Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation

339 Pages·2000·2.71 MB·English

by  John C. Inscoe

CONTENTS P

APPALACHIANS AND RACE
II CONTENTS
CONTENTS II
A R
PPALACHIANS AND ACE
T M S
HE OUNTAIN OUTH
S S
FROM LAVERY TO EGREGATION
E J C. I
DITED BY OHN NSCOE
The University Press of Kentucky
IV CONTENTS
Publication of this volume was made possible in part
by grants from the E.O. Robinson Mountain Fund
and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2001 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508–4008
01 02 03 04 05 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Appalachians and race : the mountain South from slavery to segregation / ed-
ited by John C. Inscoe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8131-2173-6 (acid-free paper)
1. Afro-Americans—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th century.
2. Afro-Americans—Appalachian Region, Southern—Social conditions—
19th century. 3. Slavery—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—19th
century. 4. Appalachian Region, Southern—Race relations. 5. Appalachian
Region, Southern—Social conditions—19th century. I. Inscoe, John C., 1951-
E185.912 .A67 2000
974.004’96’073—dc21 00-028311
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS IV
C
ONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
JOHN C. INSCOE
1. Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia 16
RICHARD B. DRAKE
2. Appalachian Echoes of the African Banjo 27
CECELIA CONWAY
3. Georgia’s Forgotten Miners: African Americans
and the Georgia Gold Rush of 1829 40
DAVID WILLIAMS
4. Slavery in the Kanawha Salt Industry 50
JOHN E. STEALEY III
5. Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave
at Buffalo Forge, Virginia 74
CHARLES B. DEW
6. “A Source of Great Economy”? The Railroad and Slavery’s
Expansion in Southwest Virginia, 1850–1860 101
KENNETH W. NOE
7. Put in Master’s Pocket: Cotton Expansion and Interstate
Slave Trading in the Mountain South 116
WILMA A. DUNAWAY
8. A Free Black Slave Owner in East Tennessee: The Strange Case
of Adam Waterford 133
MARIE TEDESCO
9. Olmsted in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery
and Racism in the Southern Highlands, 1854 154
JOHN C. INSCOE
VI CONTENTS
10. Race and the Roots of Appalachian Poverty:
Clay County, Kentucky, 1850–1910 165
KATHLEEN M. BLEE AND DWIGHT B. BILLINGS
11. Slavery’s End in East Tennessee 189
JOHN CIMPRICH
12. Southern Mountain Republicans and the Negro, 1865–1900 199
GORDON B. MCKINNEY
13. Negotiating the Terms of Freedom: The Quest for Education in
an African American Community in Reconstruction North Georgia 220
JENNIFER LUND SMITH
14. The Salem School and Orphanage:
White Missionaries, Black School 235
CONRAD OSTWALT AND PHOEBE POLLITT
15. “What Does America Need So Much as Americans?”: Race and Northern
Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870–1900 245
NINA SILBER
16. African American Convicts in the Coal Mines of Southern Appalachia 259
RONALD L. LEWIS
17. The Formation of Black Community in Southern
West Virginia Coalfields 284
JOE WILLIAM TROTTER JR.
18. Racial Violence, Lynchings, and Modernization in the Mountain South 302
W. FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE
Contributors 317
Acknowledgments 320
Index 321
CONTENTS VI
I
LLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
John G. Fee 23
A Pastoral Visit 29
Slaves mining gold 43
View of the saltworks on the Kanawha 52
Making salt at Saltville, Virginia 54
William Weaver 75
Brick slave quarters at Buffalo Forge 85
Advertisement of slaves to be sold from Lewis County, Kentucky 120
Slave coffle camped along the New River, Virginia 124
Frederick Law Olmsted 156
William G. “Parson” Brownlow 193
Freedmen registering to vote in Asheville, North Carolina 201
A black prayer service in Clarkesville, Georgia 224
Teachers and pupils at Salem Orphanage at Elm Park, North Carolina 240
Banner Mine prison buildings that housed black convicts 262
A young Booker T. Washington 292
MAPS
Key sites referred to in essays viii
Southwest Virginia, 1860, with the route of the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad 106
National slave-trading routes 118
Coalfields in southern Appalachia 260
VIII CONTENTS
Key sites referred to in essays. (Map produced by University of Georgia Cartographic
Services)
INTRODUCTION 1
4
(cid:1)
I
NTRODUCTION
J C. I
OHN NSCOE
The very first issue of the Journal of Negro History, published in 1916, included
an essay on slavery in Appalachia. It was written by Carter G. Woodson, the
journal’s founder, who would go on to become one of the most distinguished
African American historians of the first half of the twentieth century. Woodson
was himself a product of Appalachia; though born in 1875 in piedmont Vir-
ginia, he followed his older brothers into West Virginia at the age of seven-
teen, where he laid railroad ties and mined coal before heading west again for
an education at Berea College in Kentucky. He graduated in 1904, only a year
before the Kentucky legislature prohibited the enrollment of blacks there.
Woodson went on to the University of Chicago, where he became the nation’s
second black Ph.D. (following W.E.B. Du Bois) with a dissertation on Virginia’s
secession movement and the creation of West Virginia.1
Thus one of America’s first great scholars of the African American expe-
rience began his career as a scholar of Appalachia, a region he had come to
know intimately during his formative years. In his 1916 essay, certainly the
most thoughtful and comprehensive treatment of the subject of race and racial
attitudes in the mountain South up to that time, Woodson explored the vari-
ous facets of Appalachian distinctiveness on such issues, many of them well
established in popular conceptions about the region. He gave credence to the
long-standing impression that southern highlanders were as a whole “a hardy
race of European dissenters” of very different stock from other southern colo-
nists, Germans and Scotch-Irish, along “with a sprinkling of Huguenots, Quak-
ers, and poor whites who had served their time as indentured servants in the
East.” As backwoodsmen and highlanders, they opposed slavery formally,
through abolitionist organizations, newspapers, or institutions of higher edu-
cation (notably Berea and Maryville Colleges), or more informally, through a
base, often unarticulated resentment of and estrangement from the slaveholding
class that had driven them into the hills. While not denying a black presence in
the mountains (he conceded that the mountaineers’ attacks on slavery were
“not altogether opposition to an institution foreign” to them), Woodson’s
emphasis was much more on the topographic, economic, and ideological im-
pediments to slavery’s existence in the highlands and to the religious and eth-
nic makeup of those who first shunned the institution in their midst.2
Woodson’s essay remains a landmark in Appalachian historiography. It
represents the first scholarly assessment of an aspect of southern mountain life
and culture that, well before and well after its appearance, continued to be