As the political process became somewhat less turbulent, the first attempts to reintroduce industry in the region began. Northern soldiers who had fought at the battle of Chattanooga noticed evidence of coal and iron deposits in the vicinity. By 1869, they and local entrepreneurs had formed companies that would grow into Tennessee Coal and Iron, a major regional industry. In northern Alabama, businesspeople from the state recognized the same potential in their area and created the model city of Birmingham to act as another center for coal and iron production. These initiatives took place because of a rapid advance in railroad building in parts of the mountain South. Much more could have been accomplished, but corruption in some state subsidy programs, including the Western North Carolina Railroad, limited expansion.31
As Democrats returned to office at the state level in all of the Appalachian states by 1874—Alabama Democrats were the last to capture their legislature in that year—they sought to control taxes by greatly reducing government expenditures. This meant that increasingly impoverished mountain communities and counties would receive little or no assistance from the states to rebuild. In fact, many lowland leaders viewed the mountain counties as hostile political territory and refused to send resources their way. This situation was particularly tragic in the field of education. Many mountain counties were unable to develop a rudimentary educational system, and literacy began to decline in the rural parts of the highlands. This created a situation in which Appalachian leaders began to look beyond the South for the capital needed to develop their region.32
The Democratic governments also ended the policies that favored the poor in mountain counties. Virginia and Georgia restricted the right of the poor to hunt and fish on land owned by other people. Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina repealed the homestead exemption laws that allowed the poor to keep their homes even though they were in debt. In 1872, West Virginia added a provision to its state constitution that facilitated the transfer of property and mineral rights from small land owners to mining and timber companies. To ensure that the poor mountaineers would not join a political coalition to challenge these changes, Georgia, Maryland, and Tennessee imposed poll taxes in 1870 to discourage poor blacks and whites from voting.33
These setbacks did not go unnoticed. It was during this period of economic, social, cultural, and political collapse that writers of the Local Color School of fiction took notice of the Southern mountaineers. Starting in 1873, short story writers began to depict the mountain people in ways that led directly to the creation of the mountaineer stereotype. Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Yares of Black Mountain,” which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1875, is an excellent example of this treatment of Appalachians as a poor people living in a declining society. Unfortunately for many mountain dwellers, the fictional accounts were close to reality.34
The Civil War and Reconstruction were sixteen years of war, social and economic disorganization, and political turmoil. The people of the Appalachian South were caught in the middle of a catastrophic national quarrel. They suffered as few other Americans did during this period. When peace returned after 1876, the region was politically and economically weaker than it had been before 1861. Many communities and families had been shattered by death, disability, and political and personal hatreds. In this weakened condition, the region and its leaders could not resist outside powers that sought to control Appalachia’s resources and people.
NOTES
1. Victor B. Howard, “John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry and the Sectional Crisis in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 55 (Oct. 1978): 396–420.
2. Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 164–94;W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 852–64; Paul Horton, “Submitting to the ‘Shadow of Slavery’: The Secession Crisis and Civil War in Alabama’s Lawrence County,” Civil War History 44 (June 1998): 111–36.
3. Richard O. Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964).
4. Charles L. Wagandt, “Redemption or Reaction? Maryland in the Post-Civil War Years,” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 149, 152; David Madden, “Unionist Resistance to Confederate Occupation: The Bridge Burners of East Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 52 (1980–81): 22–39; W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).
5. James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997); D. Warren Lambert, When the Ripe Pears Fell: The Battle of Richmond, Kentucky (Richmond, Ky.: Madison County Historical Society, 1995).
6. Ted Alexander, “Destruction, Disease, and Death: The Battle of Antietam and the Sharpsburg Civilians,” Civil War Regiments 6 (1998): 143–73; Stephen H. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1983).
7. William Marvel, Burnside (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 264–343; Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
8. Woodworth, Six Armies; Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Richard M. McMurry, Atlanta, 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
9. John L. Heatwole, The Burning: Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville, Va.: Howell Press, 1998); Frank E. Vandiver, Jubal’s Raid: General Early’s Famous Attack on Washington in 1864 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
10. William Marvel, Southwest Virginia in the Civil War: The Battle for Saltville (Lynchburg, Va.: H. E. Howard, 1992); Chris J. Hartley, “Like an Avalanche: George Stoneman’s 1865 Cavalry Raid,” Civil War Regiments 6 (1998): 74–92; John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
11. Kenneth W. Noe, “Red String Scare: Civil War in Southwest Virginia and the Heroes of America,” North Carolina Historical Review 69 (July 1992): 301–22; John W. Shaffer, “Loyalties in Conflict: Union and Confederate Sentiment in Barbour County,” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 109–28.
12. Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 19.
13. Martin Crawford, “Confederate Volunteering and Enlistment in Ashe County, North Carolina,” Civil War History 37 (Mar. 1991): 29–50.
14. Keith S. Bohannon, “They Had Determined to Root Us Out: Dual Memoirs by a Unionist Couple in Blue Ridge Georgia,” in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 97–120; Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 111, 113, 141–45.
15. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 600–608.
16. Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 172–73.
17. Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
18. Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 197–98.
19. Jonathan D. Sarris, “Anatomy of an Atrocity: The Madden Branch Massacre and Guerrilla Warfare in North Georgia, 1861–1865,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (Winter 1993): 679–710;Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 29–33.
20. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 38–41; Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 208–31.
21. Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 198–200.
22. Sean Michael O’Brien, Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999).
23. Inscoe and McKinney, Confederate Appalachia, 261–62.
24. Foner, Reconstruction, 37–41; Hans Louis Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
25. Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Jonathan D. Sarris, “An Execution in Lumpkin County: Localized Loyalties in North Georgia’s Civil War,” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 150.
26. Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 10–11, 20–22.
27. Richard Alan Humphrey, “The Civil War and Church Schisms in Southern Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 9 (Summer 1981): 38–51.
28. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 30–61; Curry, Radicalism.
29. Foner, Reconstruction, 37–41.
30. Ibid., 421–22.
31. Gordon B. McKinney, “The Blair Committee Investigation of 1883: Industrialization in the Southern Mountains,” Appalachian Journal 26 (Winter 1999): 150–66; William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 396–97.
32. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 51–74; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 77–108.
33. Foner, Reconstruction, 440–44; Curry, Radicalism.
34. Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” Appalachian Journal (3 Winter 1976): 117–19.
5
Industrialization
Ronald L. Lewis
The Appalachia created by the late-nineteenth-century local color writers was a “strange land and peculiar people,” as one of them wrote. Their construction emphasized spatial and cultural isolation and presented Appalachia as a remnant of America’s frontier.1 Whatever its literary merit, this view obscures the reality that industry has always played an important, if not always leading, role in the region’s history. Several historical paradigms seek to explain the industrial transition in Appalachia, but the perspective presented in this chapter is that industrial enterprises, such as coal, salt, timber, iron, and agricultural processing, have long been important to the Appalachian economy. The unprecedented capital investment in the railroad and basic industries in the last decades of the nineteenth century lifted the expansion to a crescendo and transformed much of the region from a rural agricultural economy to one in which major subregions became dependent on industry.
As a producer of raw materials, Appalachia played a significant role in America’s rise as a global power between the Civil War and World War I. The transition from a rural agricultural to a rural industrial region has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Internally, industries generally were concentrated in subregions, and temporally the region’s economy evolved through stages of growth and complexity from early settlement to the present. More generally, the economy evolved from agriculture and self-subsistence, through the transition to industrial dependency at the turn of the twentieth century, and to deindustrialization in the last half of that century, when technology replaced human labor. In Appalachia as elsewhere, this era is associated with mill and mine closings, chronic unemployment, poverty, and out-migration, all of which raise serious public policy issues.
Contrary to the popular image of Appalachia as a closed and inward-looking folk culture, recent scholarship has demonstrated conclusively that a strong market orientation developed in the region. These studies show that almost from the beginning mountain settlements spawned a commercial elite, and subsequent population growth and the adoption of slavery ensured that mountain society would be not only class differentiated but also heterogeneous.2 Manufactures related to agriculture served a vital function in the early mountain economy, particularly gristmills, wool-carding mills, sawmills, and tanyards, which grew in relation to population density and social complexity. A wide variety of economic activities have been documented in Appalachia, taking us far beyond the marginal hardscrabble hill farm of lore.
Appalachian enterprises concentrated primarily on processing agricultural commodities and raw materials for export, enterprises that did not stimulate sustained, diversified economic development. Agricultural processing in southern Appalachia was concentrated in flour and cornmeal milling, distilling grains into liquor, packing beef and pork, finishing livestock hides into leather goods, and manufacturing tobacco products and cotton and woolen cloth. Three-fifths of the region’s manufacturing investment went into extractive industries such as salt, coal, iron, timber, gold, and other mineral exports, such as copper, lead, saltpeter, and alum. These industrial enterprises tended to be concentrated in industrial enclaves located on strategic river, canal, and later railroad connections that conveyed these commodities to distant markets.3
Natural resource industries, although a distant second to agriculture as a mainstay of the early Appalachian economy, also employed an increasing number of people throughout the nineteenth century. By 1860 there were 6,019 industrial enterprises in southern Appalachia, employing 23,357 laborers. Industrialization both stunted and distorted economic development in Appalachia, however. Capital investment was only one-half the national average and was below average for the South as a whole. Therefore, most firms were small. Moreover, industrialization proceeded unevenly throughout the region, creating enclaves of concentration but failing to spawn ancillary enterprises that would provide the base for a sustainable economic expansion.4
Gold discovered in 1829 sparked a rush of speculators in northern Georgia, northern Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Over the next thirty years several thousand placer miners, free and slave, dug millions of dollars’ worth of gold for export.5 Copper was also an important extractive industry in antebellum Appalachia, particularly after the copper strike in southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia opened the region’s most significant copper mining operations. Nearly all of the ore was extracted to export to distant markets, primarily in Europe. Appalachian alum was used by canneries, manganese for steel manufacturing, lead for shot and other metallurgical uses, and saltpeter for gunpowder.6
Iron manufacturing was one of the largest industrial activities in the antebellum years. Charcoal was the primary fuel for iron furnaces, and the dense forests provided a plentiful supply of wood, but by the mid-nineteenth century technological improvements permitted the use of coal to fire iron furnaces. Consequently, the proximity of coal and iron deposits dictated that the industry would be concentrated in northern Alabama, the Cumberland River basin of Tennessee, southeastern Pennsylvania, and northwestern Virginia, and in the Hanging Rock district of Ohio and Kentucky, where the raw materials were located. Appalachia’s 250 ironworks employed more than 6,000 free workers and innumerable slaves, who produced approximately one-fifth of the nation’s iron in 1840. The Mount Savage Iron Works in western Maryland was one of the largest firms in the nation, employing more than 900 slave and free laborers at its peak in the 1850s.7
Lumber was the most extensive industry in antebellum Appalachia. Most settlements had their local sawmills. As the century wore on, however, local leather, coal, iron, and salt industries stimulated the manufacture of other forest products, such as barrels, wooden pipes, planks, fence railings, shingles, ship masts, and charcoal. Much of this production was consumed lo
cally, but the Midwest was a major consumer, and shingles, ship masts, and planking were exported to the coastal seaports.8
Although coal became synonymous with Appalachia by the end of the nineteenth century, its importance was primarily local in the antebellum era. At some locations the production of coal grew into a significant industrial undertaking. Coal from eastern Kentucky was shipped down the Cumberland River to Knoxville and Nashville for use in the iron mills, and Kanawha coal fueled the salt furnaces in West Virginia. Other mines produced cannel coal, from which was produced gas for the street lights of Baltimore and other cities of the Northeast.9
Salt was a vital food seasoning and preservative before the invention of chemical preservatives and refrigeration, and Appalachian saltworks led the nation in production for the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the works in Virginia and Kentucky were regionally significant, the most extensive salt-producing complex in antebellum Appalachia was made up of 65 salt wells and 20 furnaces located on the Kanawha River near Charleston, West Virginia. The Kanawha industry reached its peak in the 1840s, when approximately 3 million bushels of salt were produced. Like most industries in the Old South, Kanawha salt manufacturers relied on the labor of African American slaves. Major changes in the economy by the Civil War, particularly the growth of railroads, the population shift westward to Chicago, and development of major salt deposits in Michigan, all doomed the Appalachian salt industry. Nevertheless, along the Kanawha River it had stimulated large-scale industrial organization based on extraction and spurred the development of lumber, coal, natural gas, boat building, and smaller-scale industries such as coopering that paved the way for industrialization, which came to the Kanawha Valley after the Civil War.10
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