Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Historian Barbara Fields has even suggested that the movement of yeomen into the backcountry can be viewed as a southern counterpart to the northern Free-Soil movement. They migrated into the hills, she maintains, “to escape the encirclement of the plantation and create a world after their own image.” Highlanders themselves often extolled the “slavelessness” of their region in Calvinistic terms that the abolitionist movement later adopted. “We are more moral and religious and less absorbed . . . than the people of West Tennessee,” noted East Tennessean David Deaderick in his journal in 1827, for “where slaves exist in large numbers and where all the work, or nearly all, is performed by slaves, a consequent inaction and idleness are characteristics of the whites.”22

  John Brown long saw the southern highlands as central to his abolitionist schemes. As early as 1847, in a meeting with Frederick Douglass, Brown pointed on a map to the “far-reaching Alleghenies” and declared that “these mountains are the basis of my plan,” both as an escape route out of the South and a base of operations from which he could direct uprisings against the plantation South. Douglass quoted Brown as saying, “God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts . . . [and] good hiding places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.”23 When Brown finally attacked Harpers Ferry twelve years later, the highlands were still crucial to his aims. He hoped to move south through Virginia and the Carolinas, liberating the slaves of the plantation piedmont and sending them to a chain of fortresses established in the mountains to their west, from which they would hold their opponents at bay as reinforcements, black and white, gathered to form an army of liberation. “The mountains and swamps of the South,” Brown reiterated to a fellow conspirator a year before his 1859 raid on that western Virginia arsenal, “were intended by the Almighty for a refuge for the slave and a defense against the oppressor.”24

  In the early months of the Civil War, a Minnesota journalist suggested that the key to putting down the southern rebellion lay in the federal government’s embrace and use of the support it enjoyed within the South, particularly among southern Appalachians. The reason, he maintained, was that “within this Switzerland of the South, Nature is at war with slavery.” Bondage, he implied, was incompatible with high altitudes: “Freedom has always loved the air of mountains. Slavery, like malaria, desolates the low alluvials of the globe.”25 Such sentiments became even more prevalent after the war, as northerners acknowledged the Union loyalty of much of the region. In an 1872 sermon Rev. William Goodrich of Cleveland, Ohio, was among those who extolled the virtues of the highland South. “Explain it as we may,” he preached, “there belongs to mountain regions a moral elevation of their own. They give birth to strong, free, pure and noble races. They lift the men who dwell among them, in thought and resolve. Slavery, falsehood, base compliance, luxury, belong to the plains. Freedom, truth, hardy sacrifice, simple honor, to the highlands.”26

  So the creation of “Holy Appalachia”—as Allen Batteau termed it in his study of the region’s “invention” by outside interests—was under way. It was a creation based on rather convoluted reasoning. The admiration for the Anglo-Saxon purity of mountaineers’ identity carried with it the implication that a conscious rejection of slavery on ideological grounds played a major part in their lack of racial or ethnic contamination. Abraham Lincoln became part of this increasingly idealized formula and emerged as a patron saint to a later generation of mountain residents.27

  Even Harry Caudill, whose haves-versus-have-nots analysis of Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountains extended to antebellum tensions between the area’s few slaveholders and its vast majority of nonslaveholders, believed that nonslaveholders’ Unionist stance during the Civil War stemmed not so much from class resentment as from the fact that in some vague way “these poorer mountaineers, fiercely independent as they were, found something abhorrent in the ownership of one person by another.” John Fox’s idealistic young hero in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come was not, Caudill maintained, “the only mountaineer to risk or endure death on the battlefields because of a sincere desire to see the shackles stricken from millions of men and women.”28

  Another major factor that contributed to the image of Appalachia as “holy” ground was the establishment of several abolitionist footholds in the region. The frequently touted claim that the abolition movement began in the mountains rests on early efforts in Wheeling, Virginia; in East Tennessee; and later in Berea, Kentucky. As early as 1797 a Knoxville newspaper advocated the forming of an abolition society, and the next decade saw Benjamin Lundy fulfilling that charge in Wheeling. Lundy later moved to northeastern Tennessee, where he joined a number of “New Light” Presbyterians and Quakers from Pennsylvania and Ohio, who established what were among the nation’s first manumission societies and produced the earliest antislavery publications. By 1827, according to one claim, East Tennessee had one-fifth of the abolition societies in the United States and almost a fifth of the national membership.29 But most organized efforts were phased out or moved elsewhere within a few years; Maryville College in Blount County remained the only substantial base of antislavery activity for the rest of the antebellum period.30

  Other manifestations of highland antislavery were more sectional. In 1847 Henry Ruffner—a Presbyterian minister and president of Virginia’s Washington College, who had small slaveholdings in Rockbridge County—stirred debate over (and, briefly, garnered considerable support for) a proposal that slavery, while firmly entrenched in eastern Virginia, could be gradually abolished west of the Blue Ridge “without detriment to the rights or interests of slaveholders.” He proposed that all slaves in the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding mountains be transported to Liberia and that future importation of blacks into the region be banned. But much of Ruffner’s agenda and the basis for much of the initial enthusiasm for his proposal grew out of resentment of sectional inequities that benefited the Tidewater slaveholding elite at the expense of westerners. Once constitutional reforms in 1851 alleviated many of those perceived abuses, support for Ruffner’s emancipation scheme evaporated.31

  Although less explicitly abolitionist in purpose, Berea College stood as a model of interracial education from its origins in the 1850s until almost the end of the century, the product of Kentucky-born, Ohio-educated abolitionist John Fee’s quest for “a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man.” Ellen Semple cited Berea as an example of “the democratic spirit characteristic of all mountain people” and concluded that its location on the western margin of the Cumberland Plateau was “probably the only geographic location south of the Mason and Dixon line where such an institution could exist.”32 As unusual as this experiment was in the postbellum, much less the antebellum, South, one can hardly credit its existence to Appalachian liberality. The school’s turn-of-the-century shift to an exclusive mission aimed at mountain whites and preservation of their folk arts bestowed on Berea a reputation as a cultural center of Appalachia. Fee himself never thought of Berea as being located in the mountains. “We are in the ‘hill country,’ ” he wrote in 1867, “between the ‘blue grass’ & the mountains. From the former region we now draw our colored men, from the latter the young white men & ladies.”33

  Merely on the basis of these rather limited or regionally marginal efforts, however, the concept of Appalachia as a solid bastion of freedom and equality has been difficult to shake, as scholars from Carter Woodson in the 1910s to Don West in the 1970s have implied that Appalachia was thoroughly and deeply abolitionist. Yet all have distorted the evidence to make such a case, and their treatments of the subject are deceptive. Woodson, himself a black Appalachian native, published his landmark 1916 essay, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia,” in the very first issue of the Journal of Negro History, which he founded and edited. He maintained that the Scotch-Irish who settled the southern highlands, a “liberty-loving, and tyrant-hatin
g race,” exhibited “more prejudice against the slave holder than against the Negro.” He stressed their antislavery sentiment in the region as pervasive and ongoing. Woodson’s geographic scope was deceptively broad, however, encompassing far more than the southern highlands. As much of his essay deals with abolitionist activity in piedmont North Carolina and central Kentucky as it does with those short-lived efforts in East Tennessee.34

  Don West, a native of north Georgia and cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, relied on only scattered evidence—from the East Tennessee abolitionists to incidents of Confederate disaffection in north Georgia—to draw even more generalized conclusions regarding mountain liberalism on racial matters. From these few examples he claimed to demonstrate that the mountain South “consistently opposed slavery” and “refused to go with the Confederacy.” The southern mountaineer, West wrote, “may be said to have held the Lincoln attitude generally.”35

  There was more than a touch of presentism in both Woodson’s and West’s historical claims. Each maintained that the legacy of antebellum racial tolerance was still very much in evidence in the Appalachia in which they were raised. Woodson concluded his essay claiming that “one can observe even day-to-day such a difference in the atmosphere of the two sections, and in passing from the tidewater to the mountains it seems like going from one country into another. . . . In Appalachian America the races still maintain a sort of social contact,” working, eating, and worshipping together. West, too, drew on his own childhood memories to make the same case. He recalled that he never saw a black person until he was fifteen years old, when his family had moved from Georgia’s mountains to sharecrop in the cotton country of Cobb County. Unfamiliar with the racial mores of the lowland South, the Wests welcomed their black neighbors as guests in their home and at their dinner table, much to the chagrin of local whites. When asked about it, his mother replied that she had always been taught to treat people equally, an attitude West claimed “was indicative of the sentiment of many people in the Appalachian South.”36

  So what is one to make of these extreme contradictions regarding highland attitudes toward blacks? Both contain significant elements of truth and perhaps even accurately convey the sentiments of certain pockets of southern highland society. However, there is another body of evidence that, while by no means either comprehensive or systematic, can be mustered in support of the idea that southern mountaineers were first and foremost southerners and that they viewed slavery and race in terms not unlike those of their yeoman or even slaveholding counterparts elsewhere in the South.

  Certainly the most useful contemporary source on the subject is Frederick Law Olmsted. As a New York journalist, he spent fourteen months traveling through the South in 1853 and 1854, observing and reporting on the region and its peculiar institution. The final month or so of his “journey through the back country,” as he called the latter part of his tour, was spent in the highlands of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. Although Olmsted noted some differences in slavery as it existed in the mountains, the comments he evoked from residents in many ways reflected attitudes not unlike those of nonslaveholding yeomen or poor whites elsewhere in the South at the time. Most seemed to be equally contemptuous of slaves, their masters, and the system itself. But given the option of eliminating slavery and the privileged class it supported, highlanders consistently deferred to what they saw as the lesser evil. Few advocated abolishing the institution, and most were blatant in demonstrating that racism dominated their rationales for tolerating its perpetuation. Olmsted said of one Tennessee mountaineer, “He’d always wished there had n’t been any niggers here . . . but he would n’t think there was any better way of getting along with them than that they had.” A highland woman reacted with “disgust and indignation on her face” when Olmsted informed her that blacks in New York were free. “I would n’t want to live where niggers are free,” she said. “They are bad enough when they are slaves. . . . If they was to think themselves equal to we, I do n’t think white folks could abide it—they’re such vile saucy things.”37

  Olmsted and others after him recognized the degree to which class resentment was also at the core of whatever opposition mountaineers felt toward slavery and its beneficiaries. In his 1888 paean to the “loyal mountaineers” of Tennessee, Thomas Humes echoed a major theme of Olmsted’s by noting that slavery, “even in the modified, domestic garb it wore” among these highlanders, had “a depressing, degrading influence” on them.38 Slave labor and the plantation system forced yeomen from their seaboard and piedmont homes up into the mountains, where they were somewhat insulated from the system’s direct competition but were nevertheless denied the greater economic opportunity the outside world had to offer. Southern highlanders, according to a 1903 analysis, “were penned up in the mountains because slavery shut out white labor. . . . It denied those that looked down from their mountain crags upon the realm of King Cotton a chance to expand, circulate, and mingle with the progressive elements at work elsewhere in the republic.”39 As north Georgia’s Lillian Smith phrased it even more eloquently: “A separation began in minds that had already taken place in living: a chasm between rich and poor that washed deeper and deeper as the sweat of more and more slaves poured into it.”40

  At least some mountain masters sensed the potential for lower-class resentment to transform itself into antislavery sentiment. Former Virginia governor David Campbell, a Washington County slave owner, cautioned fellow slave owners in the state’s southwestern corner about how tenuous the commitment to the institution was among their nonslaveholding neighbors. Most Virginians west of the Blue Ridge, he observed, “never expect or intend to own” slaves and were thus not susceptible to the fervent proslavery defenses to which they were subjected during the sectional debates of 1850. Whereas he recognized the common bonds of white supremacy that bound whites of all classes, he urged owners to tone down their impassioned rhetoric to their yeoman constituencies, because “they are not at all interested—so far from it [that] many of them feel exactly like the men of Indiana and Illinois or any of the northwestern states.”41

  Yet whatever element of truth there was to these claims of yeoman indifference to slavery’s survival—and Olmsted for one offers considerable firsthand verification—a part of the cultural baggage mountain settlers brought from the lowlands was an intense and deeply rooted racism. In that sense they were very much like their “plain folk” counterparts throughout the South. Even nonslaveholding whites living closer to slavery and feeling even more directly victimized by it kept their resentment of the institution in check by more dominant feelings of contempt, hostility, and social superiority toward all blacks, free or slave. Many, in fact, lumped together “crackers” and “rednecks” with “hillbillies” in describing these effects.42 In short, antislavery sentiment among Appalachians did not mean that they, any more than other southerners, were what Carl Degler has labeled “enemies of slavery on behalf of blacks.”43

  The strong racial prejudices in areas without a black populace were not a phenomenon limited to the mountain South. Other Americans in nonslaveholding parts of the country were hostile to the few blacks, if any, they lived with and felt threatened by future prospects of a black influx. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed this racism without tangible targets during his visit to America in 1831. “In no part of the Union in which negroes are no longer slaves,” he wrote, “they have in nowise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”44

  Eugene Berwanger, in his study of attitudes toward slavery in the Northwest Territory and other western frontiers, demonstrated that antislavery sentiment there was fueled far more by residents’ prejudice against blacks and a desire to keep them out of their region than by any moral qualms about the peculiar institution. It took Rodger Cunningham
to point out perhaps the most obvious link between Appalachia and other slaveless areas of the country. Dismissing moral components as causal factors, he stated that “the mountains were largely free of slavery only because their climate, terrain, and soil were mostly unsuited to crops and plantation sizes for which slave labor was profitable.” But this, he continued, “was also the reason the North had no slaves.”45

  Just as resentment of slavery rarely sprang from humanitarian impulses toward its black victims, there was also little correlation during the war years between loyalty to the Union and abolitionist sentiment. Nevertheless, the degree to which mountain men were committed to slavery’s preservation was long a point of contention. Two nineteenth-century historians of East Tennessee (both natives of the region) have argued that its commitment to slavery was so strong as to endanger its place in the Union. Just before the state voted on June 8, 1861, to secede, Knoxville lawyer Oliver Temple laid out his priorities: “If we had to choose between the government on one side without slavery, and a broken and dissevered government with slavery, I would say unhesitatingly, ‘Let slavery perish and the Union survive.’ ”46 Thomas Humes contended that most “loyal mountaineers” would have agreed with Temple’s choice. “Generally they looked upon slavery as something foreign to their social life,” he wrote. “They would have been displeased at its coming near their homes in the imperious majesty it wore in the cotton States. At the same time they were satisfied to let men of the South keep serfs at pleasure, but they counted it no business of theirs to help in the work.” Thus, he concluded, they would have had no hesitation in choosing “perpetuity of the Union over that of slavery.”47