As late as 1986, in a seminal collection of essays titled Blacks in Appalachia, one of its editors, Edward J. Cabbell, wrote of the “black invisibility” factor in studies of the region. He noted both the widespread assumption that southern highlanders did not include an African American presence and the failure of scholars to pay serious attention to issues of slavery or race relations in their studies of Appalachian history or culture. Black people in the region remained “a neglected minority within a neglected minority.”11
Only in the last decade and a half have scholars fully come to terms with Appalachia’s biracial makeup in its formative years. We now recognize how, despite their small numbers, African Americans influenced the region’s economy, society, and politics in significant ways, both before and after the Civil War.
Census figures alone refute misconceptions of the racial “purity” of the southern highlands. Slavery had infiltrated almost every Appalachian county by the mid-nineteenth century, although it did so more sporadically and much more sparsely than was true for most of the rest of the South. In 1860, the region as a whole included a black populace, slave and free, of 175,000. Freedmen and women continued to reside in most mountain areas by century’s end, when their numbers totaled more than 274,000.12 But the post–Civil War distribution of African Americans was far more concentrated in certain locales than was true during the slave era. The few urban areas, such as Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville, and Bristol, saw a dramatic influx of blacks just after the war. So too did the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and especially West Virginia, which attracted thousands of Southern blacks in the 1880s and 1890s and drastically changed the racial demographics of substantial areas of central Appalachia.13
The black presence in Appalachia began almost as early as that of whites. African slaves accompanied the Spanish expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo that moved through the southernmost highlands in the sixteenth century. Such exposure was fleeting, of course, but by the early eighteenth century, as white settlers pushed into the Southern backcountry, they too brought slaves with them. A slave trade developed along with that of deerskins and other commodities with the Cherokee Indians, who well before the American Revolution had replaced other Indians with Africans as the basis of what soon became a slaveholding society not unlike that of the white planter class.14
Recent work on frontier settlement in Appalachia demonstrates the extent to which the institution of slavery was at least present in, if not central to, highland society in its formative years. The earliest settlers in the Catawba, French Broad, Yadkin, and New River valleys of western North Carolina staked claims to large tracts of flat, fertile bottomlands and set about acquiring slaves to work that land in the 1770s and 1780s. Studies of upper Blue Ridge Virginia and trans-Appalachian Kentucky also indicate that blacks accompanied the white owners who first settled the most promising lands of those eighteenth-century wildernesses. The first census of 1790 indicates that more than 12,000 slaves had been transported across the mountains into Kentucky and more than 3,000 into East Tennessee.15
The slaveholdings of early mountain masters were small, averaging fewer than five slaves per household. The highlands could never support the large-scale cash crop agricultural output of the plantation South, a system fully dependent on the substantial black labor force that supported it. Much of the work performed by this early generation of Appalachian slaves was agricultural, with blacks often working alongside their owners in fields of moderate to small farms such as that of James Burroughs, Booker T. Washington’s first master. They also performed a wide range of other tasks, such as herding livestock, operating saw and grist mills, and clearing timber. But such labor would hardly have been enough to support even the small number of slaves in the region, an average of 10 percent of the Appalachian population in 1860, owned by only about 10 percent of white households. Only other nonagricultural enterprises made the “peculiar institution” profitable and spurred the importation of more substantial numbers of African Americans into the Southern mountains.
Recent studies of western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky demonstrate that most slaveowners were either merchants or professional men who often used the capital they earned to purchase more slaves than the farm property most also owned would have supported.16 Their slaves often were employed in small-scale manufacturing, from hats, shoes, and cloth to tobacco and iron products. William Holland Thomas, an influential businessman and political leader in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, was among those who put slaves to work in his various entrepreneurial activities. Several of his thirty-two slaves worked in his brickyard and small ironworks, and others were employed in carpentry and wagonmaking. There are frequent references to individual slaves who worked at his mercantile operation at Quallatown and others whom he entrusted to make trips throughout the area and as far south as Columbia, South Carolina, and Athens, Georgia, to trade iron goods for general merchandise for his store.17
Other outlets for slave labor were the many highland hotels, resorts, and mineral springs, where visitors sought relief from the summer heat and its ill effects in lowland regions of the South. Innkeepers in Abingdon and Hot Springs in Virginia and Asheville, Flat Rock, and Hendersonville in North Carolina were among the largest slaveholders in those areas. They used their bondsmen and women in all aspects of serving their guests, maintaining their facilities, and even serving as guides for sightseeing and hunting expeditions organized for visitors. One British visitor to Asheville in 1840 commented on the sheer number of slaves and the extent to which they seemed to dominate his hotel’s operation. “The business of the inn,” he complained, “is left mostly to the black servants to manage as they see fit.” The fact that many guests came accompanied by entourages of their own slaves meant that the black residents of these resort communities often swelled during the summer.18
The range of activity and seeming autonomy of some highland bondsmen and women led outside observers to see such flexibility as indications of a more relaxed and less restrictive form of slavery in the mountains than was true elsewhere in the South. New York correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted, the most notable chronicler, traveled through the region in 1854 and was struck by the extent to which Appalachian slaves were more like “ordinary free laborers” whose work “was directed to a greater variety of employments and [who] exercise more responsibility.” He concluded that the system’s “moral evils . . . are less, even less proportionately to the number of slaves.”19 Another British traveler drew a similar conclusion in traveling through the region several years earlier. “The slaves residing among the mountains are the happiest and most independent part of the population; and I have had many a one pilot me over the mountains who would not have exchanged places even with his master.”20
One must not make too much of such impressionistic statements. If these same visitors had observed slaves in other contexts—at work in coalmines or iron forges, for instance, rather than as servants at thriving resorts—they would have reached different conclusions about the plight of highland bondsmen. In fact, as already noted in both Sam Williams’s and Booker T. Washington’s experiences, far more African Americans were engaged in the grueling work of the extractive industries—coal, salt, copper, iron, or gold—that developed in southern and central Appalachia in the antebellum era than ever served summer guests at hotels and springs.
The saltworks in the Kanawha Valley, where the young Booker found his first employment, was among those largely dependent on slave labor, but it was not alone. Salt was also mined and processed in southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky. According to a new study of Clay County, Kentucky, slaves’ time there was split between salt production and farming.21
Coalmining first emerged primarily as a subsidiary enterprise for fueling the furnaces for salt and iron. Slaves had made up nearly half of the labor force in coalmining operations in eastern and northern Virginia as early as the mid-eighteenth century and were br
ought west into the mountains toward the end of the century, when coal deposits began to be mined there. Coalmining was still in its infancy in the southernmost Appalachians of Alabama and Tennessee before the Civil War, but few of the companies established in the 1840s and 1850s depended heavily on slaves. The dangers of underground mining made many slaveowners reluctant to risk hiring out those they owned to highland mining companies, a situation that changed dramatically in the latter decades of the century, when black lives had lost their high value to whites once they were emancipated.22
Gold mining proved more compatible with slave labor. The first gold rush in the region, that in the South Mountains of North Carolina, brought hundreds of slaves into Burke and Rutherford counties, either accompanied by their masters or hired out from sources elsewhere in the state and beyond. The discovery of gold in north Georgia in 1829 launched a much greater rush, with slaves a major part of the labor force brought into Auraria and Dahlonega either to pan for gold in creeks and streams or to undertake the far more risky work of digging in hastily dug tunnels or shafts. A number of slaves purchased their freedom with gold they found on their own time or with negotiated percentages of what they mined for their masters. When California gold drew Americans across the continent two decades later, southern highlanders from North Carolina and Georgia, often accompanied by slaves, made up a disproportionate number of the forty-niners rushing west to seek their fortunes.23
As noted earlier, much of the labor supply in these industries and others came from the hiring, rather than the purchase, of slaves. That option and the flexibility it provided were key to the profitability of slavery in Appalachia and fueled the impressions of Olmsted and others that slaves were more like free labor engaged in a wider variety of pursuits than was true elsewhere in the South. As many as a third to a half of slave workers in the region’s saltworks and coalmines were hired rather than owned by mine or furnace operators.24
Railroad construction in several areas of Appalachia in the late antebellum period provided an especially lucrative opportunity for owners to hire their slaves out to companies seeking local construction workers. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through southwestern Virginia in the mid-1850s was built largely by enslaved African Americans rented on an annual basis from masters in the area. By the end of that decade, western Carolinians finally saw their hopes of a railroad materialize; with it came a flurry of slave trading and hiring negotiated between large owners from Morganton to Asheville and officials of the Western North Carolina Railroad. So great was anticipated demand that Asheville businessmen advertised statewide for “100 to 500 Likely Negros Wanted” in 1859 and 1860.25
An active slave trade was very much in evidence throughout Appalachia. A major thrust of the market for black men and women was that from the upper South down to the expanding cotton belt of the Gulf states, and that meant routes through the Southern mountains. Several towns and cities in the region—Abingdon, Winchester, and Wheeling in Virginia; London and Pikeville in Kentucky; and Knoxville and Chattanooga in Tennessee—were the sites of active slave markets for much of the antebellum era. Slave auctions elsewhere in the upper South were dependent on slaves supplied from highland areas, and according to British geologist George Featherstonaugh, it was not uncommon to see slave coffles moving through southwest Virginia and East Tennessee headed for deep South markets. In 1844, he expressed amazement at the sight of slave drivers with more than 300 men, women, and children in chains, which he encountered both in the New River valley and later in Knoxville, as they moved their human cargo toward Natchez, Mississippi.26
The Civil War proved as much an upheaval for slavery in the southern highlands as it did elsewhere in the South. Just as Appalachians experienced the war in many different ways, depending on where in the region they lived, so the means and timing of slavery’s destruction varied widely. For areas subject to military incursion, such as the Shenandoah Valley and the Tennessee mountains, the stability of slavery was readily undermined. By 1863, as Federal troops occupied most of East Tennessee, many pro-Confederate owners fled the region and abandoned their slaves to fend for themselves.
Other slaves used the upheaval to escape, often heading into Kentucky or, after Union occupation, into Knoxville or Chattanooga, whose populations swelled with refugees, black and white, from within the region and well beyond.27
Black Appalachians contributed significantly to the Union army. Officials in East Tennessee cities and towns either claimed many of the slave refugees as contrabands or recruited them into Federal service, despite strenuous objections from local residents who feared the arming of their former black property. A study of Kentucky slaves who enlisted in the Union army during the war suggests that the majority of the 20,000 blacks, free and slave, recruited for the U.S. Colored Infantry in the war’s final year were from the state’s mountain counties.28
Yet for many other parts of Appalachia, the institution of slavery remained remarkably stable, indeed even flourished, for much of the conflict’s duration. Slaves were brought or sent to the mountains by their owners from other parts of the Confederacy more vulnerable to Union liberators. Several North Carolina highland entrepreneurs actively recruited slaves—either purchased or hired—from owners in coastal areas and then sold or hired them out to mountaineers eager to supplement the labor force so depleted by army recruitment and later conscription. This created a vigorous regional slave market that inflated slave prices and hiring rates that obscured for many just how risky the institution’s future was.29
The false sense of security among western Carolinians about their slave property lasted until the waning days of the conflict. In April 1865, a raid by Federal troops from East Tennessee, led by General George B. Stoneman, finally instigated slavery’s demise in the region as owners came to experience the same sense of disruption and loss that so many white southerners had felt earlier. As elsewhere, the mere presence or even proximity of Union troops emboldened slaves to leave their masters, often in unruly and destructive ways. In describing the effect of Stoneman’s presence in Asheville, one woman wrote of her neighbor’s slaves, “All of Mrs. J. W. Patton’s servants left her and went with the Yankees; not a single one of all she had remained to do a thing in the house or in the kitchen. They even took her beautiful carriage and, crowding into it, drove off in full possession.”30
If the array of emancipation experiences among Appalachian slaves was as vast as that faced by their counterparts throughout the South, so too were race relations during Reconstruction and beyond. The new mobility of freedmen and women meant major demographic shifts in the racial makeup of Appalachian counties and communities. Like Booker T. Washington and his family, many blacks moved both within the region—from a farm in western Virginia to the mining districts of central West Virginia, as Booker T. Washington’s family did at war’s end—or out of the region completely, as the young Washington himself did several years later. At least ten Appalachian counties lost their entire black population between 1880 and 1900, in response to a combination of push (scare tactics) and pull (economic opportunity elsewhere) factors.31
On the other hand, some parts of the region, especially its urban areas, saw an influx of new black residents in the immediate postwar years. In at least two cases, groups of blacks moved into the region from elsewhere to establish new communities: the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a farm commune founded in 1870 by South Carolina freedmen in Henderson County, North Carolina, and Coe Ridge, an all-black settlement established in Kentucky’s Cumberland Plateau.32
The coalfields of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky attracted vast numbers of black men from the deep South to meet the labor demands of what quickly became the region’s largest industry. The black population of that area more than doubled between 1880 and 1900 and continued to grow dramatically over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Southern West Virginia, in particular, lured African Americans in large numbers to its mines and mining communities. From a mere 3,2
00 blacks in the state in 1870, the number of black West Virginians grew to nearly 42,000 by 1910 and made up nearly three-quarters of the total black populace of central Appalachia. Their concentration was such that by 1920, 96 percent of blacks in the entire region lived in sixteen coal-producing counties.33 Not all African Americans became coalminers voluntarily. In the region’s southernmost mines, the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama leased their black convicts to mining companies, where they faced harsh working conditions and abusive treatment not unlike that experienced by earlier generations of slaves.34
Such concentrations of African Americans provided political clout, most often in conjunction with white mountain Republicans, which made that party a formidable force in much of southern Appalachia not only during Reconstruction but through the rest of the nineteenth century, until blacks throughout the South were disfranchised in the 1890s.35 Blacks who remained in the mountains often wielded their collective agency in other ways as well, from the establishment of black schools and churches to fraternal and other social organizations. Again, Booker T. Washington’s experience reflected much of this postwar community building among Appalachian freedmen. After his education at the Hampton Institute, he returned to West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley in 1875 and for several years taught school, served as Sunday school teacher and clerk of the black Baptist church, and engaged in state and local politics, mobilizing black voters for the Kanawha Republicans.36
But such achievements often were overshadowed by the same prejudices and even violence that characterized the rest of the Jim Crow South. The influx of blacks into both cities and coal districts led to open unrest and white attacks. In Asheville, the attempt by a black man to vote in 1868 led to a race riot that left one man dead and several blacks and whites wounded. Even more turbulent was an 1893 incident in Roanoke, Virginia, in which a black youth’s alleged attack on a “respectable” white woman provoked an angry mob scene at the jail where the youth was held. Attempts by police and local militia to control the crowd merely exacerbated the crowd’s mood and led to a riot that resulted in at least seven dead and more than twenty-five wounded, at the end of which the accused black assailant was taken from his cell and lynched.37
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