Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Read online

  12. James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). (Cobb does give Thomas Wolfe his due, on pp. 135–37, but he never identifies him as a product of Appalachia.) I may as well alienate another friend, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, by noting that his equally valuable study, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), make no mention of the mountain South either, although he very effectively extended his study of southern lynching into Appalachian regions, in both Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and “Racial Violence, Lynchings, and Modernization in the Mountain South,” in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 302–16.

  13. William J. Cooper Jr. and Tom E. Terrill, in The American South: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), which includes a three-page discussion of Southern Appalachia in a chapter on “Restoration and Exile, 1919–1929.” No mention of the region is made in John B. Boles, The South through Time: A History of an American Region, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1999); Paul D. Escott, et al., Major Problems in the History of the American South, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); or J. William Harris, The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500–1877 (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). John Boles does include a full essay on Appalachian historiography in A Companion to the American South (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 369–86.

  14. Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 9.

  15. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 7. Among the major works dealing with regional perception and stereotyping in addition to Batteau’s book are Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961); David Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Williamson, Hillbillyland; and Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Race

  1

  Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century

  Appalachia

  Myths, Realities, and Ambiguities

  David Whisnant, one of the premier chroniclers of Appalachia, once noted that whenever he read books that generalized about “the South,” he amused himself by checking their generalizations against what he knows of the mountain South. Rarely, he said, was the congruence very great. Nowhere, in fact, has the incongruence between the highland and lowland South been more apparent than on matters of race. In one of the most celebrated regional generalizations, U. B. Phillips in 1928 argued that racism—or, more specifically, the quest for white supremacy—was the central theme of southern history. While that claim has been debated ever since, few scholars have objected to the basic premise behind it: that, as Phillips put it quite simply, the Negro was an essential element in “the distinctive Southern pattern of life.”1

  For a significant section of the South—the Southern Appalachians—however, the African American presence has not been central, perhaps not even essential, to its distinctive “pattern of life.” That so integral a factor to southern life elsewhere is peripheral to highland society no doubt accounts for the fact that, despite increasingly sophisticated analysis of the complexities of both southern race relations and Appalachian society, the two fields have not yet intersected to any significant degree. Perhaps as a result, no other aspect of the Appalachian character has been as prone to as much myth, stereotype, contradiction, and confusion as have matters of race relations and racial attitudes among mountaineers.

  Historians have often skirted the question, but none of them has yet tackled it nearly as directly as have literary interpreters of the region. Two works of early twentieth-century fiction are particularly striking in their portrayals of the contradictory assumptions regarding racism among southern highlanders. Both works, one a short story and one a novel, use the Civil War as the catalyst through which mountain whites confront not only blacks for the first time but their own racist proclivities as well. In so doing, the authors give dramatic form to the deep-seated discrepancies that have long plagued popular and scholarly ideas regarding the relationship between these two groups of southerners.

  In his immensely popular 1903 novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, John Fox chronicled a young orphan boy’s move from Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountains to the Bluegrass. Until he leaves his home and moves to a nearby valley, where he encounters two slaves, Chad Buford has never seen a black person. Dazed, he stares at them and asks his companion, Tom, “Whut’ve them fellers got on their faces?” Tom responds, “Hain’t you nuver seed a nigger afore?” When Chad shakes his head, Tom says, “Lots o’ folks from yo’ side o’ the mountains nuver have seed a nigger. Sometimes hit skeers ’em.” “Hit don’t skeer me,” Chad replies. A few years later, when the outbreak of the Civil War forces Kentuckians to take a stand for or against the Union, Chad, by then a teenager fully exposed to slavery and plantation society as they existed in central Kentucky, chooses to fight for the Union, despite pressure from his Confederate guardians. Yet his attitude toward slavery or blacks is not central to his decision. His exposure to it has been brief, and the defense of slavery, Fox writes, “never troubled his soul. . . . Unlike the North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism, no jealousy, no grievance to help him in his struggle.”2

  Nearly thirty years after the publication of Fox’s novel, William Faulkner examined highland racial attitudes from another, far more dramatic angle. In a 1932 short story, “Mountain Victory,” he wrote of a Confederate major from Mississippi and his slave, who in heading home from Virginia just after the end of the Civil War, come upon a Tennessee mountain family and ask to spend the night in their cabin. The bulk of the story involves the varied reactions of members of this family to their two strange guests and their racial identity. Only well into the story does it become apparent that the Tennesseans assume that Major Weddel, of French and Creole ancestry, is black as well, which prompts him to taunt his hosts as to the source of their hostility: “So it’s my face and not my uniform. And you fought four years to free us, I understand.” Ultimately their revulsion toward the black and the close relationship he enjoys with his master lead to a violent denouement, an ambush by the mountain men that leaves both Mississippians and one of the Tennesseans dead.3

  This powerful but little-known Faulkner story and Fox’s far more widely read saga of Civil War Kentucky offer enlightening comparisons on a number of levels. Both are studies of the culture clashes between plantation aristocrats and poor white mountaineers, and both examine the tensions between Confederate and Unionist values that set southerner against fellow southerner. But perhaps most significant, both Faulkner and Fox depicted highlanders’ ignorance—or to use Faulkner’s term, innocence—of the biracial character of the rest of the South and described very different responses by highlanders suddenly exposed to the reality of another race.

  While more subtle in delineating the reactions of their mountain characters than many, Faulkner and Fox both rely on one of the most basic assumptions regarding preindustrial Appalachian society—the absence of blacks. This chapter explores the implications of that demographic given in terms of both the myths and realities of a far more elusive factor—the racial attitudes of white southern highlanders resulting from that minimal or nonexistent contact with blacks and what, if anything, made their brand of racism unique. Which was a more accurate reflection of mountain racism—John Fox’s young humanitarian hero or Faulkner’s vicious and violent Tennesseans?


  Part of the romanticization of Appalachia that accompanied its “discovery” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in its perceived racial and ethnic homogeneity. “Nowhere will be found purer Anglo-Saxon blood,” a journalist wrote of the north Georgia mountains in 1897.4 Ethnogeographer Ellen Semple extolled the mountain populace of Kentucky on the same 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.”5 After geological expeditions through the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies in the late 1880s, Harvard professor Nathaniel S. Shaler wrote that there were “probably more white people who have never seen a negro in this part of the United States than in all New England.” He was amused at the intense curiosity his own black servants evoked among highland men and women, some of whom traveled more than twenty miles to stare at them.6

  Appalachian residents themselves contributed to the myth. In 1906 East Tennessee minister Samuel Tyndale Wilson, then president of Maryville College, stated categorically that the mountain region is “the only part of the South that is not directly concerned with the race problem.” He even suggested that the commonly used term “mountain whites,” which he found pejorative (too much like “poor white trash”), be replaced with simply “mountaineer,” with no need for any designation by race. In The Hills Beyond, his semifictional interpretation of his region’s history, Asheville native Thomas Wolfe claimed that the mountain people had not owned slaves and that in many counties, “Negroes were unknown before the war.”7

  Even Flannery O’Connor based one of her most celebrated stories, “The Artificial Nigger,” on the premise that mountaineers had no contacts with blacks. The 1950 story, which O’Connor once said was her favorite, centers on an elderly north Georgia man who brings his ten-year-old grandson on an excursion to Atlanta in order to expose him to the world beyond their isolated backwoods existence. The experience becomes one of continual encounters with blacks, which alternately baffle, intrigue, repel, and traumatize the two highlanders, whose backgrounds have left them totally unprepared for this strange race of people. Once safely back home, the young boy sums up his introduction to the biracial urban South: “I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again.”8

  While O’Connor (like Faulkner and Fox) drew upon the assumption of a pure white mountain South to explore more universal racial themes, more recent scholars have made much of the propagandistic effects of that image. James Klotter has argued convincingly that it was the region’s perceived “whiteness” that so appealed to northern interests at the time and inspired them to divert their mission impulses toward deserving highlanders after their disillusionment with similar efforts on behalf of southern blacks during Reconstruction. Nina Silber has suggested that northerners found postwar reconciliation more palatable with the mountain South, due to its racial purity and its loyalty to the Union during the war. These traits provided northerners with identifying links less apparent in poor whites elsewhere in the South, still unreformed rebels caught up in the biracial complexities of the lowland South.9

  This basic demographic assumption, which Edward Cabbell has called Appalachia’s “black invisibility” factor, is simple enough to refute, and a number of studies in recent years have effectively demolished the myth that African Americans were a negligible presence in Appalachia.10 Slavery existed in every county in Appalachia in 1860, and the region as a whole included a black populace, free and slave, of more than 175,000. Freedmen and freedwomen continued to reside in most areas of the mountain South by century’s end, when their numbers totaled more than 274,000.11 Most of the region’s few urban areas, such as Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville, Bristol, and Roanoke, saw a dramatic influx of blacks in the decades following the Civil War, and communal experiments, such as North Carolina’s “Kingdom of the Happy Land” and Kentucky’s Coe Ridge, were established by former slaves moving into the region from antebellum plantation homes elsewhere.12 From the 1880s on, the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and especially West Virginia attracted thousands of southern blacks and drastically changed the racial demographics of substantial areas of central Appalachia.13

  There were, however, rural areas of the southern highlands from which former slaves drifted away. At least ten Appalachian counties lost their entire black population between 1880 and 1900, due to a combination of push (scare tactics) and pull (economic opportunity elsewhere) factors.14 Thus by the end of the century there were large numbers of mountain residents whose contacts with blacks were negligible. It was they who served as the models of racial purity—or to use Faulkner’s term, “innocence”—to both contemporary observers and later generations. But the nature of the racial attitudes spawned by this void, whether real or perceived, has proven a difficult aspect of the mythology to come to terms with. Like W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, most treatments of mountain racism have characterized it as a single and simple mentality. But unlike Cash, who took more than 400 pages to describe the regional “mind” as he saw it, most of what has been written about southern highlanders’ racial views has been consigned to slight and usually casual references, based on conjecture, exaggeration, and overgeneralization. More often than not, the topic is mentioned only in passing in works with other concerns or priorities. Much is taken for granted, and no one to date has subjected the issue to either serious scrutiny, systematic analysis, or substantial documentation.

  What makes the topic so intriguing is the sharp dichotomy that characterizes opinions as to how white mountaineers viewed blacks. On the one hand is the assumption on which Faulkner drew heavily—highlanders’ inherent fear of and intense hostility toward the race that they alone among southerners did not know or control. Conversely there is the more extensively supported notion that the mountains were a southern oasis of abolitionism and racial liberality. Despite the pervasiveness of both schools of thought, proponents of one never seem to have acknowledged the other, much less made any direct effort to discredit it.

  Cash’s Mind of the South had much to do with giving widespread credence to the idea of mountain hostility to blacks. His one relevant statement is among the most often quoted: “Though there were few slaves in the mountains,” the mountaineer “had acquired a hatred and contempt for the Negro even more virulent than that of the common white of the lowlands; a dislike so rabid that it was worth a black man’s life to venture into many mountain sections.”15 This was a belief to which mountain residents and chroniclers of the region had long adhered. Just after the Civil War, John Eaton, as commissioner of Tennessee’s Freedman’s Bureau, noted that even though there were far fewer blacks in the state’s eastern highlands, “the prejudice of the whites against the Negro was even more acute” there than in areas overrun with “colored” refugees, such as Memphis or Vicksburg.16

  John Campbell, perhaps the region’s most influential twentieth-century chronicler, presented a somewhat more judicious view of its racism but confirmed that there were counties “without a single Negro inhabitant and where it was unpleasant if not unsafe for him to go.” Muriel Shepherd quoted a North Carolina highlander who, in explaining why there were no blacks, free or slave, in the Rock Creek section of Mitchell County, stated that “colored people have a well-founded belief that if they venture up there they might not come back alive.”17

  The idea of a more intense highland racism was widespread even in other parts of the South. In his memoir of his sharecropping childhood in middle Georgia, for example, black author Raymond Andrews wrote of a particular overseer: “Mister Brown and his family were mountain folks, or ‘hillbillies,’ but were considered unusual for the breed, as it was often said that folks from up in the hills had no use for lowlanders, particularly colored folks.” William Styron made a similar point in The Confessions of Nat Turner, perhaps the most insightful portrait of the slaveholding South in modern fiction. In attempting to explain why Joseph Travis
split a slave family by selling a mother and child south, he noted that Travis had moved to Southampton County from “the wild slopes of the Blue Ridge mountains.” Styron, in Nat’s voice, speculates: “Maybe it was his mountain heritage, his lack of experience with Tidewater ways, that caused him to do something that no truly respectable slaveowner would do.”18

  But whereas there is evidence of intense negrophobia among southern highlanders, the diminished presence of slavery there led many to far different conclusions about the reasons behind the institution’s relative absence. The belief has long held sway that “Appalachians have not been saddled with the same prejudices about black people that people of the deep South have,” as Loyal Jones, one of the region’s most perceptive interpreters, has expressed it.19 This idea of a moral superiority among highlanders in regard to their racial attitudes is deep rooted and is based in large part on the stereotypical “rugged individualism” credited to mountain men. That perception, along with the reality of comparatively fewer slaves in the region, has led many to conclude that the rejection of slavery was a conscious choice.

  The concept of Appalachia as a bastion of liberty was well developed by the time the Civil War broke out, largely because the area was seen as a refuge for escaped slaves. The region was considered part of the Underground Railroad out of the South, where according to one contemporary source, “rugged mountaineers forfeited life for the furtherance of the means of justice, and mingled blood . . . with the blood of millions of slaves.”20 More recently, Boston social worker Leon Williams described the region as “settled to a substantial degree by slaves and indentured white servants fleeing from exploitation and angry with established colonial America.” “The hills, in their exquisite isolation,” he continued, “became havens for the disenchanted black and white . . . who needed to escape burdensome drudgery and slavery.”21