43. Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982). Quote is title of chap. 2.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 4th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Henry G, Langley, 1845), 1:389–90.
45. Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967); Rodger Cunningham, Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 99.
46. Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (Cincinnati, Ohio: Robert Clarke, 1899), 196–97.
47. Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 31. See also Arthur W. Spaulding, The Men of the Mountains: The Story of the Southern Mountaineer and His Kin of the Piedmont (Nashville: Southern Press, 1915), 40–41.
48. Alexander H. Jones, Knocking at the Door (Washington, D.C.: Mc-Gill and Witherow, 1866), 14; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 236–38.
49. Vernon M. Queener, “William G. Brownlow as an Editor,” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 4 (1932): 80; W. G. Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress and Decline of Secession (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1862), 109; and Robert Tracy McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War [Knoxville] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 61–70. Nelson quoted in Richard Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 50. For a comparison of attitudes in two sections of Appalachia, see “The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image,” chap. 5 in this volume.
50. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 244–46.
51. Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 30.
52. Etheleve Dyer Jones, Facets of Fannin: A History of Fannin County, Georgia (Dallas: Curtis Media, 1989), 32; Jonathan Sarris, “Anatomy of an Atrocity: The Madden Branch Massacre and the Guerrilla War in North Georgia, 1861–1865,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (Winter 1993): 679–710.
53. Henry T. Shanks, “Disloyalty to the Confederacy in Southwestern Virginia, 1861–1865,” North Carolina Historical Review 21 (1944): 118–19. For more recent confirmation of Shanks’s conclusions, see Kenneth W. Noe, “Red String Scare: Civil War Southwest Virginia and the Heroes of America,” North Carolina Historical Review 59 (1992): 301–22.
54. Theodore F. Davidson, “The Carolina Mountaineer: The Highest Type of American Character,” in First Annual Transactions of the Pen and Plate Club of Asheville, N.C., ed. Theodore F. Davidson (Asheville: Hackney and Mole, 1905), 84–85. For variations of this theme, see Spaulding, Men of the Mountains, 41–43; Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 30–31; Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 37–39; Waller, Feud, 30–31.
55. Quoted in Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Society: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 50.
56. Circular by W. W. Avery and Marcus Erwin, quoted in Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 226; Richard O. Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), chap. 9, esp. 91–92.
57. Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” 28. For more extensive discussion of the slave trade in Appalachia, see Dunaway, “Put in Master’s Pocket,” and Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad, chap. 1.
58. G. W. Featherstonaugh, Excursion through the Slave States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 36–37, 46.
59. Joseph John Gurney, A Journey in North America, Described in Familiar Letters to Amelia Opie (Norwich, England: J. Fletcher, 1841), 53–54.
60. Sarah Gudger and Mary Barbour interviews in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George P. Rawick, vol. 14: North Carolina Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pt. 1, 354–55 (Gudger), 79 (Barbour). Aunt Sophia quoted in Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” 27. For other examples of Appalachian ex-slave testimony and for the strongest case for cruelty and abuses inflicted on slaves in Appalachia, see Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (both Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
61. Eric J. Olson, “Race Relations in Asheville, North Carolina: Three Incidents, 1868–1906,” in The Appalachian Experience: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Appalachian Studies Conference, ed. Barry M. Buxton (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1983), 153–56.
62. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 159–61.
63. William F. Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence: Georgia, 1889–1895,” Journal of American History 67 (December 1980): 589–611; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), chap. 5. See also Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 52–53. It is perhaps noteworthy that the only black informant Miller cites as a victim of whitecappers was a Georgian.
64. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), chap. 2 (see particularly table 4, p. 73).
65. Robert P. Stuckert, “Racial Violence in Southern Appalachia, 1880–1940,” Appalachian Heritage 20 (Spring 1992): 35–41.
66. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, chap. 4; and Brundage, “Racial Violence, Lynchings, and Modernization in the Mountain South,” in Inscoe, Appalachians and Race, 302–16.
67. Charles Lanman, Letters from the Alleghany Mountains (New York: Putnam, 1849), 314; Olmsted, Journey through the Back Country, 226–27. It is worth noting that the mountain slaves to whom Gurney reacts are the first he encountered during his tour of the United States, whereas both Lanman and Olmsted moved into the southern highlands after extensive travel elsewhere in the South and thus had a basis for comparison with slave life that Gurney lacked.
68. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chap. 5. Some reviewers of the book found this section less than convincing. See Shane White, “Feeling ‘Awful Southern’ or Slavery on the Periphery,” Reviews in American History 18 (June 1990): 197–201; and reviews by Altina L. Waller, in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 88 (1990): 346–48; John Schlotterbeck, in Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 330–31; and Lynda Morgan, American Historical Review 96 (1991): 262–63. Much of Wilma Dunaway’s work on slavery refutes these conclusions as well. It is admittedly a slippery point to prove, and the evidence must remain, by its nature, circumstantial and impressionistic.
69. Van Beck Hall, “The Politics of Appalachian Virginia, 1790–1830,” in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Pre-industrial Era, ed. Robert D. Mitchell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 184–86.
70. Gordon B. McKinney, “Southern Mountain Republicans and the Negro, 1865–1900,” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 493–96.
71. Cimprich, “Slavery’s End in East Tennessee,” 84–85. Cimprich also indicated that antiblack sentiment among East Tennesseans did indeed intensify after emancipation, just as Eaton had complained.
72. Olson, “Race Relations in Asheville,” 163–64.
73. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 112, 224, 248, 264.
74. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” 144, 146. For further expansion of her arguments, see Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 118. See also John B. Boles, “Cycles of Racism in Southern History,” paper presented at conference, “Black and White Perspectives on the Ameri
can South,” September 1994, University of Georgia, Athens.
75. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” 155.
2
Between Bondage and Freedom
Confronting the Variables of Appalachian Slavery and Slaveholding
The historical scholarship on race relations in Southern Appalachia has expanded dramatically over the past couple of decades, and yet we still lack a comprehensive treatment of the subject. What has emerged instead, particularly in regard to the antebellum era, is a vast mosaic of stories that tell us a great many different things about slavery and slaveholders throughout the region. That case can be made by simply recounting some of those stories—in some cases, mere snippets of stories—of slaves and other African Americans at various times and locales in colonial and antebellum Appalachia.
In the early 1750s, a freed slave from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settled along the western slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Augusta County, Virginia and established himself as the only blacksmith to serve that rapidly populating frontier region. A Moravian missionary moving through the area was duly impressed by his encounter with this man in 1753, and in a diary entry, revealed much about him—that he was married to a Scottish woman, that his Pennsylvania background included familiarity with both the Quaker and Moravian faiths, and that he spoke as well as read both German and English. Only from other sources do we know that his name was Edward Tarr.
Tarr’s blacksmith shop was well situated, right along the Great Wagon Road that carried so much traffic south. It soon became a local gathering spot, attracting regular convergences of other free blacks, of slaves, and even of whites of the “middlin’ sort.” But this success story proved relatively short-lived; by the following decade, the boisterous interracial gatherings led to complaints from certain white citizens that Tarr was a nuisance and his forge a disruption to the public order. The community demonstrated its disapproval in an odd way, though. In 1763, a court ordered the severed head of a slave executed for murder to be placed on a pike on the road just in front of Tarr’s shop, even though it was fifty-some miles from where that slave’s crime and execution had occurred. Soon thereafter, Tarr’s wife Ann was brought before the county court on morals charges—the final straw that led Tarr to sell his land and his business at a loss and move to nearby Staunton, enough of an urban environment for him to assume a more low-key, perhaps anonymous, lifestyle.1
Farther west and several decades later, a young slave woman was punished when caught reading a book. In 1813, on a farm on the Kentucky side of the Tug River Valley (in present-day Lawrence County), an overseer came upon this slave, named D’lea, reading a religious tract and whipped her for it. Curiously, D’lea’s literacy was shared by many of her fellow slaves, and both her owner and the overseer who punished her were fully aware of her skills. She spent most of her time at the plantation on the Virginia side of the Tug River, where her owner, Wilson Cary Nicholas, a former governor of the state, not only tolerated literate slaves, but in D’lea’s case, seems to have capitalized on her so-called occupational literacy, which included some basic mathematical skills, in the management of his operation, specifically in the tallying of his hemp crop as it was bundled and shipped downriver. If D’lea had been on her home farm, she would likely have been spared any whipping. But Nicholas had sent her and about twenty other slaves to his second large holding across the river and the state line in order to hide them from a tax assessor making the rounds. With only this less tolerant overseer in authority at Nicholas’s Kentucky farm, D’lea found herself the victim of either his resentment of her ability to read or some offense taken by the religious material he found her reading.2
1843. Newport, Tennessee. Abolitionist Ezekiel Birdseye, then based in this highland community on the state’s eastern edge, attended the trial of a young slave man, Hannibal, accused of murdering his master. According to Birdseye, Hannibal had “been so frequently and cruelly scourged” at the hands of his owner that he was contemplating suicide. When his owner attacked him with a club as he was covering a coal pit, Hannibal struck back with the shovel he was holding, accidentally killing his master.
Hannibal’s plight earned him a vigorous defense from two committed lawyers, who argued that their client was guilty of no more than manslaughter; they urged jury members to “regard him as a man, a fellow-man, entitled to all the justice that one of you are.” They reminded the jury that no less than the supreme court of Tennessee had ruled that “when a master approached his slave with a dangerous weapon, the slave had a right to resist.” The court itself was not unsympathetic to the abuse the defendant had suffered and to his striking back in self-defense. Nevertheless, the jury found Hannibal guilty of first-degree murder, and the judge—who Birdseye noted “is one of the most amiable men living, who has freed his own slaves, and whose opinion of slavery corresponds with ours”—was compelled to sentence him to death. In doing so, the judge “was himself so much overcome by his feelings that he found it difficult to conclude his sentence.” Hannibal himself broke down in tears at that point, and Birdseye stated, “I should think that more than one half of the audience wept” upon hearing the sentence, which was carried out some two weeks later.3
A year later, in 1844, an extraordinary legal challenge by slaves protesting the current terms of their enslavement began to unfold in Clay County, Kentucky. This highland county in the southeastern corner of the state was the site of a thriving antebellum salt-mining industry, which, as elsewhere in Appalachia, resulted in a considerable concentration of slaves in an otherwise remote and impoverished mountain county. As part of their masterful analysis of the economic inequities and resulting culture of poverty in Clay County, Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee have chronicled several disputes, legal and extralegal, between local slaveholders, and occasionally between slaveholder and slave.4
The murder of one of the county’s most prominent slaveholders, Daniel Bates, set into motion a series of lawsuits by his slaves regarding both their past and future status.5 Bates had been the subject of several disputes over the years, including an attempt on his life in 1840. Four years later, tensions between Bates and his brother-in-law, Abner Baker, over both business and marital matters led to a confrontation at Bates’s salt furnace, in which Baker shot and killed him. Baker then claimed that Bates had “kept a band of lawless men and negroes about him,” and worried that Bates had ordered his slaves to kill him.
There is no other evidence that Bates’s slaves posed any threat to Baker or anyone else, but they did come into sharp focus with their master’s murder for another reason: several of them chose to sue his estate for their freedom. Allison was the first slave to bring suit against Daniel’s brother Stephen, in November 1844, a mere four months after Daniel’s death. Her lawyer argued that their father, John Bates, had stipulated in his will that she be freed after eight years of being hired out, an operation overseen by the county sheriff’s office. Although the case was initially dismissed, Allison and eight other slaves—Berry, Theophilus, Cuffee, Jane, Claiborne, Elsey, Alssysa, and Harriet (half of them women, significantly)—continued to press their case, ultimately resorting to the unusual tactic of suing for the value of their labor over the five years in which they considered themselves unlawfully enslaved, at rates ranging from $500 for Theophilus to $100 for Harriet. Remarkably, after nearly seven years of legal wrangling, the Kentucky Court of Appeals granted freedom to all slave plaintiffs in 1851, though it agreed to only a single cent in compensation for their many years of labor (which by then included the additional time during which their cases had wended their way to a resolution).6
A shift in scene to 1851 in the Silver Creek valley in Burke County on the eastern slopes of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Robert McElrath, a local slaveholder, sent his son-in-law to California with four of his seventeen slaves in order to secure enough gold for him to pay off his debts. The slaves were young adult men except for “Uncle Jim,” an elderly slave who had est
ablished himself as an expert place miner during the gold rush in Burke County’s own South Mountains two decades earlier. McElrath’s slaves were among hundreds from western North Carolina to be taken west to relive the glory days of Burke County’s brush with gold fever, but the owners of these slaves knew that whatever gains they made in terms of gold, they risked losing the very property they’d sent to procure it. In the free state that California had become in 1850, slaves’ status as property was by no means secure, and many owners and guardians faced discipline problems as well as the refusal of slaves to leave California at the end of their westward ventures.7
The McElrath slaves apparently posed no such problems. Much of their cooperation and productivity may have lain in the fact that they were allowed one day a week to mine for themselves. But as their guardian accompanied them back home by the quickest route then available—by ship from Stockton to the isthmus of Panama and a week-long land crossing to another ship on the Caribbean side—a new opportunity presented itself. McElrath’s son-in-law succumbed to malaria, and suddenly four slaves found themselves on their own carrying a substantial amount of gold—their own and their master’s—on a ship bound for New York City. Yet, despite exposure in New York to abolitionists who urged them to remain there, the foursome eventually made their way back to Burke County and their master, where they were much extolled throughout the community for their fidelity and devotion to him.8
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 7