Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  Most of all, from the vantage of the colonizers, by resulting in commodities shipped to France, the education tax tied the Malagasy people to the Empire. Frederick Lugard, first governor general of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, expounded on the method: “In a country so fertile as this, direct taxation is a moral benefit to the people by stimulating industry and production.” The implication being that Nigerians produced all the food they needed from their own reserves without working for “industry and production,” which the colonizers measured in money. Lugard completed the circuit by demanding back the currency that Nigerians earned. The tax “must be collected in cash wherever possible … The tax thus promotes the circulation of currency with its attendant benefits to trade.” But this kind of debt can never be repaid. We service it without ever diminishing the principal. We are bound in this relationship and default at great personal risk. Taxation does not merely fund the state. It creates its territorial and financial power.53

  Hamilton did not behave just like a colonial governor of a century later. I do not contend that his only purpose was to coerce the backcountry into increasingly monetized circuits of production and exchange. But think of the Whiskey Tax as an education tax and it makes more sense. There is at least one bit of evidence that Hamilton thought about it in exactly this way. It’s in a letter he wrote to the financier and speculator Robert Morris, which he might have titled “In Praise of Debt.” It’s well known that Hamilton favored a national debt (which he described to Morris as “a national blessing”) because he expected that the credit earned by paying it off would attract investment and advance the good name of the United States. He also wrote that a national debt served a social purpose by creating the necessity of taxation, calling this a “powerful cement of our union,” a “spur to industry.” All citizens needed to work, their individual debts forming slices of the great national debt that united their efforts. “We labour less now than any civilized nation of Europe, and a habit of labour in the people is as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies as it is conducive to the welfare of the State.” No political economist or colonial governor would have disagreed. They all believed that nations form when citizens assume a collective debt and work together like bees in a hive to pay it down.54

  But the compulsion of taxation was not Hamilton’s only tool. In the middle of the controversy, the secretary’s protégé came up with an audacious development project. Tench Coxe had been a merchant during the Revolution and an advocate of industrial policy. As assistant secretary of the Treasury, he invented a commercial town from out of nothing. It would be propitiously located between two rivers, the West Branch and the Lower Susquehanna, a watershed comprising about one-third of the state of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh already functioned as a market for the western counties. Commodities entering Coxe’s hub would flow south by southeast, entering the Atlantic trade. In his published plan, he strolled down his imaginary Main Street, deciding what should go where: tanning yard, gristmill, bake house, steel furnace, soap and tallow shop, brewery, bleach yard, wheelwright, potash works. This eighteenth-century version of Brasilia would be as “the bottom of a great bag or sack, into the upper parts of which natural and agricultural produce is poured.” The implications for the subsequent history of Appalachia are worth considering. Hamilton and Coxe realized that the monetary dependency they sought could be created by other means. Markets do create opportunities for making money. They do encourage people to sell more of the product of their labor. Coxe predicted the Appalachian Regional Commission of the 1960s by suggesting that infrastructure and social engineering promised to end what he saw as the savage isolation of the mountains.55

  And yet, Hamilton had another option, one that he must have known about all along. The United States could use the army to distribute money in the backcountry. When soldiers spent their pay, they infused the economy with new currency. Hamilton claimed, “More money has in the course of the last year been sent into the western country from the Treasury, in specie & Bank bills … than the whole amount of the tax in the four western counties of Pennsylvania and the district of Kentucky is likely to equal in four or five years … Hence the government itself furnishes and in all probability will continue to furnish the means of paying its own demands.” In other words, the secretary printed notes, circulated them, and then wanted them back. The irony is that a military invasion intended to enforce the tax made all debts easier to pay, even though the United States never tried to collect the tax again. Hamilton did not live to see the more frequent exchanges in money that he desired or the wayward mountains become fiscally productive governable space. But in the 1790s, he expected that bank bills would stitch up a far-flung republic, instilling the whole in each of its parts.56

  * * *

  WORD OF THE ARMY’S ARRIVAL caused the insurgents to dissipate like road dust. Hamilton found no one to fight. It isn’t known who killed an innkeeper and a small boy, but these outrages added murder to the highlanders’ grievances against the government. During the night of November 13, troops seized men from their beds and marched them barefoot through the cold to Pittsburgh. Soldiers penned the suspects without food or heat for two days while Hamilton interrogated them. One of the detainees died. None provided information. Yet the secretary came up with a short list of offenders, leading to ten arrests. Even when juries in Philadelphia found that the defendants had assaulted government officials, they did not convict on grounds of treason or any other crime, except in two cases. Washington pardoned them both.57

  Looked at one way, victory belonged to the highlanders. The tax not only turned the backcountry against the Federalists, it contributed to the “revolution” that brought Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans to power in 1800. Jefferson oversaw the repeal of the Whiskey Tax, an action that appeared to nullify the entire idea of an excise on domestic production. From the end of the Rebellion through the end of the Civil War, the federal government made no attempt to impose an internal tax.58

  But victory did not protect the backcountry folk from all the things that pressed against their household economies like snow piled heavy on a roof. No trend broke their way. Absentee ownership continued to reduce the area available for makeshift economy. Fleeing debt, tenancy, and diminished opportunity, many of the first settlers moved on to avoid these troubles, but they ran up against a barrier. At the very moment that the Rebellion flared, the United States escalated its war with the Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware in the Ohio Valley. Little Turtle’s confederacy of northwestern nations skirmished with settlers and destroyed two armies, one in 1790 and the other in 1791. In the second battle, a militia under Arthur St. Clair lost 623 soldiers out of a force of 1,400, or 44 percent. (A retreating soldier carved a tree with the words “This is the road to hell.”) In response, the United States assembled a force of 5,000 commanded by Anthony Wayne to destroy the Indian army. The battle took place at Fallen Timbers in 1794, the year of the Rebellion. The point is that during the entire period of conflict over the Whiskey Tax, the Ohio Valley boiled in violence, contributing to a sense of crisis. Those wanting to escape Hamilton’s excise might have felt hemmed in.

  For all these reasons, the Rebellion was a threshold response. Things piled up. They had to endure tenancy and debt to a western landed elite; a lack of currency and various demands on what little money households accumulated; population pressure that eroded the possibility of smallholder competency; and Indian wars to the west. To these the United States added an excise tax. The agrarians of western Pennsylvania clung to whiskey as the stronghold of their households, an irreplaceable source of stable value, a currency they freely minted. Whiskey held up both sides of their economic existence—autonomy and engagement, subsistence and consumption, community and market. They resisted the tax to preserve its function.

  We should not look for simple conclusions in Hamilton’s loss. No one in the 1790s would have seen the outcome of the Rebellion as a momentary pause in the inexorable victory of c
apital and the state over agrarian sufficiency. The dominion of landowners over the backwoods might seem formidable. Many of them were politically powerful. But even when they confronted squatters, few succeeded in ejecting them like Washington did. When households wrote their own deeds and hunted freely, they made a mockery of the absentees. The tax and its uncompromising enforcer joined a continuum of earlier colonial policy that attempted to bring the mountains into the fold of centralized administration. Capturing some of the value created by rye meant getting in between backcountry people and their forest clearings. But Hamilton had few tools for doing this, and he certainly had no interest in and no thought of cleaving them away from the environments they occupied. The industrialists who came after him by a century did just that. They sought to extract value from both, not by compelling people to sell homegrown commodities but by enclosing the landscape and inducing them to sell their labor. During the coming decades, a more potent form of legal and political power expanded from its Atlantic core into the mountain periphery and turned the pioneers into paupers.

  4. Mountaineers Are Always Free

  ON LOSING LAND AND LIVELIHOOD

  When the pressure of a system is great and is increasing, it matters to find a breathing-space, a fortunate distance, from the immediate and visible controls. What was drastically reduced, by enclosures, was just such a breathing-space, a marginal day-to-day independence, for many thousands of people … The many miles of new fences and walls, the new paper rights, were the formal declaration of where the power now lay.

  —Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)

  MOUNTAINS FEND OFF CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY. Roads exist seasonally, washed out by rivers and creeks. Nothing moves in a straight line. Time slows down. Twenty years before Alexander Hamilton’s climb into the western counties of Pennsylvania, the English scholar and critic Samuel Johnson took a trip to the Hebrides, the western islands of Scotland. There he posited that elevation determined a people’s loyalty to their monarch. He said that highlanders lived in savage freedom, “ignorantly proud and habitually violent,” high and away from civilizing influences, where “every new ridge is a new fortress.” These states within states were “so remote from the seat of government, and so difficult of access, that they are very little under the influence of the sovereign.” Johnson measured mountain wars not in years but generations. “As mountains are long before they are conquered, they are likewise long before they are civilized.”1

  Representatives of the same sovereign dreaded the American highlands. In 1756, Major Andrew Lewis took a force up the Big Sandy River to attack Shawnee positions along the Ohio River. He found no good path to follow and no animals to hunt. The soldiers starved and threatened mutiny before deserting. One described an interminable labyrinth of sharp inclines “which closed in on both sides,” offering no place to ride or camp. But Major Lewis was just passing through; he had no intention of invading any portion of western Virginia. Though a number of battles and limited expeditions pierced northern Appalachia in the eighteenth century, no army attempted anything like an occupation until the Civil War. No campaign previous to that compared in its complexity or lasting effects.2

  The Civil War in the mountains differed from nineteenth-century warfare as we usually think of it. Famous generals did not often meet on battlefields commanding ranks of uniformed soldiers. Instead, guerrilla forces along the border between Unionist Kentucky and Confederate Tennessee engaged in violence hideous for its intimacy. Each side raided and ambushed the other in familiar forest, exchanging murder, arson, and rape. The Union high command pursued more than one tactical objective in the battles of Harpers Ferry, Cheat Mountain, Chattanooga, Fort Sanders, and Blountville. But without question they wanted control of the Shenandoah Valley, source of the Confederacy’s food supply. General Ulysses S. Grant ordered General Philip Sheridan to seize it and torch it. “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can,” Grant wrote to Sheridan. “Carry off stock of all descriptions, and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” During the Valley Campaign of 1864, Sheridan’s army burned thousands of barns and mills. This is where he learned subsistence warfare, a method he used again a decade later when he recommended the slaughter of bison during the rebellion of the Plains Sioux.3

  Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah didn’t conquer the mountains, and some said that was impossible. A Kentucky reverend predicted that a victorious Confederacy would never govern such an empire. “It is a region of 300,000 square miles, trenching upon eight or nine slave States … trenching upon at least five cotton States.” Ruling over so varied a region seemed preposterous. And yet, we can mark the beginning of the industrial takeover of Appalachia to the Civil War. The damage Sheridan inflicted on the Shenandoah lingered for decades, contributing to a weakened economy that made the entire region more vulnerable to a different kind of invasion in the decades that followed. And that invasion didn’t really begin with the industrialists themselves or with their lawyers or even with the absentee landowners. It began with the gathering of geographical and geological information before and especially during the war.4

  The mineral form of fossilized carbon attracted little attention before the war. Residents of New England were more likely to burn a hydrocarbon rendered from whale blubber than anything that came out of the ground. The first factories in the United States didn’t burn anything. At Lowell, Massachusetts, giant mills operated thousands of spindles, turning out tons of cotton cloth, powered by the Merrimack River. As a fuel for steam engines, coal radiated more energy than wood. But in 1838, only 1,850 stationary steam engines and 350 locomotives operated in the United States, and most of them burned wood. Petroleum looked to be more promising than coal. First discovered in western Pennsylvania in 1859, oil could be turned into kerosene, its first distilled form, used for lighting.5

  Coal gained traction along with knowledge of its abundance. The geologist Richard Cowling Taylor published a work whose title indicates its breadth, Statistics of Coal, The Geographical and Geological Distribution of Mineral Combustibles or Fossil Fuel, Including, also, Notices and Localities of the Various Mineral Bituminous Substances, Employed in Arts and Manufactures … From Official Reports of the Great Coal-Producing Countries, The Respective Amounts of Their Production, Consumption and Commercial Distribution in All Parts of the World, Together With Their Prices, Tariffs, Duties and International Regulations (1848). Taylor acted more like a booster than a scientist. He helped his readers visualize the new energy frontier by depicting as much statistical information in cartographic form as was possible at the time. What the Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley West Virginia was to geography, Taylor’s Statistics of Coal was to geology. It translated the earth into a commercial language, not for people who lived in the mountains but for those who didn’t. It took a rich and varied landscape and simplified it to a single purpose.

  Another turning point came when a Confederate cartographer noticed an outcropping along the eastern base of Flat Top Mountain in southwestern West Virginia. Jedediah Hotchkiss was born in New York and moved to the Shenandoah Valley during the 1840s, where he opened a school. He served the Confederacy by drawing maps for Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, including the battle plans for Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. Hotchkiss saw extraordinary deposits of coal close to the surface. He thought the location too rugged for a railroad, but he returned home convinced that Flat Top was one of the richest seams ever discovered.6

  Many other people also noticed hydrocarbons all over the place. Just weeks after Lee’s surrender, with snow still melting on the roads in the spring of 1865, an agent for the Department of Agriculture witnessed “an eager crowd of strangers, on horseback and on foot,” treading their way through the narrow valleys, “watching for oil bubbles to rise to the surface on the margins of streams.” Geological reports came one after another. Their conclus
ions sounded like this one: “The amount of coal in the Kanawha and its tributaries, Elk and Coal Rivers, is incredible. There is nothing equal to it anywhere.” Their authors marveled at the abundance. Said another report, “The coal-beds increase in thickness and number east of the Big Sandy.” One joint-stock company set the tone for the coming decades, declaring of West Virginia, “Her hills and valleys are full of wealth which only needs development to attract capitalists like a magnet.” Full of wealth, they said, and empty; nothing but a vast, neglected “squatter’s farm.” During the decade following the war, Hotchkiss promoted Flat Top Mountain to anyone who would listen, including a group of Philadelphia capitalists who finally hired him to conduct a formal survey in 1873. Ten years later, they formed the Flat Top Coal Company. But this company and the state in which it operated were not extraordinary. Instead, they exemplify changes going on throughout the southern mountains in the nineteenth century.7

  All of this is prologue to the scramble for Appalachia. An army could invade but never dominate the mountains. Capital moved differently. It acted through individuals and institutions. It employed impersonal laws and the language of progress. Mountain people knew how to soldier and hunt, to track an animal or an enemy through the woods. But few of them could organize against an act of the legislature or to stop a clear-cut. The scramble built upon these vulnerabilities, but it did not happen all at once. The first thing it required was a conversion in the ownership and uses of land. The vast holdings of the generation that acquired mountain real estate by grant and early purchase did not turn out to be profitable. Speculation offered one of the only ways of turning money into more money, but it contained a contradiction. Passive investment inhibits the kind of production that gives land greater value. The scramble brought the end of the era of the backwoods monopolist. This amounted to a new kind of invasion, one that mountain people could not easily resist.8