Colin Woodard (17 page)

While hostile to external restraints on their behavior, the Borderlanders could be uncompromising in enforcing their own internal cultural norms. Dissent or disagreement—whether by neighbors, wives, children, or political opponents—was unacceptable and often crushed savagely. Borderlanders tolerated enormous inequalities within their communities. In many areas, the wealthiest tenth of the population controlled the majority of the land while the bottom half had none at all and survived as tenants or squatters. The lucky tenth were usually the heads of “good families,” charismatic figures who commanded loyalty that was more a function of their personalities, character, and horizontal genealogical connections than of any particular policies they supported. They earned social standing from their individual deeds and accomplishments, rather than any sort of inherited station. Borderlanders recognized as “family” individuals out four generations in either direction, effectively creating enormous clans. Intermarriage between first cousins was commonplace, reinforcing the bonds of kinship. At the lower end of the social scale were the families who survived on hunting, foraging, and preying on their neighbors' crops, livestock, valuables, and daughters. Containing the predations of the latter group would become a major political issue as Appalachian civilization took root.
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From their initial stronghold in south central Pennsylvania, the Borderlanders spread south down the mountains on an ancient 800-mile-long Indian trail that came to be known as the Great Wagon Road. This crude passage led out of Lancaster and York, through Hagerstown (in what is now the western panhandle of Maryland), down the length of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and through the highlands of North Carolina to terminate in what is now Augusta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of Borderlanders and their herds migrated along this trail to new land in the rugged, barely explored Southern upcountry. As Ulster and the Scottish Marches emptied between 1730 and 1750, the population of North Carolina doubled, and then doubled again by 1770. Southwestern Virginia was growing at 9 percent a year, and in the South Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, almost the entire population had come from Pennsylvania or interior Virginia. The Borderlanders may have technically moved into colonies controlled by Tidewater gentry and the great planters of the Deep South, but in cultural terms their Appalachian nation effectively cut Tidewater off from the interior, blocking the West Indian slaveocracy from advancing into the southern uplands. Not until after the revolution would they control any formal governments; places called Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia did not yet exist.
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Borderlanders lived among the Native Americans on whose land they were usually trespassing. As in New France, a significant proportion of settlers essentially “went Native,” abandoning farming and husbandry for an aboriginal life. They hunted and fished, wore furs and clothing similar to those of the natives in their area, adopted Indian customs, took Indian wives, and had mixed-race children, several of whom grew up to be prominent Native American statesmen. Some learned Indian languages and conducted extended trapping and trading expeditions deep into aboriginal territory. Others became nomadic outlaws, hunting and stealing their way through the backcountry, annoying just about everyone. They were “little more than white Indians,” one disgruntled South Carolinian observed, while backcountry Virginians complained of those “who live like savages.” The mainstream of Appalachian society, however, regarded the Lenni Lenape, Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, and other Indians as opponents in a struggle for control of the backcountry. It was an attitude often reciprocated, especially as the Borderlanders increasingly hunted, cleared, and squatted on Indian land. The result was a series of brutal wars that left staggering numbers of dead on both sides.
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Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particularly the Midlands. We've already seen how the Lenni Lenape invasion in the 1750s forced Quakers to relinquish much of their control over the region, but this was merely a dress rehearsal for a much more destabilizing series of events during a later conflict. In December 1763, a Scots-Irish band from in and around Paxton, Pennsylvania, attacked and burned a peaceful Christianized Indian settlement on Penn family land, killing six individuals on the spot and butchering fourteen more at the Lancaster jail, where Midlanders had brought them for protection. Among the dead were two three-year-old children who had been scalped and an old man who'd been hacked up with an axe in the jail yard. After the killings, these so-called “Paxton Boys” rallied together an armed force of 1,500 Scots-Irish neighbors and marched on Philadelphia, intending to murder more peaceful Native Americans who had fled there for their safety on the invitation of Governor John Penn, the late founder's grandson.

The result was a tense military showdown between Borderlanders and Midlanders, with control of what was then British North America's premier city hanging in the balance. When the Paxton Boys arrived outside Philadelphia on a rainy day in February 1764, a thousand Midlanders rallied to defend the State House. The city militia deployed a row of artillery pieces on the parade ground of their garrison, each loaded with grapeshot. As the Borderlander army surrounded the city, 200 Quakers actually set aside their principles and took up arms. On the city outskirts the Paxton Boys, dressed in moccasins and blanket coats, “uttered hideous cries in imitation of the [Indian] war whoop, knocked down peaceable citizens, and pretended to scalp them,” according to an eyewitness. With German citizens generally remaining neutral and the Scots-Irish underclass in Philadelphia sympathetic with the invaders, the Midlands stood on the brink of occupation.
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In the end Benjamin Franklin saved the day, leading a negotiating team that promised to address the Borderlanders' grievances if they agreed to go home. A party of them was allowed to inspect the Indian refugees in the city but was unable to identify a single enemy combatant among them. When they later submitted their demands to Penn, foremost among them was to be given proper representation in the provincial assembly. (At the time, Midlander counties had twice as many representatives per capita as Borderlander ones.) Philadelphians were horrified, the governor dallied, and the city was “daily threatened with the return of a more formidable force.” Quakers turned to London for help, and kept a standing military force posted in the city for the first time in Midlands history. Only the end of hostilities with Indians farther west allowed the situation to normalize. But the Paxton Boys' actions had revealed fault lines across Pennsylvania and other colonies that would break open during the American Revolution.
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Other parts of colonial Appalachia were just as turbulent. On the disputed Pennsylvania-Maryland border in the 1730s, Scots-Irish were recruited by both governments to hold down the land; while the first parties were happy to use force to expel ethnic Germans, they proved unwilling to fight one another, leaving the colonial governments at an impasse. National background had again trumped state affiliation.

In the South Carolina backcountry, Borderlanders invaded Cherokee lands in the 1750s, poaching deer and taking human scalps, which they passed off as Shawnee to collect a generous bounty in neighboring Virginia. These unprovoked incursions triggered a bloody war in 1759–61 that left hundreds dead on both sides by the time imperial British troops forced a peace settlement. A few years later, Creek Indians in upland Georgia complained of Borderlander hunters “wandering all over the woods destroying our game.” At the end of the hunting season these poachers began stealing cattle, hogs, and horses from their more law-abiding Borderlander neighbors. Some formed organized gangs that robbed backcountry people at gunpoint and forced some to reveal hidden coins and valuables via beatings, brandings, and burning off toes.
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This crime wave discouraged settlers from accumulating wealth, reinforcing the old Borderlander pattern. “The person who by his honest labour has earned £50 and lays it up for his future occasions, by this very step endangers his own life and his own family,” one South Carolinian observed. “If we buy liquor for to retail or for hospitality they break into our dwellings and consume it,” backcountry settlers in that colony reported in 1769. “Should we raise fat cattle or prime horses for market, they are constantly carried off [even when] well guarded.” Runaway slaves from Deep South plantations joined the “banditti” in considerable numbers, some of them rising to lead their own gangs. This threatened the expansion of the Deep South as that nation could not survive in a region where bandits offered refuge to runaways. “The lands, though the finest in the province, [are] unoccupied and rich men [are] afraid to set slaves to work to clear them,” Anglican minister Charles Woodmason warned, “lest they should become a Prey to the Banditti.”
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With the highlands of South Carolina and Georgia beginning to resemble the lawless frontiers of Scotland, leading Appalachian families responded in the familiar Borderlander fashion: they formed a vigilante gang to hunt the bandits down. They called themselves the Regulators, and they swept up and down the highlands from Georgia to Virginia, whipping, branding, and lynching suspected outlaws. (Many bandits were woodsmen and poachers, but some leaders turned out to have been Cherokee War veterans from respectable families who'd apparently gotten a taste for plunder.) The Regulators then turned on “rogues and other idle, worthless people” in their communities, adopting a Plan of Regulation under which they whipped and banished anyone they considered lazy or immoral and forced others to farm land “on pain of flagellation.” For three years starting in 1768, the Regulators had total control of interior South Carolina, driving off sheriffs and judges sent in from the lowlands. They demanded the Deep Southerners grant them proportional representation in the legislature; at the time the backcountry had three-quarters of the colony's white population but only two of the forty-eight assembly seats. They “treat us,” one noted, “as if we were a different species from themselves.” No substantive progress was made before attention began turning to a conflict with Britain, one in which the divide between the Deep South and the Borderlanders would prove critical.
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The cultural divide was even more disruptive in North Carolina, where Tidewater gentry, who effectively controlled the colony's government, tried to assert jurisdiction over the Borderlanders in the 1760s. The legislature—which gave ten times more representation per capita to the coastal lowlands—imposed a property tax system based on acreage, not property values, effectively shifting the burden from wealthy plantation owners to impoverished Borderlanders. The new royal governor, Sir William Tryon, increased the burden in 1765 in order to build himself a lavish £15,000 palace. Again the backcountry responded with a vigilante movement of “Regulators” who violently seized control of the Appalachian portion of the colony for three years starting in 1768. Beating lawyers, sacking courthouses, and expelling tax collectors, the Regulators remained in power until their army of 2,000 was defeated in a pitched battle with Tidewater militia at Alamance Creek in 1771. Many Regulator leaders took refuge in the deep backcountry of what would one day be called Tennessee. Here, too, the inter-national tensions between Appalachia and the coast would profoundly shape allegiances when the American Revolution erupted a few years later.
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Frustrated by outside rule, some Borderlanders tried to create nation-states of their own, flouting the authority of both the British crown and their Native American neighbors. In north-central Pennsylvania, a group of squatters with a Scots-Irish majority set up its own “fair play system” of government modeled on the democratic principles of the Presbyterian Church and the radical individualism of the Scottish Marches. The forty families of this independent Fair Play territory continued their experiment in frontier self-sovereignty for five years until 1784, when the line of settlement overran the area and they were absorbed, perhaps unwillingly, into the general population.
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A larger-scale experiment took place farther south in what is now the eastern part of Tennessee and central Kentucky, where several thousand Borderlanders insituted an improvised government deep inside Indian territory. Their new nation, Transylvania, was created in direct violation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (which prohibited settlement west of the Appalachians), the legal jurisdictions of North Carolina and Virginia (which then claimed the territory), and His Majesty's property rights (as the Crown legally controlled all undeeded land on the continent). Without any permission they created their own constitution, government, courts, and land offices. Their leaders, including the lowland Scot immigrant James Hogg, dispatched frontiersman Daniel Boone to hack a 200-mile access trail into what is now central Kentucky, enabling settlers to stream in to found Boonesborough. There, in early 1775, they convened a “House of Delegates” under a massive elm tree in a clearing declared to be “our church, state house, [and] council chamber.” When word came that the other colonies were convening a Continental Congress to discuss tensions with Great Britain, Transylvania sent Hogg to Philadelphia with a request to be admitted as the fourteenth member.
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As the British-controlled nations careened toward a series of conflicts with the mother country, the Borderlanders of Appalachia would play a decisive role. In some regions they would fight in support of Britain, in others, against, but they all did so for the same reason: to resist the threats to their clansmen's freedom, be it from Midland merchants, Tidewater gentlemen, Deep Southern planters, or the British crown itself. It was a pattern that would define Appalachia to the present day.