High Mountains Rising
Page 5
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.
13. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 289–309; Theda Perdue, The Cherokee (New York:Chelsea House, 1989), 16;Donald L. Winters, Tennessee Farming, Tennessee Farmers: Antebellum Agriculture in the Upper South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 9–10. For the Cherokee willingness to adopt European ways see John Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 8–10.
14. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 46–52, 73–79.
15. Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 209. For a brief overview of African Americans in Appalachia see William H. Turner, “Black Appalachians,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 139–42.
16. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 111–15; Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 179–85.
17. Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 91–113, 189–92; Perdue, Cherokee Women, chap. 5.
18. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 125–47;Winters, Tennessee Farming, 15–22, 34, 171–72; H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, From Ulster to Carolina: The Migration of the Scotch-Irish to Southwestern North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1998), 44–46, 59–63.
19. Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 56–81 and esp. 70 (table 3.3) and 92 (table 4.2). But compare the lower tenancy rates compiled by Winters, Tennessee Farming, 100 (table 6.1) and 108, for antebellum Tennessee as a whole.
20. Winters, Tennessee Farming, 96–105; Dunaway, First American Frontier, 81–84, 98–105.
21. Winters, Tennessee Farming, 30–37.
22. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 32–39.
23. James Patton, Letter of James Patton, One of the First Residents of Asheville, North Carolina, to His Children (Racine, Wis.: Privately printed, 1845; reprint, privately printed, 1970), 21. For a fuller discussion of Patton, see H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., “A Trader on the Western Carolina Frontier,” in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. Robert D. Mitchell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 150–65.
24. William Holland Thomas Collection, Special Collections, Hunter Library, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C.; Winters, Tennessee Farming, 34–35.
25. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 127; Gordon B. McKinney, “Economy and Community in Western North Carolina, 1860–65,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 163–84.
26. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 131.
27. Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
28. This discussion of industry in Appalachia is based largely on Dunaway, First American Frontier, chap. 6.
29. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 147–53.
30. See Pudup et al., Appalachia in the Making, esp. the introduction (“Taking Exception with Exceptionalism: The Emergence and Transformation of Historical Studies of Appalachia”), 9–14.
31. This discussion is drawn from H. Tyler Blethen, “The Transmission of Scottish Culture to the Southern Back Country,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 6 (1994): 59–72; Michael Ann Williams, Great Smoky Mountains Folklife (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); and Ted Olson, Blue Ridge Folklife (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).
32. Davis, Where There Are Mountains, 99–102.
33. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 18–30; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 72–73.
34. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Dent, 1962), 2:320.
35. Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 50–68, chap. 2.
36. Kenneth W. Keller, “What Is Distinctive about the Scotch-Irish?” in Appalachian Frontiers, ed. Mitchell, 79–82.
37. Blethen and Wood, Ulster to Carolina, 55–58. For a general discussion of Appalachian religion, see Deborah Vansau McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
3
Slavery and African Americans
in the Nineteenth Century
John C. Inscoe
The life stories of two black men embody much of the African American experience in Appalachia in the nineteenth century. One spent most of his life as a slave; the other was born into slavery but came of age as part of the first generation of Southern blacks to grow up after emancipation. One was as obscure when he died as he was throughout his lifetime; his story we know only because of the detective work of a modern historian working through the meticulous records left by his owners. The other went on to become the most prominent African American of his generation, whose story we know from multiple biographies and because he chose to tell it in one of the classic American autobiographies. One man was named Sam Williams, the other Booker T. Washington.
Sam Williams spent his life as an ironworker at a forge in western Virginia. Our knowledge of him comes from Charles Dew, a historian of industrial slavery who came across Williams as part of his remarkable recreation of the Buffalo Forge operation where Sam worked as both slave and, after the Civil War, free laborer.1 Williams was born in 1820 to slave parents owned by William Weaver, a Pennsylvania native whose business partnership in a distant ironmaking venture b
rought him to Rockbridge County on the eastern edge of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Weaver eventually bought out his partner and expanded his property to other ironworks, vast landholdings, and some seventy slaves by 1860, making him the county’s largest slaveholder and wealthiest citizen.
We know little of Sam Williams’s youth except that he was the second of four children born to Sam and Sally Williams. In 1837, the entire family was moved from another of the Weaver enterprises to Buffalo Forge, nine miles south of Lexington, Virginia. It is there that Sam Jr. entered the historical record, beginning his training as a forgeman when he turned eighteen in 1838.
More specifically, Sam intended to follow in his father’s footsteps as a master refiner, the most crucial and skilled position in the early process of purifying the raw pig iron and shaping it through pounding and heating to prepare it for the next step in the manufacturing sequence: hammering the refined iron into bars. It was a goal encouraged by his master. Whereas Weaver saw it as a means of increasing the productivity and the value of one of his slaves, Sam himself probably saw it as a means of gaining what few advantages might be gleaned from rising as high as possible within the hierarchy of his slave community and workforce. As limited as such aspirations could realistically be, it may have represented to Sam a chance to shape at least a small part of his own destiny and to parlay his valued skills into a more comfortable life for himself and his family.
Such aspirations certainly became more pronounced when in 1840 Sam married Nancy, also owned by William Weaver, and they began a family that eventually included four daughters. After a year’s apprenticeship, Sam became a master refiner and was in a position to earn money by overtime work, paid at a standard rate based on the amount of iron refined. He also spent much of his spare time burning tar, or extracting the gumlike resin from rotting pine trees and boiling it down to a tarlike substance that he sold to Weaver.
Sam’s energy and ambition continued through the 1840s and 1850s as his family grew. Charles Dew’s readings of Weaver’s meticulous records on all aspects of his slaves’ fiscal activity indicates that Williams continued to earn significant amounts of extra cash and credit through overwork to establish a savings account for himself; his wife, Nancy, had one in her own name as well. They used these funds to improve the quality of their family’s life, buying home furnishings, foodstuffs, and even Christmas presents.
We do not know much of the Williamses’ experience during the Civil War. Weaver’s death in the spring of 1863 had little effect on those he owned. Sam’s master left his fortune, including all of his slave property, to Daniel Brady, who for several years had managed the forge and other enterprises of the elderly Weaver. Even freedom at war’s end meant little change in the daily routine of the Williams family. Declared free by military authorities on a Friday, May 26,1865, Sam and his wife contracted with Brady on Monday to continue as free employees as master refiner and head dairymaid, respectively. A few months later they legitimized their long marriage before a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Lexington. Eventually Sam gave up his position at the forge and turned to farming, first as a sharecropper to Brady and then as an agricultural laborer elsewhere in the county, near Virginia’s famous Natural Bridge. We have no record of Sam and Nancy’s deaths; we know only that both lived well after 1880.
Booker T. Washington’s fate could have been very much like that of Sam Williams, but for the timing of his birth and the opportunities made available to him as a result of the momentous changes wrought by the Civil War and its aftermath. Washington was born in 1856 to a slave mother and an unknown father (who could have been either white or black) on a small farm on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia.2 His owner was James Burroughs, whom Washington biographer Louis Harlan describes as “a raw-boned yeoman, a dirt farmer of the Southern uplands.” Burroughs owned between six and ten slaves, several of whom he hired out to others. He kept only about half of his 200 acres under cultivation, with tobacco as the only cash crop, the rest devoted to subsistence farming (wheat, corn, and various fruits and vegetables) and livestock.3
Washington was nine years old when the Civil War ended and, with it, his slave status. His stepfather, Wash Fergeson, a former slave from a neighboring farm, had already moved on to West Virginia, where he worked in the salt furnaces of the Kanawha Valley. He called on Booker’s mother to join him there, and in the summer of 1865 she and her two sons traveled by wagon to Malden, a center of the salt industry, about five miles from Charleston. Freedom did not mean upward mobility, Washington noted in his 1901 autobiography Up from Slavery. The cabin into which they moved was no larger than that in which they had lived as slaves, and he found the crowded and filthy conditions nearly intolerable. “Some of our neighbors were coloured people, and some were the poorest and most ignorant and degraded white people. It was a motley mixture. Drinking, gambling, quarrels, fights, and shockingly immoral practices were frequent.”4
Salt was among the earliest extractive industries established in central Appalachia. As early as 1810, the salt licks along a ten-mile section of the Great Kanawha River in what later became West Virginia already produced more salt than any other part of the United States and proved vital in meeting the growing demands for salt throughout the rapidly expanding Midwest. Slaves provided most of the labor. At its peak in 1850, some thirty-three companies employed more than 3,100 slaves, owned and leased, to work in all phases of the mining, processing, and barreling of salt.5
Even in freedom, African Americans continued to supply much of the labor for the faltering postwar industry, and neither the young Booker nor his brother, four years older, was exempt from joining their stepfather, Wash, in the furnaces, where they helped to pack the salt into barrels for shipping. Washington’s most vivid memory of that work was that it triggered his first steps toward literacy as he recognized and then recreated in the dirt the number “18” assigned to his stepfather and marked on the barrels packed by him and his two young assistants.6
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.”7
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.8
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.”9 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