High Mountains Rising (6 page)

William Holland Thomas operated several stores in western North Carolina near the homeland of the Cherokee in the early nineteenth century. His inventory also illustrates how trade connected Appalachian farm families to the world market. In addition to corn and livestock, he shipped butter, tanned hides, and ginseng to markets in Savannah, Charleston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Ginseng linked Appalachia to far-off Asia, for after shipment to London it was reexported by the British East India Company to China. Thomas's stores offered a wide selection of goods ordered from those cities, many of which had originated in Europe: hardware, cotton and wool cloth, yarn, shoes, liquor, drugs, bonnets, silk goods, and a large selection of books including Bibles, histories, biographies, textbooks, almanacs, dictionaries, and etiquette books. Most farm households regularly purchased salt, coffee, refined cane sugar, tea, spices, chocolate, and rum from merchants such as Thomas.
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On the western side of the Continental Divide the commodities of Appalachian farmers found their way down various tributaries to the Mississippi River. Even before 1800 Cumberland Plateau farmers shipped cotton, oats, wheat, corn, tobacco, hemp, and ginseng to New Orleans. Later Nashville became an important market.
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These trade patterns clearly reflect Appalachia's integration into a market economy. Despite its high level of farm tenancy, Appalachia in the antebellum period had become a productive supplier of agricultural commodities and a comparatively wealthy region of the nation. Farmers who owned land did especially well. One historian has estimated that most of
Appalachia's farm owners exceeded national averages in the per capita production of corn, wheat, and hogs, matched them in tobacco and cattle, and were only slightly below in cotton.
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Unfortunately, Appalachia's position of relative wealth changed dramatically after the Civil War, thanks in part to increasing competition from Midwestern crops made possible by the expansion of railways but also to the wartime devastation of Appalachia and the explosion of its population.
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Although agriculture dominated the antebellum Appalachian economy, industry did set some small-scale roots, especially in the extractive industries.
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America's first gold rush began in the 1820s in western North Carolina and north Georgia, spreading to the Appalachian parts of Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia. The fever became so intense that whites persuaded state and federal governments to remove the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to the hills of Oklahoma. For two decades southern Appalachia led the nation in gold production, until the 1849 gold rush in California. Another southern Appalachian extractive industry that made a major contribution to the national economy was salt. Large salt works were developed in eastern Kentucky and in western and southwestern Virginia, primarily to supply meat packers in places such as Cincinnati and Knoxville.

Although mines, furnaces, bloomeries, forges, and rolling mills popped up throughout the region, Appalachian iron production did not play as important a role in the antebellum national economy as gold and salt did. East Tennessee and eastern Kentucky became the largest regional producers. Ironworks ranged from small family-based operations supplying local demand to large firms such as those in northeastern Kentucky that employed dozens of workers and made Kentucky the third largest producer of iron in the nation by the 1830s.
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Coal became dominant in southern Appalachia after the Civil War. Before the war coal was mined on a significant scale only in western and southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and East Tennessee. It was dug out of both mine shafts and open pits. It took the arrival of railroads to open Appalachian coalmines to a larger export market for this bulk commodity.

Of all the extractive industries, timber was the most extensive in the antebellum period. It supported a host of other industries—supplying fuel for saltmaking, charcoal for ironmaking, bark for tanning leather, support beams for constructing mine shafts, barrels for transporting salt and meat—and provided building material for the production of most artifacts in a wood-based culture. Despite its bulk, timber was already being cut before the Civil War for export outside the region, even to Europe. But as with coal, the arrival of railways allowed greatly increased extraction from the mountains, leading to environmentally disastrous clearcutting in many places.

The nature of the pioneer society that developed in Appalachia before the Civil War has been the subject of debate. In particular, much discussion has revolved around the notion of “Appalachian exceptionalism,” whether the region developed a unique culture that sharply distinguished it from the rest of America. Recent scholarship argues that it did not, that careful study reveals broad parallels between the development of Appalachia and of other American regions. The goal of scholarship then becomes one of “mapping points of similarity to and difference from . . . other rural locales across the nation.”
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Two differences, land use patterns and religion, resulted from interaction between the environment and topography of the region and the cultural inheritance some settlers brought with them from their Old World homes in Europe and Africa.
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Land use patterns were affected by the new environment, for pioneer families initially were attracted to settle along the fertile banks of rivers and streams, often taking over fields that had been cultivated by Native Americans for generations. But cultural transmission played a role as well, especially the traditions of the Scotch-Irish who so heavily settled the Appalachian frontier. Their preference for combining open range livestock herding with crops dotted the Ulster landscape with
clachans
, clusters of a few farm households usually related by kin, and dispersed single-family farms. They regularly planted the “infields” near their houses with grains and potatoes while subjecting the “outfields” further off to a soil revitalizing cycle that alternated between grains and pasture. In the summer they herded their cattle and sheep to graze on ridge and mountaintop pastures. This pattern contrasted starkly with the densely populated villages of England's grain-growing southeast. Ulster emigrants settling in the southern Appalachians brought it with them, stringing their farms out along the rivers and creeks in the dispersed pattern that they favored, planting infields and outfields, and free-ranging their livestock.
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This cultural preference overlaid on a mountainous topography partially explains the slow development of towns and urban life in Appalachia.

Religion also shaped some distinctive differences in Appalachia. Early Scotch-Irish pioneers brought their Presbyterianism to the backcountry, and in places such as the Shenandoah Valley the progress of European settlement along the frontier can be mapped by the appearance of Presbyterian churches. In the eighteenth century, “New Side” Scottish Presbyterian reformers, insisting on a personal conversion experience as the sign of salvation, sponsored sacramental (or communion) festivals. These outdoor festivals, or “holy fairs,” lasting three or four days in the summer, drew large crowds and included lengthy sermons by popular ministers, prayer vigils, public confessions of sin, conversions, and tables full of communicants
celebrating the Last Supper.
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Daniel Defoe described one such fair as a “field meeting, where [the preacher] preach'd to an auditory of near 7,000 people, all sitting in rows on the steep side of a green hill, and the preacher in a little pulpit made under a tent at the foot of the hill; he held his auditory, with not above an intermission of half an hour, almost seven hours.”
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Scotch-Irish clergymen such as James McGready introduced these sacramental fairs to America, influencing the Great Awakening as it swept south from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. Born in Pennsylvania in 1758 and raised in Guilford County, North Carolina, McGready spread the devotional practices of the Scottish holy fairs, including prayer, self-examination of one's conscience and behavior, meditation and devotional readings, and personal covenanting with God to renounce temptation and sin, accept Christ, rededicate to God, and renew baptismal covenants. Ecstatic experiences—trances, fainting spells, supernatural voices, and visions—were common. Ironically, these meetings were too often defiled by brazen sinners who saw them as opportunities to indulge in the very behaviors being denounced, especially drinking, gambling, and fornication. Such abuses provided ammunition to conservative clergymen who feared the emotions released during these revivals and attacked them as superstitious and licentious. But the meetings created a sense of community that helped bind dispersed frontier settlers together.
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Other denominations contributed popular practices such as camping out, altar calls, and interdenominational congregations. Baptist and Methodist churches in particular thrived on the frontier. In part this was for doctrinal reasons; some Presbyterians came to prefer Baptist and Methodist teachings about personal salvation and congregational church government and therefore converted.
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But it was due more to the willingness of Baptists and Methodists to accept “the call” from God as sufficient certification of fitness for the ministry. Presbyterians, who demanded a seminary-trained ministry, found it difficult to attract qualified clergymen to frontier communities and were too often faced with the choice of doing without church life or converting. But while Presbyterian congregations diminished in numbers, the intense evangelical religiosity brought by the Scotch-Irish survived, and beliefs and practices rooted in their Calvinism such as predestination, contentiousness over theology, and emotional evangelicalism left a strong imprint on Appalachian culture.
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Appalachia underwent its frontier phase between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That experience was similar in many ways to that of other parts of the nation. But the Civil War was a turning point for the worse. It devastated the region's economy, marked the beginning of a dramatic
surge in population that contributed to serious economic decline, and was followed by the takeoff of Midwestern agricultural production and its subsequent domination of eastern markets. From a region that had matched many of the social and economic characteristics of the nation as a whole, Appalachia after the Civil War entered a long and painful transformation into a new and painful role as the nation's deprived and neglected stepchild.

NOTES

1.
Roy S. Dickens Jr., “The Origins and Development of Cherokee Culture,” in
The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History
, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 3–32; Charles Hudson,
The Southeastern Indians
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 77–119;Russell Thornton,
The Cherokees: A Population History
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 12–18; Donald Edward Davis,
Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 20; Sharlotte Neely,
Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 15–16.

2.
James T. Lemon,
The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), chap. 2.

3.
Thomas L. Purvis, “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790,”
William and Mary Quarterly
3d ser., 41 (1984): 85–101.

4.
Various censuses place the number of slaves in the Cherokee Nation at 583 in 1809, 1,277 in 1825, and nearly 1,600 in 1835. Theda Perdue,
Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 126.

5.
Theda Perdue,
Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 42–44; Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” in
Cherokee Indian Nation
, ed. King, 114–25.

6.
See chapter 3 in this book and John C. Inscoe,
Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), chap. 4. William H. Turner, “The Demography of Black Appalachia: Past and Present,” in
Blacks in Appalachia
, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 237–41, argues that the black population of Appalachia was already 10 percent in 1820 and grew to 19 percent in 1860.

7.
John C. Inscoe, ed.,
Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), chaps. 5 and 8.

8.
Barry M. Buxton and Malinda Crutchfield, eds.,
The Great Forest: An Appalachian Story
(Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1985), ix; Davis,
Where There Are Mountains
, chap. 2; Ronald L. Lewis,
Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 15–18.

9.
Davis,
Where There Are Mountains
, 60–61.

10.
Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds.,
Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 2–5.

11.
William B. Hart, “Black ‘Go-Betweens‘ and the Mutability of ‘Race,' Status, and Identity on New York's Pre-Revolutionary Frontier,” in
Contact Points
, ed. Cayton and Teute, 91.

12.
John Solomon Otto, “The Migration of the Southern Plain Folk: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis,”
Journal of Southern History
51 (1985): 187–88.