High Mountains Rising (9 page)

As noted earlier, much of the labor supply in these industries and
others came from the hiring, rather than the purchase, of slaves. That option and the flexibility it provided were key to the profitability of slavery in Appalachia and fueled the impressions of Olmsted and others that slaves were more like free labor engaged in a wider variety of pursuits than was true elsewhere in the South. As many as a third to a half of slave workers in the region's saltworks and coalmines were hired rather than owned by mine or furnace operators.
²⁴

Railroad construction in several areas of Appalachia in the late antebellum period provided an especially lucrative opportunity for owners to hire their slaves out to companies seeking local construction workers. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through southwestern Virginia in the mid-1850s was built largely by enslaved African Americans rented on an annual basis from masters in the area. By the end of that decade, western Carolinians finally saw their hopes of a railroad materialize; with it came a flurry of slave trading and hiring negotiated between large owners from Morganton to Asheville and officials of the Western North Carolina Railroad. So great was anticipated demand that Asheville businessmen advertised statewide for “100 to 500 Likely Negros Wanted” in 1859 and 1860.
²⁵

An active slave trade was very much in evidence throughout Appalachia. A major thrust of the market for black men and women was that from the upper South down to the expanding cotton belt of the Gulf states, and that meant routes through the Southern mountains. Several towns and cities in the region—Abingdon, Winchester, and Wheeling in Virginia; London and Pikeville in Kentucky; and Knoxville and Chattanooga in Tennessee—were the sites of active slave markets for much of the antebellum era. Slave auctions elsewhere in the upper South were dependent on slaves supplied from highland areas, and according to British geologist George Featherstonaugh, it was not uncommon to see slave coffles moving through southwest Virginia and East Tennessee headed for deep South markets. In 1844, he expressed amazement at the sight of slave drivers with more than 300 men, women, and children in chains, which he encountered both in the New River valley and later in Knoxville, as they moved their human cargo toward Natchez, Mississippi.
²⁶

The Civil War proved as much an upheaval for slavery in the southern highlands as it did elsewhere in the South. Just as Appalachians experienced the war in many different ways, depending on where in the region they lived, so the means and timing of slavery's destruction varied widely. For areas subject to military incursion, such as the Shenandoah Valley and the Tennessee mountains, the stability of slavery was readily undermined. By 1863, as Federal troops occupied most of East Tennessee, many pro-Confederate owners fled the region and abandoned their slaves to fend for themselves.

Other slaves used the upheaval to escape, often heading into Kentucky or, after Union occupation, into Knoxville or Chattanooga, whose populations swelled with refugees, black and white, from within the region and well beyond.
²⁷

Black Appalachians contributed significantly to the Union army. Officials in East Tennessee cities and towns either claimed many of the slave refugees as contrabands or recruited them into Federal service, despite strenuous objections from local residents who feared the arming of their former black property. A study of Kentucky slaves who enlisted in the Union army during the war suggests that the majority of the 20,000 blacks, free and slave, recruited for the U.S. Colored Infantry in the war's final year were from the state's mountain counties.
²⁸

Yet for many other parts of Appalachia, the institution of slavery remained remarkably stable, indeed even flourished, for much of the conflict's duration. Slaves were brought or sent to the mountains by their owners from other parts of the Confederacy more vulnerable to Union liberators. Several North Carolina highland entrepreneurs actively recruited slaves—either purchased or hired—from owners in coastal areas and then sold or hired them out to mountaineers eager to supplement the labor force so depleted by army recruitment and later conscription. This created a vigorous regional slave market that inflated slave prices and hiring rates that obscured for many just how risky the institution's future was.
²⁹

The false sense of security among western Carolinians about their slave property lasted until the waning days of the conflict. In April 1865, a raid by Federal troops from East Tennessee, led by General George B. Stoneman, finally instigated slavery's demise in the region as owners came to experience the same sense of disruption and loss that so many white southerners had felt earlier. As elsewhere, the mere presence or even proximity of Union troops emboldened slaves to leave their masters, often in unruly and destructive ways. In describing the effect of Stoneman's presence in Asheville, one woman wrote of her neighbor's slaves, “All of Mrs. J. W. Patton's servants left her and went with the Yankees; not a single one of all she had remained to do a thing in the house or in the kitchen. They even took her beautiful carriage and, crowding into it, drove off in full possession.”
³⁰

If the array of emancipation experiences among Appalachian slaves was as vast as that faced by their counterparts throughout the South, so too were race relations during Reconstruction and beyond. The new mobility of freedmen and women meant major demographic shifts in the racial makeup of Appalachian counties and communities. Like Booker T. Washington and his family, many blacks moved both within the region—from a farm in western Virginia to the mining districts of central West Virginia,
as Booker T. Washington's family did at war's end—or out of the region completely, as the young Washington himself did several years later. At least ten Appalachian counties lost their entire black population between 1880 and 1900, in response to a combination of push (scare tactics) and pull (economic opportunity elsewhere) factors.
³¹

On the other hand, some parts of the region, especially its urban areas, saw an influx of new black residents in the immediate postwar years. In at least two cases, groups of blacks moved into the region from elsewhere to establish new communities: the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a farm commune founded in 1870 by South Carolina freedmen in Henderson County, North Carolina, and Coe Ridge, an all-black settlement established in Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau.
³²

The coalfields of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky attracted vast numbers of black men from the deep South to meet the labor demands of what quickly became the region's largest industry. The black population of that area more than doubled between 1880 and 1900 and continued to grow dramatically over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Southern West Virginia, in particular, lured African Americans in large numbers to its mines and mining communities. From a mere 3,200 blacks in the state in 1870, the number of black West Virginians grew to nearly 42,000 by 1910 and made up nearly three-quarters of the total black populace of central Appalachia. Their concentration was such that by 1920, 96 percent of blacks in the entire region lived in sixteen coal-producing counties.
³³
Not all African Americans became coalminers voluntarily. In the region's southernmost mines, the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama leased their black convicts to mining companies, where they faced harsh working conditions and abusive treatment not unlike that experienced by earlier generations of slaves.
³⁴

Such concentrations of African Americans provided political clout, most often in conjunction with white mountain Republicans, which made that party a formidable force in much of southern Appalachia not only during Reconstruction but through the rest of the nineteenth century, until blacks throughout the South were disfranchised in the 1890s.
³⁵
Blacks who remained in the mountains often wielded their collective agency in other ways as well, from the establishment of black schools and churches to fraternal and other social organizations. Again, Booker T. Washington's experience reflected much of this postwar community building among Appalachian freedmen. After his education at the Hampton Institute, he returned to West Virginia's Kanawha Valley in 1875 and for several years taught school, served as Sunday school teacher and clerk of the black Baptist church, and engaged in state and local politics, mobilizing black voters for the Kanawha Republicans.
³⁶

But such achievements often were overshadowed by the same prejudices
and even violence that characterized the rest of the Jim Crow South. The influx of blacks into both cities and coal districts led to open unrest and white attacks. In Asheville, the attempt by a black man to vote in 1868 led to a race riot that left one man dead and several blacks and whites wounded. Even more turbulent was an 1893 incident in Roanoke, Virginia, in which a black youth's alleged attack on a “respectable” white woman provoked an angry mob scene at the jail where the youth was held. Attempts by police and local militia to control the crowd merely exacerbated the crowd's mood and led to a riot that resulted in at least seven dead and more than twenty-five wounded, at the end of which the accused black assailant was taken from his cell and lynched.
³⁷

Several studies of racial violence in the southern highlands document its frequency and intensity. In a book on such tensions in Kentucky, George Wright noted that the state's mountain residents lynched fewer African Americans than did other Kentuckians but at a rate fully proportionate to its smaller black and white populace. Fitzhugh Brundage made the startling discovery that no area of Virginia saw more black lynch victims than did its mountain counties. Of a total of seventy blacks lynched in Virginia between 1880 and 1930, no less than twenty-four lost their lives in southwestern counties, a phenomenon Brundage credits to the “furious pace” of the region's postwar social and economic transformations, particularly the influx of itinerant black and foreign workers into mining and lumber camps. The fact that most such incidents occurred in towns, the centers of this change, rather than in the hills or countryside, confirms the economic roots of this particular expression of mountain racism.
³⁸

These findings confirm the findings of recent scholarship on Appalachian race relations: that despite significant demographic variables in the biracial populace of the highland and lowland South, blacks in the mountains—as slaves and as freedmen, as ironworkers and coalminers, as sharecroppers or leased convicts—were subject to the same sorts of exploitation, abuse, and prejudice faced by blacks throughout the nineteenth-century South. But the rationale that drove the region's black presence may have stemmed from different factors. Historian Kenneth Noe, in his study of slaves and railroad building in southwest Virginia, noted the paradox that the forces of modernization in antebellum Appalachia were enterprises dependent on the most “unmodern” of institutions, slavery.
³⁹
The stories of both Sam Williams and Booker T. Washington, as ironworker and coalminer, reflect that truth. They also illustrate the extent of postemancipation dependencies between the region's continued industrial development and racial exploitation.

Yet this was only one of several trends or themes that characterized the
realities of an African American presence in the mountain South during its formative years. By simply acknowledging and including the region's African Americans in our study of Appalachian history, we more fully appreciate the social, economic, and political complexities that have always characterized the southern highland experience but that have for far too long been obscured by more simplistic misconceptions and stereotypes, especially those that suggest a “racial innocence” and “Anglo-Saxon purity.” Blacks were vital players, sometimes as unwilling and unfree victims of white mountain residents, sometimes as free agents whose ambition and drive allowed for somewhat better opportunities either within or beyond the region. As we begin to recover more of their stories, we should become increasingly aware that, for better or worse, southern highlanders, white and black, shared much in common with other southerners and other Americans in the long and often turbulent history of their interactions.

NOTES

1.
Charles B. Dew,
Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). The account of Williams's life is drawn from Dew's book and from his essay “Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave at Buffalo Forge, Virginia,” in
Race, Region, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward
, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199–240, reprinted in
Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation
, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 74–100.

2.
Washington himself was never certain of his birth date and wrote on different occasions that he was born in 1857, 1858, or 1859. See Louis R. Harlan,
Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 325n1. On speculation regarding his paternity, see ibid., 3–5.

3.
Ibid., 6–7. In his autobiography, Washington referred to the Burroughs farm as a plantation, implying a much larger operation than was actually the case. See Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901), chap. 1.

4.
Washington,
Up from Slavery
, 26.

5.
John E. Stealey III,
The Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), chap. 3.

6.
Washington,
Up from Slavery
, 26–27.