of Appalachia’s farm owners exceeded national averages in the per capita production of corn, wheat, and hogs, matched them in tobacco and cattle, and were only slightly below in cotton.26 Unfortunately, Appalachia’s position of relative wealth changed dramatically after the Civil War, thanks in part to increasing competition from Midwestern crops made possible by the expansion of railways but also to the wartime devastation of Appalachia and the explosion of its population.27

  Although agriculture dominated the antebellum Appalachian economy, industry did set some small-scale roots, especially in the extractive industries.28 America’s first gold rush began in the 1820s in western North Carolina and north Georgia, spreading to the Appalachian parts of Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia. The fever became so intense that whites persuaded state and federal governments to remove the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to the hills of Oklahoma. For two decades southern Appalachia led the nation in gold production, until the 1849 gold rush in California. Another southern Appalachian extractive industry that made a major contribution to the national economy was salt. Large salt works were developed in eastern Kentucky and in western and southwestern Virginia, primarily to supply meat packers in places such as Cincinnati and Knoxville.

  Although mines, furnaces, bloomeries, forges, and rolling mills popped up throughout the region, Appalachian iron production did not play as important a role in the antebellum national economy as gold and salt did. East Tennessee and eastern Kentucky became the largest regional producers. Ironworks ranged from small family-based operations supplying local demand to large firms such as those in northeastern Kentucky that employed dozens of workers and made Kentucky the third largest producer of iron in the nation by the 1830s.29

  Coal became dominant in southern Appalachia after the Civil War. Before the war coal was mined on a significant scale only in western and southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and East Tennessee. It was dug out of both mine shafts and open pits. It took the arrival of railroads to open Appalachian coalmines to a larger export market for this bulk commodity.

  Of all the extractive industries, timber was the most extensive in the antebellum period. It supported a host of other industries—supplying fuel for saltmaking, charcoal for ironmaking, bark for tanning leather, support beams for constructing mine shafts, barrels for transporting salt and meat—and provided building material for the production of most artifacts in a wood-based culture. Despite its bulk, timber was already being cut before the Civil War for export outside the region, even to Europe. But as with coal, the arrival of railways allowed greatly increased extraction from the mountains, leading to environmentally disastrous clearcutting in many places.

  The nature of the pioneer society that developed in Appalachia before the Civil War has been the subject of debate. In particular, much discussion has revolved around the notion of “Appalachian exceptionalism,” whether the region developed a unique culture that sharply distinguished it from the rest of America. Recent scholarship argues that it did not, that careful study reveals broad parallels between the development of Appalachia and of other American regions. The goal of scholarship then becomes one of “mapping points of similarity to and difference from . . . other rural locales across the nation.”30 Two differences, land use patterns and religion, resulted from interaction between the environment and topography of the region and the cultural inheritance some settlers brought with them from their Old World homes in Europe and Africa.31

  Land use patterns were affected by the new environment, for pioneer families initially were attracted to settle along the fertile banks of rivers and streams, often taking over fields that had been cultivated by Native Americans for generations. But cultural transmission played a role as well, especially the traditions of the Scotch-Irish who so heavily settled the Appalachian frontier. Their preference for combining open range livestock herding with crops dotted the Ulster landscape with clachans, clusters of a few farm households usually related by kin, and dispersed single-family farms. They regularly planted the “infields” near their houses with grains and potatoes while subjecting the “outfields” further off to a soil revitalizing cycle that alternated between grains and pasture. In the summer they herded their cattle and sheep to graze on ridge and mountaintop pastures. This pattern contrasted starkly with the densely populated villages of England’s grain-growing southeast. Ulster emigrants settling in the southern Appalachians brought it with them, stringing their farms out along the rivers and creeks in the dispersed pattern that they favored, planting infields and outfields, and free-ranging their livestock.32 This cultural preference overlaid on a mountainous topography partially explains the slow development of towns and urban life in Appalachia.

  Religion also shaped some distinctive differences in Appalachia. Early Scotch-Irish pioneers brought their Presbyterianism to the backcountry, and in places such as the Shenandoah Valley the progress of European settlement along the frontier can be mapped by the appearance of Presbyterian churches. In the eighteenth century, “New Side” Scottish Presbyterian reformers, insisting on a personal conversion experience as the sign of salvation, sponsored sacramental (or communion) festivals. These outdoor festivals, or “holy fairs,” lasting three or four days in the summer, drew large crowds and included lengthy sermons by popular ministers, prayer vigils, public confessions of sin, conversions, and tables full of communicants celebrating the Last Supper.33 Daniel Defoe described one such fair as a “field meeting, where [the preacher] preach’d to an auditory of near 7,000 people, all sitting in rows on the steep side of a green hill, and the preacher in a little pulpit made under a tent at the foot of the hill; he held his auditory, with not above an intermission of half an hour, almost seven hours.”34

  Scotch-Irish clergymen such as James McGready introduced these sacramental fairs to America, influencing the Great Awakening as it swept south from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. Born in Pennsylvania in 1758 and raised in Guilford County, North Carolina, McGready spread the devotional practices of the Scottish holy fairs, including prayer, self-examination of one’s conscience and behavior, meditation and devotional readings, and personal covenanting with God to renounce temptation and sin, accept Christ, rededicate to God, and renew baptismal covenants. Ecstatic experiences—trances, fainting spells, supernatural voices, and visions—were common. Ironically, these meetings were too often defiled by brazen sinners who saw them as opportunities to indulge in the very behaviors being denounced, especially drinking, gambling, and fornication. Such abuses provided ammunition to conservative clergymen who feared the emotions released during these revivals and attacked them as superstitious and licentious. But the meetings created a sense of community that helped bind dispersed frontier settlers together.35

  Other denominations contributed popular practices such as camping out, altar calls, and interdenominational congregations. Baptist and Methodist churches in particular thrived on the frontier. In part this was for doctrinal reasons; some Presbyterians came to prefer Baptist and Methodist teachings about personal salvation and congregational church government and therefore converted.36 But it was due more to the willingness of Baptists and Methodists to accept “the call” from God as sufficient certification of fitness for the ministry. Presbyterians, who demanded a seminary-trained ministry, found it difficult to attract qualified clergymen to frontier communities and were too often faced with the choice of doing without church life or converting. But while Presbyterian congregations diminished in numbers, the intense evangelical religiosity brought by the Scotch-Irish survived, and beliefs and practices roote
d in their Calvinism such as predestination, contentiousness over theology, and emotional evangelicalism left a strong imprint on Appalachian culture.37

  Appalachia underwent its frontier phase between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That experience was similar in many ways to that of other parts of the nation. But the Civil War was a turning point for the worse. It devastated the region’s economy, marked the beginning of a dramatic surge in population that contributed to serious economic decline, and was followed by the takeoff of Midwestern agricultural production and its subsequent domination of eastern markets. From a region that had matched many of the social and economic characteristics of the nation as a whole, Appalachia after the Civil War entered a long and painful transformation into a new and painful role as the nation’s deprived and neglected stepchild.

  NOTES

  1. Roy S. Dickens Jr., “The Origins and Development of Cherokee Culture,” in The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 3–32; Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 77–119;Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 12–18; Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 20; Sharlotte Neely, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 15–16.

  2. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), chap. 2.

  3. Thomas L. Purvis, “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 41 (1984): 85–101.