Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  With the exception of the few substantial towns through which he passed, Olmsted’s mountain route took him through areas with among the fewest slaves in the South. In 1850, the total slave population of the ten identifiable counties through which he passed was a little more than eight thousand—only 10 percent of the counties’ total populations. Excluding Hamilton, Buncombe, and Washington counties, with their respective communities of Chattanooga, Asheville, and Abingdon, whose populations were larger, more affluent, and included a higher percentage of slaves, the remaining seven counties were home to a mere 2,446 slaves, who made up only 6.7 percent of the populace.8

  While moving in and between these highland counties, Olmsted found much to confirm his general conclusions formed after observing other parts of the South. Though the impact of bondage on its black victims was a major concern of Olmsted’s throughout his southern travels, he paid little attention to slaves themselves once he moved into the mountains. While he occasionally noted their presence in households or farms that he visited, he related only one specific encounter with a highland slave, a woman he observed while en route through a prosperous mountain valley. But neither her treatment nor her mental state interested him by then. In rounding up a herd of “uncommonly fine cattle,” she forced the animals to leap over a four-foot fence rail rather than lower it, and she beat a pregnant heifer that failed to make the unreasonable jump. Such behavior confirmed to Olmsted his theory that “slavery breeds unfaithful, meritorious, inexact and non-persistent habits of working,” habits that are inevitably passed on to white laborers as well, so that they become “even more indifferent than negroes to the interests of their employers.”9 Even though he maintained that the highlanders he observed were much more industrious than their lowland counterparts (no doubt due to the presence of far fewer slaves), this regrettable side effect of the system was nevertheless apparent in the mountains.

  But Olmsted was also quick to note the much-improved temperaments of those in areas little touched by slavery, which he credited to the absence of black bondsmen and their owners. “Compared with the slaveholders,” he generalized about the mountain residents he observed, “these people are more cheerful, more amiable, more sociable, and more liberal. Compared with the nonslaveholders of the slave-holding districts, they are also more hopeful, more ambitious, more intelligent, more provident, and more comfortable” (293). Even the material conditions of mountain life were, he claimed, an improvement over those of plantation society.

  Olmsted wasted no time in drawing these conclusions. As he moved north into the Alabama hill country, he passed through a valley he described as having “thin, sandy soil, thickly populated by poor farmers.” He added that “negroes are rare, but occasionally neat, new houses, with other improvements, show the increasing prosperity of the district” (220). The journalist would later go to great lengths to reinforce his case for the degenerative effects of slavery on the character and physical well-being of owners. He told of approaching a substantial log house with adjacent cabins for blacks, only to be told by its owner that he could afford to spare neither food nor fodder for Olmsted or his horse (233). A lengthy sequence on his visit with a Tennessee “squire” slightly farther along his route stressed the indolence and slovenly lifestyle exhibited by both his host and hostess. The squire slept late and did not change his clothes, and his wife spent most of her time smoking a pipe on the porch, leading their New England guest to exclaim incredulously, “Yet every thing betokened an opulent and prosperous farmer—rich land, extensive field crops, a number of negroes, and considerable herds of cattle and horses. He also had capital invested in mines and railroads, he told me” (236).

  In his most clear-cut elaboration of this point, Olmsted described his accommodations on two consecutive nights near Elizabethton, Tennessee. One was the residence of a slaveholder; the other was not. Though similar in size and furnishings—“both houses were of the best class common in the region” (268)—and though the slaveholder was much the wealthier of the two, Olmsted maintained that he lived in much less comfort. His house was dirty, disorderly, and in need of repair; he and his wife were “very morose or sadly silent”; the household’s white women were “very negligent and sluttish in their attire”; and the food was badly cooked and badly served by blacks (269). By contrast, Olmsted’s next host, a nonslaveholder, lived in much neater, well-ordered, and comfortable quarters. The women were clean and well dressed, and everyone was “cheerful and kind.” The food served was abundant and wholesome (the first Olmsted claimed to have had of that quality since Natchez, Mississippi, months earlier), and all work was carried on far more smoothly and conscientiously (269–70).

  Though such convenient contrasts may strain credibility, the southern highlands provided the Connecticut Yankee with interesting variations to his theory that the negative effects of a slaveholding society extended well beyond its black victims. But it is his interviews with the region’s inhabitants that serve as the most revealing and valuable aspects of his work, for his account gave voice to this ordinarily inarticulate and rarely quoted group. The testimony of these generally inaccessible southerners elicited by their northern guest serves as the most significant body of evidence regarding what has long been a baffling array of opinion, expert and otherwise, on racism in the mountains.

  On no other aspect of Appalachian culture has opinion been so divided as on the question of how mountaineers regarded blacks. On the one hand are those who concluded that the lack of contact meant a lack of prejudice as well. Carter G. Woodson, an African American historian with West Virginia roots, was the first scholar—and still one of the few—to have dealt seriously with the subject of racial attitudes in the Southern Appalachians. He maintained that greater social harmony existed between the races there than elsewhere in the South. “There was more prejudice against the slaveholder than against the Negro,” he wrote, and “with so many sympathizers with the oppressed in the back country, the South had much difficulty in holding the mountaineer in line to force upon the whole nation their policies,” namely, the continuation of slavery. John C. Campbell agreed, stating that “large sections of the Highland South were in sympathy with the North on the Negro question.” Far more recently, Loyal Jones, an Appalachian scholar and native western North Carolinian, asserted that the “Appalachians have not been saddled with the same prejudices about black people that people of the deep South have.”10 Such statements seem to credit mountain residents with a sort of moral superiority, as if being somewhat removed from the harsher realities of the institution enabled them to view it more objectively and to see the slaves’ plight more sympathetically.

  Other scholars have drawn from the “rugged individualism” and fierce independence associated with early mountain settlers the corollary that their love of freedom led them to repudiate the concept of human property. Those “true democrats” of Appalachia, according to one account, “cherish liberty as a priceless heritage. They would never hold slaves and we may almost say they will never be enslaved.” An even more general assessment proposed that bondage and high altitudes were incompatible: “Freedom has always loved the air of mountains. Slavery, like malaria, desolated the alluvials of the globe. The skypiercing peaks of the continents are bulwarks against oppression.”11

  In stark contrast stand those who have posited that the lack of black contact by many white mountaineers resulted in an even more intense hostility toward blacks than that felt by whites in areas with more substantial black populations. This view owes much of its popularity to the oft-quoted statement of W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South:“The mountaineer has acquired a hatred and contempt for the Negro even more virulent than that of the common white of the lowlands; a dislike so rabid that it was worth a black man’s life to venture into many mountain sections.”12 Some of the more secluded pockets of settlement in the southern highlands did have and continue to have reputations for their vehement opposition to a local black presence. A resident explaining the ab
sence of blacks, free or slave, in the Rock Creek section of North Carolina’s Mitchell County stated that “colored people have a well-founded belief that if they venture up there they might not come back alive.”13

  These extreme points of view suggest, at the very least, that the degree of racism among antebellum mountain residents ran the full gamut of opinion. But it should be noted that most of the statements quoted above come from twentieth-century sources and are largely conjectural as to how pre–Civil War highlanders would view a race with whom they had little or no contact. Thus Olmsted’s testimony is particularly significant, in that it addresses these issues so directly.

  Most of the mountain residents with whom Olmsted discussed the topic of slavery seem to have had equal contempt for slaves, their masters, and the system itself. Compared to their hatred of slavery in the lowland South, they had relatively few objections to the institution in their own area. One Tennessee mountaineer summed up the viewpoint held to varying degrees by almost all of those Olmsted interviewed. The journalist reported, “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” (239). One of Olmsted’s hosts near Burnsville, North Carolina, stated, “Slavery is a great cuss . . . the greatest there is in these United States.” But his explanation mentioned only the fact that it allowed eastern planters to dominate state government at the expense of westerners (259). Others expressed very real regional prejudices against the lowland society dominated by a slaveholding elite. Olmsted must have reveled in the chance to quote one mountain resident, whose objections to the system’s moral effects on slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike echoed Olmsted’s own: “He was afraid that there was many a man who had gone to the bad world, who wouldn’t have gone there if he had n’t had any slaves. He had been down in the nigger counties a good deal, and he had seen how it worked on the white people. It made the rich people, who owned the niggers, passionate, and proud and ugly, and it made the poor people mean” (263).

  But despite their objections to the system, almost none of the highlanders that Olmsted encountered advocated abolition. The only exception was, significantly, a resident of East Tennessee, virtually the only section of the South with an ardent and well-developed antislavery movement.14 This “man of superior standing” was a merchant and farmer near Elizabethton, whose home Olmsted described as “the pleasantest house I have yet seen in the mountain[s]” (262). Such praise from Olmsted should make it obvious that this man owned no slaves. Never missing an opportunity to belabor a point, Olmsted later noted that the slaveholding neighbors of this nonslaveholder had “houses and establishments . . . much poorer than his” (272).

  This East Tennessean was far more outspoken than other highland nonslaveholders about his disdain for the system and the blacks it embraced. Slaves “were horrid things,” he said, insisting that he “would not take one to keep if it should be given to him.” He maintained that it “would be a great deal better for the country . . . if there was not a slave in it,” and advocated sending all blacks to Liberia. Olmsted noted that this “colonizationist” even owned a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and said that he “thought well of its depiction of slavery and its message” (263–64). In reply to Olmsted’s question as to whether most mountain residents felt as he did, the Tennessean replied, “Well, there’s some thinks one way and some another, but there’s hardly anyone here that do n’t think slavery’s a curse to our country, or who would n’t be glad to get rid of it” (264).

  But Olmsted found no one else in the highlands with as firm a commitment to ending the system. He was quick to dismiss similar antislavery rhetoric from three young men “of the poorest class” that he overtook on the road a day later. “Let the reader not be deceived by these expressions,” he warned. “It is not slavery they detest; it is simply negro competition, and the monopoly of the opportunities to make money by negro owners, which they feel but dimly comprehend” (265).

  The relative absence of slaves in the region defused any concern over the threat of black labor as competition. But the fear of a free black populace was very apparent among southern highlanders and accounted for much of their commitment to slavery. One mountain woman, on learning that Olmsted was from New York and that blacks there were all free, said “with disgust and indignation on her face” that “I would n’t want to live where niggers are free, 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” (237).

  But even more often it was their belief in the rights of property owners that led most mountaineers to stop their condemnation of the institution short of advocating its abolition. To be deprived of one’s possessions, human or otherwise, was an injustice with which they could and did identify. As one highland slave owner reminded his nonslaveholding neighbors, “If they can take our niggers away from us they can take our cows or hosses, and everything else we’ve got!”15 Whatever distaste they may have felt for slavery or slaveholders, this argument was one in which most highland yeomen readily acquiesced. Even the seemingly subversive sentiments of the Tennessee “colonizationist” stopped short of infringing upon slaveholders’ rights. He admitted, though reluctantly, that he “supposed it would not be right to take them away from those who had acquired property in them, without any remuneration” (263). As with most other southerners, the peculiar institution remained considerably less offensive to highlanders than did outside interference with either property rights or any other aspect of their own or other southerners’ way of life.16

  The backgrounds of the small mountain farmers Olmsted encountered also contributed to their attitudes toward black bondage. Some observers concluded that the region’s poorer residents bore a strong grudge against slavery because their inability to compete with it as free laborers had forced them from their seaboard or piedmont homes up into the highlands. There, the argument followed, they were insulated from the system but quickly found themselves shut off as well from the economic opportunities that the outside world offered, thus adding to their resentment. As an early twentieth-century missionary to the mountains concluded, “The aristocratic slaveholder from his river-bottom plantation looked with scorn on the slaveless dweller among the hills; while the highlander repaid his scorn with high disdain and even hate.”17 Similarly, another advocate of this thesis explained that southern highlanders “were penned up in the mountains because slavery shut out white labor and left them no market for their skill and strength. . . . 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.”18

  Whatever element of truth there was to those assumptions, Olmsted’s interviews provide very real evidence that such displacement, whether actual or imagined, was a source of Appalachians’ animosity toward the lowland planter class. But as his narrative also makes quite apparent, an intense racism was far more widespread and deeply rooted in the cultural baggage that mountain settlers brought from the lowlands. That racism in turn carried with it a basic belief in the institution of slavery, regardless of their feelings toward its most prosperous beneficiaries, the slaveholding elite.”19

  In light of the very slim body of evidence of such views from the nineteenth century, much less the antebellum period, the sheer volume of material provided by Olmsted’s narrative regarding racial attitudes among mountaineers makes it significant. Equally admirable is the sensitivity with which he conveyed the variety of sentiments toward slaves, slavery, and slaveholders that he witnessed along that route. But one must be wary of accepting the comments of those he interviewed as a thorough or accurate representation of overall regional attitudes. One of the major attractions of the mountains to Olmsted, as he neared completion of his second southern tour, was the contrast that they offered to the rest of the South. Mountain residents we
re, in effect, a unique control group by which he could test his theories regarding the impact of slavery on southern society; they made up virtually the only group of southerners whose lives were relatively untouched by the institution. Thus his depiction of highland society became far more selective than was his itinerary in the region.

  Olmsted visited several of the highlands’ more bustling commercial hubs and population centers, such as Chattanooga, Asheville, and Abingdon. These areas supported far larger populations, white and black, and maintained many more vital links with other parts of the South through trade and tourist networks than did the more remote and primitive areas he also visited. The three counties in which these towns were located were home to 5,683 slaves in 1850. Not only did that make up an average of 13 percent of those counties’ total populations—almost twice the average proportion of slaves in the seven other mountain counties that Olmsted visited—but these 5,600 slaves also accounted for more than two-thirds of the total slave populace in the ten-county area that Olmsted covered.20

  The conclusions that Olmsted reached based on his observations of those larger and more prosperous highland communities are among his most astute and potentially significant. He noted, for example, that mountain masters were “chiefly professional men, shop-keepers, and men in office, who are also land owners” (226). He also concluded that “the direct moral evils of slavery are less—even less proportionately to the number of slaves,” that the habits of those slaves “more resemble those of ordinary free laborers,” and that they “exercise more responsibility, and both in soul and intellect they are more elevated” (226–27). The implications of such statements on the issue of master-slave relations are, at the very least, intriguing; yet Olmsted never elaborated on these generalizations or substantiated them with specific examples. He included no interviews with the benevolent and affluent slaveholding businessmen to whom he referred, nor did he indulge in detailed descriptions of their situations as he did so extensively for those more deprived, and deeply entrenched mountain residents.21