Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Lillian Smith, who wrote perhaps more passionately and perceptively about southern mores than any other white southerner, once observed of its racial order: “There is a structural, bony sameness through the region that can be called accurately ‘the South’; but it is fleshed out in ten thousand different ways—ways often strikingly inconsistent with the ‘beliefs’ that seem inherent in the structure.”13 It seems that the vast and growing scholarship on slavery and race relations in Appalachia over the past couple of decades has in itself led us to new understandings of the inconsistencies that Smith notes. (She herself, incidentally, was a resident of Appalachia—Rabun County, Georgia—for most of her adult life.)

  In generalizing about southern slavery, historians need to—and now easily can—take into account its existence in the mountain South. For far too long, its presence there was seen as a mere demographic distinction, and the simple fact that there were far fewer slaves and slaveholders in Appalachia than in the lowland South served as the be-all and end-all in explaining a regional “otherness” in terms of race. But what the rich and varied work of recent years suggests is that quantitative differences do not, in and of themselves, explain the qualitative differences in slavery. In lifting their eyes unto the hills, so to speak, historians will find not merely one new variable to challenge that “structural, bony sameness” to which Smith refers; they’ll find multiple variables within and throughout the region, some of which confirm realities elsewhere in the American South, and some of which may be particular not just to Appalachia, but to even more specific settings within the region.

  In an essay published in 1983, entitled “Slavery on the Edges of the Old South: or Do Exceptions Prove Rules?” British scholar Peter Parish suggested that the “deviants from the pattern of Southern slave society” can serve as valuable indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of the system as a whole—its flexibility, adaptability, potential for growth and development as well as for its inefficiencies and instabilities. Parish focuses on four exceptions to the acknowledged norm of plantation, agricultural slavery: slavery in cities, industrial slavery, the hiring out of slaves, and free blacks.

  While the peripheries on which he concentrates are not geographical, and thus Appalachia does not factor into his analysis per se, it is interesting that three of his four categories are very much inherent in the way in which the institution manifested itself in the highland South, and are reflected in several of the stories told here—slave hiring, industrial slavery, and the free black experience. Thus it would be easy to extrapolate from Parish’s thesis and make a case that Appalachia offers not merely one but multiple exceptions of its own. The “exceptions” noted here, if indeed they are that, do illuminate in subtle and perhaps not so subtle ways what Parish characterized as “many features of slavery and of Southern society generally—its racial attitudes and compromises, its internal pressures, its readiness sometimes to subordinate economic to social and racial priorities, its combination of inflexible rules and flexible application, and not least, the ability of slaves to exploit the weaknesses and loopholes of the system in their own interest.”14

  As such, Appalachia offers the student of American slavery something more than flukes, exceptions, or anomalies. By taking seriously and integrating into broader studies of race relations drawn from the mountain South, we can indeed come to appreciate the impact of geography, topography, demographics, and local and regional economies on the interactions of whites and blacks, slave or free. I would suggest again that there is much value in taking seriously the evidence we have of slavery at the most intimate and personal of levels—the stories of individuals, of families, of communities, from whatever sources and perspectives they come to us. Masters’ records and correspondence; slaves’ own memories and testimony; court transcripts and other legal documents; and outside observers with varying agendas—all remind us that perhaps the most ultimate variable in how the practice of slavery played out, regardless of its “structural, bony sameness,” lay in human nature. This is where the continued fascination remains with the slave past, as with history in general, and where we as scholars are most likely to reach beyond our academic peers to a broader audience.

  It is no surprise that the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and other individual slaves have long been among the most vital and effective venues for understanding southern slavery. No doubt they continue to be assigned readings in high school and college classrooms more than any scholarly monograph because their stories so readily engage us in such vivid and emotional ways. Nor is it coincidental that with all the books that continue to be published on slavery even now, the two that generated the most excitement and attention in 2005—and those most likely to reach beyond a narrow academic audience—are Vincent Carretta’s startlingly revisionist biography of Olaudah Equiano, and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s study of Sally Thomas, a Tennessee slave woman who achieved near freedom as a businesswoman and who, by very different means, worked to free her three sons.15 As Franklin notes in the preface to this extraordinary saga of the Thomas family, the story “breaks nearly all the traditional stereotypes associated with such rational constructs as black/white and slave/free.”16

  One reads neither Equiano’s nor Sally Thomas’s stories for the typicality of their experiences, any more than one does Douglass’s or Jacobs’s narratives. It is, in fact, the extraordinary circumstances of each of these slave lives that make them so compelling—the fine lines walked between slavery and freedom and the dramatic situations in which they found themselves, the tragedies and occasional triumphs that were dictated as much by luck and happenchance as by their owners’ dispositions and whims. The contradictions and complexities of African American life are fully apparent in each of these lives, and like many other such experiences, in Appalachia and throughout the South, they suggest that “the boundaries between slavery and freedom were always harsh and menacing but . . . sometimes more permeable and flexible than we imagine.”17

  Just as each of the stories told here suggests complex and sometimes ambivalent aspects of slave life in Appalachia, they also serve to remind us that Southern Appalachia has always been home to a far more complicated and diverse society and economy than once assumed. The vast explosion of scholarship on the region, particularly that focused on the nineteenth century, has made that point over and over again. Close examinations of Appalachia’s slaves and slaveholders provide merely one more window into that complexity and diversity, as they challenge generalizations and stereotypes so long applied to both the region and to southern slavery. The editors of a 1995 essay collection noted of this new scholarship on nineteenth-century Appalachia: “None claim that the patterns described were necessarily unique to the southern highlands or were general to the whole mountain region.”18 And so it is with race relations in the region. No one scenario laid out here typifies the whole; nor are any of these types of incidents limited to highland contexts.

  Slavery was an institution that, for all of its legal rigidities and clearly defined boundaries, often proved quite adaptable, malleable, and always subject to the idiosyncrasies of local demands and individual agendas. These variables are perhaps more evident in Appalachia than elsewhere. It was the one area (or certainly most extensive area) of the American South in which the vast majority of residents were neither slaves nor slaveholders, and where the institution, in order to be profitable, was forced to adjust to a range of settings and scenarios far removed from the plantation worlds of cotton, rice, or sugar.

  This doesn’t mean that the system in the mountains was any less harsh or cruel or exploitative than it was on those other areas.19 Yet it does provide us an opportunity to view slaves as both victims and agents, and along with their masters, as individuals and in communities, in more intimate and nuanced terms that serve to inform our understanding not only of Appalachia as more than simply a periphery of the slaveholding South, but also of the strengths and weaknesses of the institution as i
t was adapted to this relatively atypical environment. In adding this “edge” of slavery, in Peter Parish’s words, to the whole, we can indeed more fully appreciate not only the extent to which exceptions can prove rules, but also the possibility that what were once considered mere exceptions may not have been so exceptional after all.

  Notes

  1. J. Susanne Schramm Simmons, “Augusta County’s Other Pioneers: The African American Presence in Frontier Augusta County,” in Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier, ed. Michael J. Puglisi (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 160–61, 163. Simmons drew on an unpublished paper by Turk McCleskey, “The Mystery of Edward Tarr,” as the source of her treatment of him.

  2. Marilyn Davis-DeEulis, “Slavery on the Margins of the Virginia Frontier: African American Literacy in Western Kanawha and Cabell Counties, 1795–1840,” in Puglisi, Diversity and Accommodation, 194–99 passim.

  3. Ezekiel Birdseye to The Christian Freeman, April 14, 1843, reprinted in 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), 252–54.

  4. Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 3.

  5. Billings and Blee provide a thorough account of the murder and Baker’s trial in ibid., 124–31.

  6. Allison and others (of color) v. Stephen W. Bates; Theophilus, Jane, Cuffee, Claiborne, Elsey, Berry, Jr., and Assysa v. Stephen W. Bates, Clay County, Ky., Circuit Court, 1844–1851. I am grateful to Dwight Billings for sharing transcriptions of these cases with me. Daniel Bates owned forty-four slaves at his death; his father, John, owned fifty-one. John Bates’s will made various provisions for his slaves: he freed some, gave land to some, and stipulated that several—including the eight litigants in the case discussed here— serve eight years as hired labor and then be set free. Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, 221.

  7. John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 72–74.

  8. Ibid., 73. The most extended version of this story is found in Thomas G. Walton, “Sketches of Pioneers in Burke County History,” typescript (Thomas George Walton Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC), 10–11.

  9. Sarah Gudger interview, May 5, 1937, in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 14: North Carolina Narratives, Part I (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 350–58; quoted material on 352, 353, 354–55.

  10. Charles B. Dew, “Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave at Buffalo Forge, Virginia,” Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 84–86. For a full discussion of the overwork system as practiced at Buffalo Forge, see Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 108–21.

  11. Charles Johnson to Andrew Johnson, January 29, 1860, in Leroy P. Graf and Ralph W. Hoskins, eds., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 3: 1858–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 404–5, quoted in David Warren Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). See pp. 51–54 for the fullest coverage of Johnson as slaveholder.

  12. Dew, Bond of Iron, 108.

  13. Lillian Smith, “Introduction” to Ely Green, Ely: An Autobiography (rept., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), xxxi.

  14. Peter Parish, “The Edges of Slavery in the Old South: Or, Do Exceptions Prove Rules?” Slavery & Abolition 4 (September 1983): 106–25, quotes on 108, 124.

  15. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  16. Preface to Franklin and Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land, xi.

  17. Ibid., xii.

  18. Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina L. Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 9–10.

  19. Wilma A. Dunaway’s Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003) provide the most unrelenting documentation of cruelty to and exploitation of Appalachian slaves.

  3

  Olmsted in Appalachia

  A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery in the Southern Highlands, 1854

  Outside observers have provided among the richest primary sources for scholars of the antebellum South. Despite the stereotypical assumptions, florid prose, and regional and moral biases that characterize the majority of such travel accounts, their detailed descriptions of the people and places encountered have often been of great value to later chroniclers of slavery and the Old South.

  Probably the most valuable of such accounts are three volumes of commentary on slavery and southern society written by Frederick Law Olmsted. These accounts are based on his fourteen months of travel throughout the South from 1852 to 1854.1 Although it was his later career as a landscape architect, environmentalist, and urban planner for which Olmsted is most widely remembered, his much briefer stint as a journalist and social critic during the 1850s is equally significant. Because his mission to observe and report objectively on slavery and its effects on southern society was so precise, his route so extensive, and his observations so voluminous, historians from James Rhodes and U. B. Phillips to Kenneth Stampp and Eugene Genovese have made Olmsted’s work the most cited and quoted of any contemporary source on the “peculiar institution.” Yet relatively little attention has been paid to one of the most distinctive and uniquely revealing segments of Olmsted’s southern tour: the summer month in 1854 in which he journeyed through the Southern Appalachians.

  Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822, the product of a comfortable New England upbringing and a Yale education, Olmsted seemed to have been imbued with a sense of wanderlust throughout his youth. After an extensive tour of Europe and the British Isles, which led to the 1852 publication of his first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, Olmsted was commissioned by two New York newspapers to serve as a roving correspondent in the American South. That assignment led to a series of letters that appeared in the New York Daily Times and the New York Daily Tribune during and after his trip; the letters were then compiled and expanded into three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860).2

  Though Olmsted, like many of his fellow New Englanders, firmly opposed slavery, he was, early in the decade, almost as offended by the hyperbole and pious posturing of what he felt were overwrought and ill-informed abolitionists. He saw his southern assignment as an opportunity to provide a more objective appraisal of slavery based entirely on his firsthand observations. “Very little candid, truthful, and unprejudiced public discussion,” he wrote, “has yet been had on the vexed subject of slavery.” He maintained that the true nature of southern life, white and black, had thus far proved more impenetrable to insiders and thus subject to misconception than was true of most foreign countries.3

  Once his trip was under way, Olmsted’s concern was not so much the black labor system’s cruelties and injustices to those enslaved. In fact, he found the physical treatment and quality of the slaves’ lives to be somewhat better than he had anticipated. Rather it was the economic and cultural detriments that slavery inflicted on southern whites—slaveholders and nonslaveholders—that made up his most stinging indictment of the system. As a labor force, slavery proved grossly inefficient, due in part to too much indulgence on the part of owners and task
masters. Olmsted concluded that, because of their lack of incentive and their inherent shortcomings as a race, slaves worked slowly and poorly. Even worse, they lowered the expectations for white labor output and locked southern agriculture into crude, backward methods that limited the progress and the productivity that characterized American farming elsewhere.4

  A far more serious defect in Olmsted’s eyes was the cultural and social stagnation that the peculiar institution imposed upon the South. Slavery robbed the region’s yeomen of any Calvinistic work ethic or of any incentive for self-improvement, material or otherwise. But what made Olmsted’s commentary most original was that his descriptions of nonslaveholders—“unambitious, indolent, degraded and illiterate . . . a dead peasantry so far as they affect the industrial position of the South”—he found almost equally applicable to the ruling class.5 Its black property inhibited intellectual activity or interests and perpetuated among the planter elite crude, primitive living conditions usually indicative only of frontier society.6

  In the summer of 1854, toward the end of his second tour, that covering the “backcountry” or inland South, Olmsted moved into Appalachia. There he found exceptions to the deplorable conditions of the plantation South and evidence confirming his explanation for those conditions. From late June through late July, the Connecticut correspondent traveled through the hills of northern Alabama, passed briefly through Tennessee and Georgia, then moved through western North Carolina across the northeastern tip of Tennessee, and on into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. His itinerary included Chattanooga and the nearby copper-mining region of Polk County; the westernmost string of North Carolina county seats (Murphy, Waynesville, Asheville, Burnsville, and Bakersville); Elizabethton, Tennessee; and finally Abingdon and Lynchburg, Virginia.7