High Mountains Rising (8 page)

That exposure began Booker's intense quest for an education. Wash Fergeson's demand that he not give up valuable work time, as meager as his
earnings from it were, kept him from joining the many other young black people who attended the new schools established for freedmen and women. Night school became his first recourse, and he later wrestled further concessions in his work schedule to attend school during the day. But Booker faced another setback to his education when Fergeson sent him to work in one of the coalmines owned by the salt company. “Work in the coal-mine, I always dreaded” he wrote in
Up from Slavery
, both for the sheer distance underground and the “blackest darkness” he experienced there, and for the fact that “anyone who worked in a coal-mine was always unclean, and it was a very hard job to get one's skin clean after the day's work was done.” In addition, Booker faced the hazards of the job and particularly feared being lost in the labyrinthine chambers, which happened occasionally when his light went out. Washington concluded his description of these experiences by lecturing his readers, “Many children of the tenderest years were compelled then, as is now true I fear, in most coal-mining districts, to spend a large part of their lives in these coal-mines, with little opportunity to get an education; and what is worse, I have often noted that, as a rule, young boys who begin life in a coal-mine are often physically and mentally dwarfed. They soon lose ambition to do anything else than to continue as a coal-miner.”
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Washington was able to provide such commentary because he was among the few—certainly very few black miners—who escaped such a fate. After spending his early adolescence in salt furnaces and coalmines, he had the good fortune of becoming a houseboy for Lewis Ruffner and his wife. Ruffner was one of the pioneers of the salt industry in the area and owned the mines in which Booker had worked. Under Mrs. Ruffner's loving care and supervision, he greatly advanced his education, both formal and informal. With her encouragement and that of his mother, the sixteen-year-old Washington went east in 1872, traveling five hundred miles to attend the Hampton Institute in tidewater Virginia. Thus began his celebrated academic and intellectual journey that, after a brief return to Malden to teach school, took him far from Appalachia and made him the most prominent spokesman of his race over the next two decades.
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Williams's life and Washington's youth reflect the experiences of a great many African Americans who were integral components of Appalachian life and labor during the region's formative years. They also illustrate just how different the slave experience was for blacks in the Southern mountains than for those in the lowland plantation South. The extractive industries in which both Williams and Washington worked—iron, salt, and coal—as well as others, such as copper and even gold, provided the impetus for much of the black presence in the southern highlands both before and after the Civil War. In this respect, both men can be considered typical of many other slaves
and freedmen who lived out their lives in the mountain South. And yet, as this chapter demonstrates, their lives do not fully embrace, as no two men's could, either the multifaceted nature of the biracial populace of the mountain South or the range of ways in which black Appalachians shaped the region, socially or economically.

Curiously, despite the presence of many African Americans such as Williams and Washington throughout southern Appalachia, they attracted little notice from observers of the region. By century's end and for many years thereafter, few chroniclers of the highland South even acknowledged that there had been a black presence there. In 1897, a journalist stated of the north Georgia mountains, “Nowhere will be found purer Anglo-Saxon blood,” and ethnogeographer Ellen Semple extolled the mountain populace of Kentucky on similar grounds. Not only had they kept foreign elements at bay, she observed in 1901, but they had “still more effectively excluded the negroes. This region is as free from them as northern Vermont.”
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In one of the early definitive accounts of the region,
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
, published in 1921, John C. Campbell stated that “there were few Negroes in the Highlands in early times. . . . They have never been a factor in rural mountain life.”
¹⁰

As late as 1986, in a seminal collection of essays titled
Blacks in Appalachia
, one of its editors, Edward J. Cabbell, wrote of the “black invisibility” factor in studies of the region. He noted both the widespread assumption that southern highlanders did not include an African American presence and the failure of scholars to pay serious attention to issues of slavery or race relations in their studies of Appalachian history or culture. Black people in the region remained “a neglected minority within a neglected minority.”
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Only in the last decade and a half have scholars fully come to terms with Appalachia's biracial makeup in its formative years. We now recognize how, despite their small numbers, African Americans influenced the region's economy, society, and politics in significant ways, both before and after the Civil War.

Census figures alone refute misconceptions of the racial “purity” of the southern highlands. Slavery had infiltrated almost every Appalachian county by the mid-nineteenth century, although it did so more sporadically and much more sparsely than was true for most of the rest of the South. In 1860, the region as a whole included a black populace, slave and free, of 175,000. Freedmen and women continued to reside in most mountain areas by century's end, when their numbers totaled more than 274,000.
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But the post–Civil War distribution of African Americans was far more concentrated in certain locales than was true during the slave era. The few urban areas, such as Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville, and Bristol, saw a dramatic influx of
blacks just after the war. So too did the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and especially West Virginia, which attracted thousands of Southern blacks in the 1880s and 1890s and drastically changed the racial demographics of substantial areas of central Appalachia.
¹³

The black presence in Appalachia began almost as early as that of whites. African slaves accompanied the Spanish expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo that moved through the southernmost highlands in the sixteenth century. Such exposure was fleeting, of course, but by the early eighteenth century, as white settlers pushed into the Southern backcountry, they too brought slaves with them. A slave trade developed along with that of deerskins and other commodities with the Cherokee Indians, who well before the American Revolution had replaced other Indians with Africans as the basis of what soon became a slaveholding society not unlike that of the white planter class.
¹⁴

Recent work on frontier settlement in Appalachia demonstrates the extent to which the institution of slavery was at least present in, if not central to, highland society in its formative years. The earliest settlers in the Catawba, French Broad, Yadkin, and New River valleys of western North Carolina staked claims to large tracts of flat, fertile bottomlands and set about acquiring slaves to work that land in the 1770s and 1780s. Studies of upper Blue Ridge Virginia and trans-Appalachian Kentucky also indicate that blacks accompanied the white owners who first settled the most promising lands of those eighteenth-century wildernesses. The first census of 1790 indicates that more than 12,000 slaves had been transported across the mountains into Kentucky and more than 3,000 into East Tennessee.
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The slaveholdings of early mountain masters were small, averaging fewer than five slaves per household. The highlands could never support the large-scale cash crop agricultural output of the plantation South, a system fully dependent on the substantial black labor force that supported it. Much of the work performed by this early generation of Appalachian slaves was agricultural, with blacks often working alongside their owners in fields of moderate to small farms such as that of James Burroughs, Booker T. Washington's first master. They also performed a wide range of other tasks, such as herding livestock, operating saw and grist mills, and clearing timber. But such labor would hardly have been enough to support even the small number of slaves in the region, an average of 10 percent of the Appalachian population in 1860, owned by only about 10 percent of white households. Only other nonagricultural enterprises made the “peculiar institution” profitable and spurred the importation of more substantial numbers of African Americans into the Southern mountains.

Recent studies of western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and
eastern Kentucky demonstrate that most slaveowners were either merchants or professional men who often used the capital they earned to purchase more slaves than the farm property most also owned would have supported.
¹⁶
Their slaves often were employed in small-scale manufacturing, from hats, shoes, and cloth to tobacco and iron products. William Holland Thomas, an influential businessman and political leader in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, was among those who put slaves to work in his various entrepreneurial activities. Several of his thirty-two slaves worked in his brickyard and small ironworks, and others were employed in carpentry and wagonmaking. There are frequent references to individual slaves who worked at his mercantile operation at Quallatown and others whom he entrusted to make trips throughout the area and as far south as Columbia, South Carolina, and Athens, Georgia, to trade iron goods for general merchandise for his store.
¹⁷

Other outlets for slave labor were the many highland hotels, resorts, and mineral springs, where visitors sought relief from the summer heat and its ill effects in lowland regions of the South. Innkeepers in Abingdon and Hot Springs in Virginia and Asheville, Flat Rock, and Hendersonville in North Carolina were among the largest slaveholders in those areas. They used their bondsmen and women in all aspects of serving their guests, maintaining their facilities, and even serving as guides for sightseeing and hunting expeditions organized for visitors. One British visitor to Asheville in 1840 commented on the sheer number of slaves and the extent to which they seemed to dominate his hotel's operation. “The business of the inn,” he complained, “is left mostly to the black servants to manage as they see fit.” The fact that many guests came accompanied by entourages of their own slaves meant that the black residents of these resort communities often swelled during the summer.
¹⁸

The range of activity and seeming autonomy of some highland bondsmen and women led outside observers to see such flexibility as indications of a more relaxed and less restrictive form of slavery in the mountains than was true elsewhere in the South. New York correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted, the most notable chronicler, traveled through the region in 1854 and was struck by the extent to which Appalachian slaves were more like “ordinary free laborers” whose work “was directed to a greater variety of employments and [who] exercise more responsibility.” He concluded that the system's “moral evils . . . are less, even less proportionately to the number of slaves.”
¹⁹
Another British traveler drew a similar conclusion in traveling through the region several years earlier. “The slaves residing among the mountains are the happiest and most independent part of the population; and I have had many a one pilot me over the mountains who would not have exchanged places even with his master.”
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One must not make too much of such impressionistic statements. If these same visitors had observed slaves in other contexts—at work in coalmines or iron forges, for instance, rather than as servants at thriving resorts—they would have reached different conclusions about the plight of highland bondsmen. In fact, as already noted in both Sam Williams's and Booker T. Washington's experiences, far more African Americans were engaged in the grueling work of the extractive industries—coal, salt, copper, iron, or gold—that developed in southern and central Appalachia in the antebellum era than ever served summer guests at hotels and springs.

The saltworks in the Kanawha Valley, where the young Booker found his first employment, was among those largely dependent on slave labor, but it was not alone. Salt was also mined and processed in southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky. According to a new study of Clay County, Kentucky, slaves' time there was split between salt production and farming.
²¹

Coalmining first emerged primarily as a subsidiary enterprise for fueling the furnaces for salt and iron. Slaves had made up nearly half of the labor force in coalmining operations in eastern and northern Virginia as early as the mid-eighteenth century and were brought west into the mountains toward the end of the century, when coal deposits began to be mined there. Coalmining was still in its infancy in the southernmost Appalachians of Alabama and Tennessee before the Civil War, but few of the companies established in the 1840s and 1850s depended heavily on slaves. The dangers of underground mining made many slaveowners reluctant to risk hiring out those they owned to highland mining companies, a situation that changed dramatically in the latter decades of the century, when black lives had lost their high value to whites once they were emancipated.
²²

Gold mining proved more compatible with slave labor. The first gold rush in the region, that in the South Mountains of North Carolina, brought hundreds of slaves into Burke and Rutherford counties, either accompanied by their masters or hired out from sources elsewhere in the state and beyond. The discovery of gold in north Georgia in 1829 launched a much greater rush, with slaves a major part of the labor force brought into Auraria and Dahlonega either to pan for gold in creeks and streams or to undertake the far more risky work of digging in hastily dug tunnels or shafts. A number of slaves purchased their freedom with gold they found on their own time or with negotiated percentages of what they mined for their masters. When California gold drew Americans across the continent two decades later, southern highlanders from North Carolina and Georgia, often accompanied by slaves, made up a disproportionate number of the forty-niners rushing west to seek their fortunes.
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