Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  It is one thing simply to chronicle or to categorize the varieties of ways in which white mountaineers viewed or treated blacks, and that is all that has been attempted here. It is quite another to sort out, identify, and explain the more elusive causal factors behind such views. That formidable task still looms large as one of the more exciting challenges confronting Appalachian scholars and can perhaps proceed once the debris of myth and misconception that has for so long obstructed the route to such insights is at long last cleared away.

  Notes

  1. U. B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” American Historical Review 34 (1928): 30–43. On the debate among historians since, see John David Smith and John C. Inscoe, eds., Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990). The statement by David Whisnant is from a book review in the Journal of Southern History 56 (1990): 566.

  2. John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 28, 119, 239.

  3. William Faulkner, “Mountain Victory,” in Collected Stories (1950; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1977), 745–80; quote, 751. For a more extensive analysis of this story, see “The Racial ‘Innocence’ of Appalachia,” chap. 10 in this volume.

  4. William Brewer, “Moonshining in Georgia,” Cosmopolitan 23 (June 1897): 132, quoted in Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 144.

  5. Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” in Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, ed. W. K. McNeil (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), 150–51.

  6. Nathaniel S. Shaler, “The Peculiarities of the South,” North American Review 151 (October 1890): 483–84. See also Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “The Appalachian Reality: Ethnic and Class Diversity,” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 52 and 53 (1980–1981): 40–60.

  7. Samuel Tyndale Wilson, The Southern Mountaineers (New York: Presbyterian Home Missions, 1906), 42, 20–21; Thomas Wolfe, The Hills Beyond (1935; reprint, New York: Plume, 1982), 263.

  8. Flannery O’Connor, “The Artificial Nigger,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), quote, 129. Curiously, analysts of this story fail to recognize or acknowledge the mountain context of the two characters’ background. See, for example, Miles Orvell, Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 152–60; Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 120–24; and Jill P. Baumgaertner, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1988), 56–62.

  9. James C. Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 832–49; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 143–58. See also Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 59–63, on other uses of Anglo-Saxonism in romanticizing Appalachia. Even more recent studies have focused on turn-of-the-century mission work to Appalachian blacks. See Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr., “Crossing of Cultures: The Mennonite Brethren of Boone, North Carolina,” in Environmental Voices: Cultural, Social, Physical, and Natural, ed. Garry Barker, Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 4 (1992): 105–12; Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr. and Phoebe Pollitt, “The Salem School and Orphanage [in Elk Park, N.C]: White Missionaries, Black School,” in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 235–44.

  10. Useful and varied anthologies on the black experience in the southern highlands, most of which focus on the twentieth century, include William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); Edward J. Cabbell, guest ed., “Black Appalachians,” special issue of Now and Then 3 (Winter 1986); Len-wood Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina (Asheville: Southern Highlands Research Center, University of North Carolina–Asheville, 1986); William H. Turner, guest ed., “Blacks in Appalachia,” special issue of Appalachian Heritage 19 (Fall 1991); and “Whiteness and Racialization in Appalachia,” special issue of Journal of Appalachian Studies 10 (Spring/Fall 2004). For an essay collection focused on the nineteenth century, see Inscoe, Appalachians and Race.

  11. On the distribution of slaves in Appalachia, see Robert P. Stuckert, “Black Populations of the Southern Appalachian Mountains,” Phylon 48 (June 1987): 141–51; Richard B. Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 14 (Winter 1986): 25–33; James B. Murphy, “Slavery and Freedom in Appalachia: Kentucky as a Demographic Case Study,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 80 (1982): 151–69; John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 59–63, 84–86; Wilma A. Dunaway, “Diaspora, Death, and Sexual Exploitation: Slave Families at Risk in the Mountain South,” Appalachian Journal (Winter 1999): 128–49; and Dunaway, “Put in Master’s Pocket: Cotton Expansion and Interstate Slave Trading in the Mountain South,” in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 116–32. For a nineteenth-century perspective, see William E. Barton, “The Cumberland Mountains and the Struggle for Freedom,” New England Magazine 16 (1897): 65–87.

  We are still sadly lacking in scholarly treatments of antebellum free black highlanders. Among the few works dealing with the subject are Stuart Sprague, “From Slavery to Freedom: African-Americans in Eastern Kentucky, 1864–1884,” in Diversity in Appalachia: Images and Realities, ed. Tyler Blethen, Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 5 (1993): 67–74; and Marie Tedesco, “A Free Black Slave Owner in East Tennessee: The Strange Case of Adam Waterford,” in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 133–53.

  12. Sadie Smathers Patton, “The Kingdom of the Happy Land” (Asheville: Stephens Press, 1957); Sam Gray and Theda Perdue, “Appalachia as the Promised Land: A Freedmen’s Commune in Henderson County, North Carolina, 1870–1920,” paper presented at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 1979, Lexington, Ky.; William Lynwood Montell, The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970). For other treatments of the postwar black population in Appalachia, see William H. Turner, “The Demography of Black Appalachia, Past and Present,” in Turner and Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia, 237–61; Michael A. Cooke, “Race Relations in Montgomery County, Virginia, 1870–1990,” in Barker, Environmental Voices, 94–104; Sprague, “From Slavery to Freedom,” 72–73; and Wilson, Southern Mountaineers, 41–42.

  13. On the migration of blacks in Appalachian coalfields, see Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), chap. 7; Ronald L. Lewis, “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Migration of Southern Blacks to the Central Appalachian Coalfields,” Journal of Southern History 55 (1989): 77–102; Emily Jones Hudson, “The Black American Family in Southeastern Kentucky: Red Fox, Kodak, and Town Mountain,” in Reshaping the Image of Appalachia, ed. Loyal Jones (Berea, Ky.: Berea College Appalachian Center, 1986), 136–45; Joe William Trotter Jr., Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pt. 1; Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), chap. 5. None of these works speaks to the issue of local reaction of white Appalachians to this influx of black migrants, although Flynt has a perceptive discussion of race relations between black and Appalachian white workers in northern Alabama’s coalfields (pp. 121, 136–38, 257–61).

  14. Stuckert, Black Populations of Southern Appalachian Mountains, 141 (tab.), 145.

  15. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 219.

  16. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedman: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), 119. See also John Cimprich, “Slavery’s End in East Tennessee,” in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 190–91.

 
17. John C. Campbell, The Southern Mountaineer and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), 95; Muriel E. Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 60.

  18. Raymond Andrews, The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir (Atlanta: Peachtree, 1990), 79; William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967), 326–27.

  19. Loyal Jones, “Appalachian Values,” in Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia, ed. Robert J. Higgs (New York: Ungar, 1975), 507–17.

  20. Quoted in William H. Turner, “Between Berea (1904) and Birmingham (1908): The Rock and Hard Place for Blacks in Appalachia,” in Turner and Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia, 13. The whole notion of Appalachia as a center of Underground Railroad activity is suspect. Most major treatments of the Underground Railroad make no reference to southern highland locales. See Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1961); William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872); and Eber M. Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad (Fredonia, N.Y.: W. McKinstry and Son, 1879). The only such account to refer to even the possibility that Appalachians provided regular routes is Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 118–19, but its map (facing p. 113) indicates no routes anywhere in the region.

  21. Leon F. Williams, “The Vanishing Appalachian: How to ‘Whiten’ the Problem,” in Turner and Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia, 201.

  22. Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 157; Samuel C. Williams, ed., “Journal of Events (1825–1873) of David Anderson Deaderick,” East Tennessee Historical Publications 8 (1936): 121–37.

  23. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1962), 273–74. See also William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 186–87, 190–92.

  24. Richard Hinton interview with John Brown and John Kagi in August 1858, in John Brown, ed. Richard Warch and Jonathan F. Fauton (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 54 (second quote). For other treatments of the southern highlands as central to Brown’s insurrection plan, see Siebert, Underground Railroad, 118, and Jules Abel, Man on Fire: John Brown and the Cause of Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 245–48.

  25. James W. Taylor, Alleghania: A Geographical and Statistical Memoir (St. Paul, Minn.: James Davenport, 1862), 1–2, 15–16.

  26. William Goodrich, God’s Handiwork in the Sea and the Mountains: Sermons Preached after a Summer Vacation (Cleveland, Ohio: privately published, n.d.), quoted in Jan Davidson’s introduction to Frances Louisa Goodrich, Mountain Homespun (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 13.

  27. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 78. On Lincoln’s legacy for Appalachia, see Shannon H. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sons and Daughters: Berea College, Lincoln Memorial University, and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1866–1910,” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon W. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 242–64.

  28. Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 38–39.

  29. Asa Earl Martin, “The Anti-Slavery Societies of Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (1915): 261–81; Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961), 1:74–75; North Callahan, Smoky Mountain Country, ed. Erskine Caldwell (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1952), 37–49; Thomas W. Humes, The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee (Knoxville: Ogden Bros., 1888), 31–33; David W. Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 15–16; and Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

  30. Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818–1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 124–25. On opposition to East Tennessee abolitionists, see Chase C. Mooney, Slavery in Tennessee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 70–73; Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro, 16; Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” 31–32. On postwar commitment to biracial education at Maryville, see Lester C. Lamon, “Ignoring the Color Line: Maryville College, 1868–1901,” in The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall, ed. Elizabeth Jacoway et al. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 64–89.

  31. Henry Ruffner, Address to the People of West Virginia: Showing That Slavery Is Injurious to the Public Welfare and That It May Gradually Be Abolished Without Detriment to the Rights and Interests of Slaveholders (Lexington, Va.: R. C. Noel, 1847), cited and discussed in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Shifting Attitudes towards Slavery in Antebellum Rockbridge County,” Rockbridge Historical Society Proceedings 10 (1980–1989): 333–44. There is no indication that the abolition of slavery was ever a factor in intrastate sectional battles waged by highlanders in antebellum legislatures in North Carolina, Kentucky, or even Tennessee. On Ruffner’s role in the American Colonization Society, see Eric Burn, “A Manumission in the Mountains: Slavery and the African Colonization Movement in Southwestern Virginia,” Appalachian Journal 33 (Winter 2006): 164–86.

  32. Richard D. Sears, “A Practical Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man”: John G. Fee and the Camp Nelson Experience (Berea, Ky.: Berea College Press, 1986), 46; Semple, “Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 151. See also Richard D. Sears, The Day of Small Things: Abolitionism in the Midst of Slavery (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986). Broader studies of abolitionism in Kentucky include Asa Earl Martin, The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky Prior to 1850 (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club Publication no. 25, 1918); Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978); Gordon E. Finnie, “The Antislavery Movement in the Upper South before 1840,” Journal of Southern History 35 (1969): 319–42; Jeffrey Brooke Allen, “Were Southern White Critics of Slavery Racists? Kentucky and the Upper South, 1791–1824,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 169–90; Stanley Harrold, “Violence and Nonviolence in Kentucky Abolitionism,” Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 15–38. None of these works acknowledges any significant abolitionist activity in the state’s eastern mountain region. (Another Appalachian institution that embraced biracial education after the war was Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens, under the auspices of the Northern Methodist Church.)

  33. Quoted in Sears, “Practical Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man,” 46. On Berea’s move away from its commitment to black education, see Klotter, “Black South and White Appalachia,” 846–48; Turner, “Between Berea and Birmingham,” 13–14; Jacqueline G. Burnside, “Suspicion Versus Faith: Negro Criticisms of Berea College in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jones, Reshaping the Image of Appalachia, 102–25; and Burnside, “Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of Berea College’s Nineteenth Century Interracial Education in the Twenty-first Century,” lecture delivered at Berea College Symposium on the Black Experience in Appalachia and America, September–October 2005.

  34. Carter G. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia,” Journal of Negro History 1 (April 1916): 132–50. For more on Woodson’s essay, see introduction to Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 1–2. Much the same ground is covered in Finnie, “Anti-slavery Movement in the Upper South.” See also Barton, “Cumberland Mountains and the Struggle for Freedom.”

  35. Don West, Freedom in the Mountains (Huntington, W.Va.: Appalachian Movement Press, 1973), 3–4, 9.

  36. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia,” 147; Don West interview in Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grass-Roots So
cial Activism in America, 1921–1964, ed. Eliot Wigginton (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 68.

  37. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through the Back Country in the Winter of 1853–54 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 239, 237, 263–64. On Olmsted’s schedule and route, see Charles E. Beveridge, ed., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 2: Slavery and the South, 1852–1857 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 309 (map) and 481–82 (itinerary). For a fuller discussion of his mission and findings, see chap. 3, “Olmsted in Appalachia,” in this volume.

  38. Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 30.

  39. Julian Ralph, “Our Appalachian Americans,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (June 1903): 37.

  40. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949; rev. ed., New York: Norton, 1961), 171.

  41. Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 17.

  42. See, for example, Smith, Killers of the Dream, 170; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 258–60; Eugene D. Genovese, “Yeomen Farmers in a Slaveholder’s Democracy,” Agricultural History 49 (1975): 331–42; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 88–91; J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press), 72–77; F. N. Boney, Southerners All (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), chap. 2. On the commonality of southern and Appalachian values, see Richard B. Drake, “Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region within a Section,” in Southern Appalachia and the South: A Region within a Region, ed. John C. Inscoe, Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 3 (1991): 18–27.