High Mountains Rising (5 page)

The new settlers, both white and black, brought a diverse ethnic and cultural mix to Appalachia. The English, as elsewhere in America, contributed fundamental elements such as legal and government institutions and language. But the Scotch-Irish, descended from seventeenth-century mostly Presbyterian emigrants from the Scottish Lowlands and northwestern England to Ireland's northern province of Ulster, also shaped Appalachian frontier society. James I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, had initiated that migration, or “plantation of Ireland,” to subdue his rebellious Irish Catholic subjects. In the eighteenth century more than 100,000 of their descendants left Ulster, driven out by the province's increasing poverty. Overpopulation had encouraged “rack-renting,” a practice whereby landlords were able to drive up their rents by leasing their lands to the highest (and usually most desperate) bidder. The resulting agricultural distress was worsened by cyclical depressions in the Irish linen industry, which reduced opportunities for farm families to supplement their agricultural income by spinning and weaving. Many Ulster Presbyterians also resented their persecution by the episcopal Church of Ireland. Most of these Scotch-Irish emigrants eventually ended up in southern Appalachia. There they were joined by significant numbers of the 200,000 Germans who migrated to America in the eighteenth century and smaller numbers of French, Welsh, Dutch, and Scots.
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Immigrants of African ancestry also continuously entered the mountains, from the time of the de Soto expedition on. Most were brought as slaves,
obtained from various West African kingdoms. The Cherokee sometimes acted as slave-catchers, returning runaways to their white masters, but they eventually practiced African slavery themselves.
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Ironically, although the Cherokee adopted many European prejudices concerning the racial inferiority of Africans, they shared some cultural traits with Africans: the desire to maintain harmony and balance within a spiritualized nature, the importance of kinship in governing individual lives, and subsistence agriculture.
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Slavery in Appalachia never reached the critical mass that it did in Southern piedmont and coastal plantation societies; the environment was unfavorable to plantation crops such as cotton, rice, and tobacco, and mountain farms were too small. Analysis of census records indicates that blacks in Appalachia made up about 10 percent of the total population in 1860.
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The majority of those African Americans were slaves, but some were free. A surprising number of both slaves and free blacks worked out individual accommodations with the white racist and patriarchal society that dominated Appalachia as much as it did the South in general.
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The complex mix of cultural diversity created by these migration patterns, described by some as a triracial society, developed in a physical environment dominated by mountains and forests. The Appalachian Mountains sweep southwest from Newfoundland to Alabama, but they embrace a wide variety of topographic and environmental regions. They vary in height—rising to almost 7,000 feet in North Carolina—and in configuration—from chains and cross-chains to plateaus to ridge-and-valley topographies. Well into the nineteenth century they were covered by an upland forest, part of the great eastern hardwood forest that dominated the continent east of the Mississippi River. It was made up mostly of chestnut, hickory, and oak but contained significant stands of evergreens such as spruce, hemlock, and pine.
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That the environmental characteristics of this mountain frontier must have powerfully influenced its culture seems persuasive,
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but since Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis” in 1893 there has been substantial disagreement as to what shape such influence may have taken. Turner emphasized the role of land as property in arguing that the supply of free land on the frontier had shaped America's democratic institutions, economic behavior, and social patterns. Recent revisionists have accused him of “ethnocentrism, triumphalism, gender bias, and linearity.” Turning away from his environmental determinism, they examine “the ways in which the interaction of diverse peoples on frontiers created new cultural forms.”
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To them, frontiers are important because they are “regions that lay between two or more culturally distinct societies and beyond the immediate control of any one of them, where individuals or groups from these
societies came into direct contact. The uncertain, changeable natural and social conditions of frontier life required that people rely upon and borrow from others who came from alien cultures.”
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This conception of frontier nicely fits the complex process of cultural formation that occurred in Appalachia as the frontier moved through the region between the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Appalachia's cultural diversity was especially rich because each of its three broad racial categories was further differentiated into ethnic subgroups and by status, gender, language, and religious differences. Out of the ensuing cultural exchange emerged a synthesis on which Appalachians of all ethnicities came to rely to sustain themselves on this frontier. This shared core, based on herding, farming, and hunting, was characterized by the historian John Solomon Otto as a “stockman-farmer-hunter economy.”
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It drew heavily on Native American practices for its agricultural patterns. New World crops long cultivated by Indians and quickly adopted by newcomers included several strains of corn, beans, squashes, and tobacco. The Indian method of clearing ground—girdling trees to kill them and then burning them, known as slash-and-burn—fertilized the soil (burned trees provide the nutrient potash). It also took less work, an important advantage on a labor-poor frontier. The Indians supplemented their agriculture with forest products obtained by hunting, fishing, and gathering.
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European and African newcomers often took over the very fields that Indians had farmed and adopted Indian methods of slash-and-burn and of planting beans and squashes among irregular rows of corn. They also contributed new crops along with their practice of stock-raising. The most important European crops were grains such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, and various peas, which pioneers planted along with Indian crops. More significantly, Europeans introduced cattle, sheep, and hogs to the New World, which they allowed to range freely. Native Americans had no tradition of livestock herding, and for a time the domestication of animals marked a cultural divide on the frontier.
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Africa also contributed new crops to the Appalachian agricultural economy: edible plants such as watermelons, okra, groundnuts (peanuts), millet, and yams, as well as dozens of medicinal plants.
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On this multicultural frontier, not only were cultural practices in a state of flux, but personal identity was also fluid. Hunting provides an illustration of that merging and transformation of culture and identity in the region. Europeans increased the killing efficiency of the hunt with their gunpowder technology, and both they and Africans in the backcountry learned from the Indians how to dress, track, and decoy game and live off the land while hunting. Outsiders regularly commented on how difficult it was to
differentiate white hunters from Indian not only in behavior but also in appearance.
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But Indians in turn borrowed from Europeans and Africans. They adopted some of the new crops brought by the outsiders and began raising livestock; this led them to protect the crops in their fields by building European-style fences. Embracing another European custom, Cherokee men took over responsibility for farming from the women, who had traditionally done it, thereby dramatically altering traditional sex roles.
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This shared stockman-farmer-hunter economy was organized on the basis of family farms. Its staple grain crop was corn, often planted among the stumps of deadened and burned trees, supplemented by wheat, rye, and oats. Farmers also raised a variety of vegetables in kitchen gardens, such as potatoes, beans, peas, onions, squashes, and cabbages. Livestock consisted primarily of hogs and cattle, which were largely left to fend for themselves, and lesser numbers of sheep, horses, and mules. Animals remained outside most of the year, feeding on unfenced forest and wastelands, which farmers treated as a communal grazing area; to support their animals, farmers as late as the mid-nineteenth century continued to leave four-fifths to three-quarters of their land unimproved, primarily in forest. Cattle and sheep often were herded to pasture on high mountain balds during the summer, and free-ranging hogs were rounded up in the fall and butchered for meat. Various fowl such as chicken and ducks were also kept. The forest also provided food: meat, fish, fruits, nuts, and sweeteners from maple tree sap and honeybees.
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The goal of Appalachian settlers in the antebellum period was to own their own land, thereby achieving economic independence (and fulfilling Thomas Jefferson's dream of a country of yeoman farmers). But not all succeeded. Recent scholarship has shown that significant numbers of farmers in antebellum Appalachia never achieved land ownership. Land in Appalachia was first “privatized” through an orgy of speculation beginning in the late eighteenth century; by 1800 a small number of absentee owners had bought from the new states about three-quarters of the land. Those large land speculators were eager to sell, but only at a profit. Increasing population growth on the frontier meant steadily rising land values, which priced many settlers out of the market, ensuring that land ownership became very inequitably distributed. One recent exhaustive study calculates that by 1860 about 40 percent of agricultural households still owned no land; they survived as tenants or landless laborers.
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Tenancy and wage labor had become entrenched on the southern Appalachian frontier.

Tenancy took several forms. One form required renters to make improvements—such as clearing land and building structures and fences—that would increase the land's value for the owner. A more common form
required the tenant to share his crop, often between a third and a half, with the landlord. Tenancy was not a dead end for all farmers. Some tenants were able to accumulate savings, which they eventually used to buy land. Other tenants rented land from their fathers or fathers-in-law in anticipation of eventually inheriting it. Tenants tended to be somewhat younger than farmers who owned land. They also were more mobile than owners, often disappearing from county census rolls from one decade to the next. Despite a few success stories, however, most tenants were not upwardly mobile and did not achieve their dream of land ownership.
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Appalachian farming households produced mainly for their own consumption, but contrary to stereotype, few were completely self-sufficient. A significant minority of households made no effort to be self-sufficient; they specialized in cultivating cash crops such as tobacco and cotton for market sale and purchased most of their household goods. But even farm households that came close to self-sufficiency produced at least a small surplus of grain or livestock, which they bartered with neighbors or sold to local storekeepers or itinerant merchants and drovers. Those whose crops fell short of supporting them—most often those who farmed less than 100 acres—survived by selling their labor to their more prosperous neighbors, becoming dependent on wage earnings to supplement their needs. Although growing food was the highest priority for most farm families, they produced other items for domestic consumption such as clothing, tools, and home furnishings, and of course they constructed their own farm buildings.
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Although the majority of Appalachian farm households supplied most of their own needs, it was not because they were isolated or cut off from the outside world; that persistent stereotype has long been proven false. Beginning with the earliest European hunters and traders who entered the region in the seventeenth century, mountaineers wanted to be and remained firmly connected to an external, or “world,” market economy. Appalachia initially became enmeshed in that world economy through Britain and France's New World rivalry. Their main interest in the region was its forest products, especially deerskins to supply the European leathermaking industry. First Indian and then European hunters provided skins to British and French trading companies in exchange for guns, axes, knives, beads, pottery, clothing, and cooking utensils. This hunting became so intense that it threatened the survival of deer as a species in the Southern mountains.
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As the farming stage of Appalachian history succeeded the hunting stage, mountaineers strengthened their trade links with the world economy by adding crops and livestock to a growing list of forest products that they shipped out of the region. James Patton, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in 1789, exemplified the steady expansion of that
trade.
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A weaver in Ulster, he brought to America neither the skills nor the desire to work the land, preferring to become a “drummer,” or itinerant merchant, instead. His territory eventually stretched along the backcountry Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia through the Valley of Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina.

The primary cash crop that mountain farmers raised for the market was livestock, primarily hogs, which Patton and others drove out of the mountains in large numbers. An expanding web of drovers' roads such as western North Carolina's Buncombe Turnpike, Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road, and the Federal Road from Nashville to Augusta, Georgia, linked inland farmers with coastal ports and enabled drovers such as Patton to establish Appalachia as a substantial provider of livestock to eastern markets (the Buncombe Turnpike was soon collecting tolls on more than 150,000 hogs per year). Other commodities that Patton bought from mountain farmers included furs, feathers, beeswax, and ginseng and snake root for medicines. In exchange for those forest products he traded cotton fabric and clothing, buckles, buttons, and silver lockets.