Colin Woodard (30 page)

Separate, yes, but despite their conflicts with the Borderlanders, considerable cultural and genetic exchange continued to occur. Some Appalachian people “went Native,” marrying into Cherokee villages; many more carried on dalliances with Cherokee women. By the end of the eighteenth century, a mixed-blood Cherokee upper class had formed whose members spoke English, converted to Christianity, and could act as cultural interlocutors. As president, Thomas Jefferson had urged the Cherokee “to go on learning to cultivate the Earth,” promising that “in time, you will be as we are.” Their mixed-race elite took this advice to heart, encouraging their people to emulate the Tidewater ways of Jefferson's Virginia. Corn Tassel's métis nephew, Sequoyah, developed a written Cherokee script that was quickly adopted by his people. The Bible was translated into Cherokee, and, in 1828, the
Cherokee Phoenix
newspaper began rolling off the press at their capital, New Echota. Cherokee leaders passed a written constitution modeled on that of the United States, while healers, herbalists, and conjurers recorded their ancient practices and knowledge for the first time. Farms and villages grew into plantations and towns. Leading families first hired whites to help maintain their growing business enterprises, then began purchasing large numbers of African slaves to do the most difficult work. By 1825 the elite owned 1,277 slaves, accounting for 10 percent of their nation's population. Meanwhile, they made it clear that they would surrender no more of their land, by then limited to the northern third of Georgia and Alabama, and adjacent sections of North Carolina and Tennessee—not “one foot more,” a delegation to Washington announced.
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Unfortunately for the Cherokee, the growing population and influence of Appalachia launched a Borderlander warrior into the White House in 1829, one with little patience for the rule of law or tolerance for people of other races.

 

Andrew Jackson, our first Appalachian president, was born to Scots-Irish immigrants on the border between the two Carolinas. In keeping with the Borderlanders' warrior ethic, he fought in the American Revolution, led the Tennessee militia against the Creeks in the War of 1812, and emerged as a national hero after defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans. A resident of the short-lived State of Franklin and, later, Tennessee, Jackson was a slaveholder, country lawyer, U.S. senator, and irrepressible Indian fighter. On his own initiative he invaded Spanish Florida in 1818 to punish the Seminole Indians for sheltering runaway slaves. By the time he won the presidency, he had personally overseen the expropriation of tens of millions of acres of Native American land, facilitating the expansion of the Deep South to Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. Indians, he would later tell Congress, “have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”
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Jackson won the presidency with the overwhelming support of Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Deep South, claiming every electoral vote west of the Appalachians and south of the Mason-Dixon line. His principles—minimal government, maximum freedom for individuals, aggressive military expansion, white supremacy, and the right of each American nation to uphold its customs without the interference of others—earned him few friends in the Midlands and Yankeedom. The tone for his twoterm administration was set on Inauguration Day, when thousands of his supporters mobbed the White House, destroying furniture and breaking thousands of dollars' worth of china and glassware in their haste “to get the refreshments, punch and other articles” inside. “The noisy and disorderly rabble in the President's House brought to my mind descriptions I had read, of the mobs in the Tuileries and at Versailles,” one witness wrote. “I fear [if such people] get the Power in their hands, that of all tyrants, they [would be] the most ferocious, cruel and despotic.” Jackson, for his part, handed out government jobs to his friends with abandon, initiating what one of his allies called “the rule that to the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.” Regarding the Cherokee, he would soon demonstrate contempt for the Constitution he had just sworn to uphold.
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Ridding Appalachia of the Cherokee was Jackson's top priority. Previous presidents had supported the tribe against the treachery of Georgia's political elite, who wished to steal by force the lands of all “barbarous and savage tribes.” Jackson let the Georgians do as they pleased. He remained silent as their legislature passed a bill unilaterally applying all of Georgia's racially discriminatory laws to the Cherokee nation; like other “inferior races” in the Deep South, they would not be allowed to vote, own property, testify against a white person, obtain a loan, or sue in court. When gold was discovered in the Cherokee lands a few months later, Jackson ordered the federal troops assigned to protect the Indians to leave the area, replacing them with predatory Georgia militiamen. He then drafted and put forward the obscene Indian Removal Bill, a measure to ethnically cleanse the Cherokee and neighboring nations and to relocate them a thousand miles to the west in the arid plains of Oklahoma. The measure passed the House by only five votes, with Yankeedom and the Midlands opposed and the Deep South enthusiastically supportive. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled Georgia's annexation of Cherokee territory unconstitutional, as it violated the tribe's treaty with the federal government. Georgia and the Jackson administration simply ignored the decision. The Cherokees' Georgia lands were raffled off to white people; the Cherokee themselves were rounded up into detention camps by the U.S. Army, then force-marched to Oklahoma under conditions so abominable that 4,000 of them died. The Creek and Chicksaw followed the Cherokees' Trail of Tears a few years later, when Alabama and Mississippi annexed their territories.
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Appalachia, the immediate beneficiary, was actually split on the annexations, with Tennessee's famous Davy Crockett denouncing on the House floor the Indian Removal Act as “oppression with a vengeance.” But while the region may not have been entirely supportive of its president's actions, the southernmost Appalachians were now open for Borderlander expansion.

 

Historians traditionally speak of the culture of the “Upland South” as if the presence of slavery alone created a culture distinct from places north of the Ohio River also settled by Borderlanders. The people of Greater Appalachia in fact shared consistent cultural values and characteristics whether they lived in slaveless Indiana or slavery-friendly Tennessee and Arkansas. However, southern Borderlanders confronted a far more dangerous, uncertain, and precarious existence than their prairie kin. Life on the mountain frontier was more lawless, isolated, and combative, with Indian conflicts, banditry, blood feuds, and vigilantism all commonplace occurrences. Early-nineteenth-century visitors were shocked by the violence and debauchery they witnessed on the southern frontier, where men engaged in “rough and tumble” public brawls over minor slights or disagreements in which they gouged out one another's eyes, bit off lips and ears, and tore off noses. Violence that would be considered disreputable in Yankeedom or the Midlands earned one honor and respect in Greater Appalachia, where men were judged based on their toughness and ferocity rather than hard work, righteousness, or material achievements. Leading brawlers grew out their fingernails, hardened them in candle flames, and slicked them with oil to more easily remove their opponent's eyeballs. Victors were celebrated in the region's rich, boastful oral folklore, which celebrated their bloodiness. As one fighter put it: “I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight, rough-an'-tumble, no holds barred, any man on both sides of the [Mississippi] river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an' back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on you . . . milk white mechanics an' see how tough I am to chaw. I ain't had a fight for two days an' I'm spilein' for exercise. Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
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Like Yankees, Borderlanders experienced a wave of intense religious conversion and experimentation in the aftermath of the American Revolution, particularly in the southern region, where frontier conditions undermined the influence and authority of the Presbyterian Church. But while Yankee frontiersmen joined or invented faiths that emphasized good works, utopian communities, and righteous behavior, Borderlanders were drawn to those that stressed individual salvation, a bilateral relationship with God, and the rewards of the next world.

The Borderlander religious heritage was also far more emotional and spontaneous than that of Yankee Puritans or Anglicans of south English origins. Their ancestors in Scotland and Ulster had participated in Presbyterian “holy fairs,” huge outdoor events where thousands of worshippers cried, swooned, and otherwise interacted with the divine. After the revolution such gatherings became commonplace in Appalachia. Some 20,000 worshippers from Tennessee, Kentucky, western Virginia, and southern Ohio gathered in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, for a massive Christian revival. “Hundreds fell prostrate under the mighty power of God, as men slain in battle,” a witness to the outdoor gathering recalled. “At times more than one thousand persons broke into loud shouting all at once, and that the shouts could be heard for miles around.” By the 1830s, specifically Southern Baptist and Methodist churches had formed, distinguished from their northern brethren by their praise of slavery. Both denominations spread rapidly in Greater Appalachia due to their emphasis on personal spiritual rebirth and on each person's being able to connect directly with God without the mediation of books, reverends, or church hierarchies. Impoverished preachers promised to help their followers open personal conduits to the divine, and even encouraged each of them to preach, pray, or share their emotions if the feeling came upon them. In harmony with Borderland conditions and culture, these evangelical faiths dominated Greater Appalachia by 1850, attracting adherents at the expense of the more learned and literary Presbyterian and Anglican churches. In the process, they widened the cultural divide between Appalachia and Yankeedom, and partially closed the one with their increasingly powerful neighbors to the south.
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CHAPTER 18

I
t's often argued that prior to the 1830s, “the South” looked upon slavery as an embarrassment, an anachronistic institution that should be allowed to fade away. But after 1830 “Southerners” increasingly celebrated the practice, championing its expansion across the continent and even casting it as a virtuous institution endorsed by the Bible.

But while these developments did in fact take place, the process that drove them has largely gone unexplained. The sanctification of slavery in the emerging Confederacy was the result of a major shift in the relative power of the continent's two principal slave cultures, Tidewater and the Deep South. The third, Appalachia, wouldn't truly join the coalition we call Dixie until
after
the Civil War.

Prior to 1820 Tidewater had dominated the southeastern part of the continent. During the colonial period and the Early Republic, Virginia had been the most populous of the British colonies and American states. By depriving Appalachian districts of proper representation, the Tidewater gentry had maintained an outsized influence over regional and national politics, providing the intellectual foundation for the Declaration of Independence and 1789 Constitution as well as four of the first five U.S. presidents. Larger, wealthier, and more sophisticated than its Deep Southern neighbor, Tidewater had spoken for “the South” on the national stage. Coming from a society that idealized the enlightened rural English gentry, the Tidewater elite expressed regret at the existence of slavery and looked forward to its gradual disappearance.
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But during the 1820s and 1830s, Tidewater lost most of its power and influence to the rapidly expanding Deep South. Hemmed in by Borderlanders, Tidewater was unable to meaningfully expand its influence westward during the great migrations of the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the people of Appalachia and the Deep South rapidly extended the area under their respective cultures' control. Greater Appalachia more than doubled in geographical size between 1789 and 1840, gaining effective control over the governments of four new states. The Deep South grew nearly tenfold in territory in this period, expanding the number of statehouses under its dominion from two to six. With this expansion, the voices of slaveholding America were no longer those of Virginian gentlemen in the mold of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, but rather of South Carolinian firebrands like John C. Calhoun, Louis Wigfall, and Robert Rhett.

Unlike Tidewater, the Deep South was able to plow aside the Borderlanders through its masterful control of a lucrative resource. The market for tobacco, the traditional mainstay of Tidewater plantations, was in decline, but cotton, which grew only in the subtropical climes of the Deep South, was booming, with a seemingly insatiable demand from the textile mills of both Old and New England. The marketability of cotton allowed the Deep Southern plantation system to break out of the coastal lowlands, as the plants grew well on higher and drier ground. Since it was a labor-intensive crop, slaveholding planters could easily outcompete the small family cotton farmers. As demand grew, so did the value of land suitable for cotton production, encouraging its transfer to those with greater capital. Appalachian herdsmen, hunters, and small farmers tended to sell out and move on when land prices rose. They found ready buyers, particularly after 1791, when Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made cotton processing more efficient and profitable. In this way the Deep South wrested control of much of the South Carolina and Georgia backcountry from Borderlanders in the opening years of the nineteenth century, then expanded across much of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, northern Florida, and Louisiana, and on to western Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, and Texas. As it did so, it expanded its share of world cotton production from 9 percent in 1801 to 68 percent in 1850, even as global production tripled.
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