Colin Woodard (29 page)

The end result was characteristically Midland: a large region of swing voters whose support could make or break nearly every future federal coalition around any given issue. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery would push a narrow majority of Midlanders into the Republican camp. Careful forensic analysis of the 1860 presidential vote by late twentieth-century political scientists has shown that this shift in Midlander opinion—particularly among Germans—tipped Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana into Abraham Lincoln's column, giving him control of the White House. Defeated on the federal stage by the defection of the Midland Midwest, the Deep South would move to secede almost immediately.
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CHAPTER 17

I
t is little wonder that historians have long identified the Appalachian people with the frontier. Borderlanders were the first to move across the Appalachians, forcing their way into Native American territory in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. They were founding renegade governments like Transylvania and the State of Franklin long before the Continental Congress got around to creating the Northwest Territory or conquering the Indians that lived within it. Yankees and Midlanders generally waited until federal military forces had defeated Indian peoples before moving into their lands; Borderlanders often carried out the conquest themselves. While New Englanders were still colonizing upstate New York, Appalachian folk were rafting down the Ohio River to stake out claims in southern Indiana and Illinois. By the time Midlanders reached Ohio, Borderlanders were skirmishing with Cherokees in central Tennessee. They were very often on the cutting edge of Euro-American expansion because of their willingness—even desire—to live beyond the effective reach of government.

Greater Appalachian culture spread faster and wider than that of the other nations. Attracted by better soils, cheap and properly surveyed land, and easier access to markets (via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers), hundreds of thousands fled Virginia in the first half of the nineteenth century, causing the Old Dominion to cease to be the most populous state in the Union. This mass movement out of Virginia and other eastern states came to be known as the Great Migration, and it was in large part an Appalachian movement. By 1800 Borderlanders had colonized much of what is now Kentucky, north-central Tennessee, and southwestern Illinois. Thirty years later—at a time when Yankeees had yet to reach Illinois or Wisconsin—Borderlanders had seized control of northern Alabama, much of the rest of Tennessee, the Ozarks of Arkansas, and the Mississippi Valley of southern Illinois and Missouri. In 1850 they were spreading across north Texas, carrying the speech patterns of Ulster and the English Marches to their homes on the range. The culture's turbulent, highly mobile people were deflected only by the power of the Deep Southern planters and stopped short only upon reaching the treeless, arid prairies they encountered at the edge of the Far West. The culture they laid down—allegedly that of “real Americans”—was very different from that of its neighbors, many of whom found its disorderliness distasteful.

But during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Borderlanders became so numerous and widespread that their leaders were able to seize control of national affairs, occupying the White House and branding an epoch of American history with their values.

 

Greater Appalachia was a decidedly rural nation. Borderlanders expanded across Kentucky and the southern Midwest not as transplanted communities but as individuals or in small groups. Scattering themselves through the forests and hollows, they formed towns almost as an afterthought, spurning investments in communal resources. Across Greater Appalachia local taxes were low, schools and libraries rare, and municipal governments few and far between. The proportion of Kentuckians enrolled in public schools in 1850 was about one-sixth that of Maine, the poorest and most frontier-like New England state, while its libraries had fewer than half as many books per capita.
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Appalachian illiteracy has complicated historians' efforts to trace its people's progress. Most accounts of Midwestern Borderlanders come from the voluminous writings of Yankee neighbors and visitors to the region, who were generally shocked by their poverty. Philadelphia physician Richard Lee Mason crossed southern Indiana in the winter of 1819 and described coming upon “one of the most miserable huts ever seen,” a pile of slabs laid against a pigsty containing a woman and “two shivering and almost starving children,” all of them bareheaded and barefoot; the father was “absent in search of bread.” One farmer reported, “Southern Illinois has been a city of refuge for the poor people of the Slave States. I saw children here . . . last year, eat dirt, they were so hungry.” Midwestern Yankees took to calling the Borderlanders “butternuts”—a reference to the color of their crude homespun clothes. “Hoosier”—a Southern slang term for a frontier hick—was adopted as a badge of honor by the Appalachian people of Indiana.
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Appalachia's farming was an improvised and destructive affair. Borderlanders, who were primarily a society of herdsmen, sought forested land, where they burned the trees or killed them by girdling. Corn was planted between the stumps and, when ripened, fed to hogs and cattle or made into corn bread, cornmeal mush, or whiskey. Families often stayed in a particular location for only a few years before moving on, sometimes because they had been squatting and the real owners appeared, but more often because the area had started to get too thickly settled. As one scholar explained, “When neighbors got as close as five miles, they felt crowded.” Scholars have since found that 60 to 80 percent of frontiersmen moved within a decade of arrival, with the poorest people relocating most often.
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Outsiders blamed the settlers themselves for their poverty. Dr. Mason said the people of southern Indiana were “imprudent and lazy beyond example.” “Yankee energy and enterprise do not enter into the composition of their character,” an Ohio-based journalist agreed. “The resources of southern Illinois are limited only because its inhabitants have not been adequate to develop its resources,” Yankee-born state senator Jason Strevell told his colleagues on the floor of that state's capitol. “Sloth and independence are prominent traits in their character,” a Massachusetts pastor said of West Virginians, alleging these were “their principal enjoyment” and “chief ambition,” respectively. Another described the Butternut as a “long, lank, lean, ignorant animal . . . little in advance of the savage state [and] content to squat in a log-cabin with a large family of ill-fed and illclothed, idle, ignorant children.” One Illinois newspaper deplored “the intellectual, moral, and political darkness which covers the land” in Appalachian-settled areas.
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Outsiders also remarked on the unsettled nature of the region's people. Indiana—a state dominated by Appalachian people—was reported to be populated by those with a “prevailing thirst for immigration,” a “floating, unsettled class waiting [for] an opportunity to sell out and move further.” A correspondent for the
New England Farmer
worried such individuals would never “settle down into anything like the moral and religious society of New England.” A Massachusetts farmer predicted in 1839 that “a long period” would have to elapse before the region's inhabitants became “assimilated and melted down into one homogenous mass.”
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Yankeedom sent missionaries to Appalachian areas in an effort to encourage assimilation, but religious and cultural differences frustrated their work. College-trained New Englanders soberly read from carefully prepared written sermons to listeners accustomed to the fiery, improvised oratory of itinerant preachers. “They are not generally a reading people, but a thinking and talking people,” one missionary reported from southern Illinois. “They are accustomed to catch the glance of the living eye and to be instructed and animated by the counsels and persuasions of a living voice.” Others complained of the Borderlanders' overly casual manners: men didn't take their hats off when entering church, toddlers were allowed to run about the pews at will, and adults came and went as they pleased. More troubling was the Borderlanders' refusal to provide Yankee ministers with full financial support, as they were accustomed to having preachers with honest day jobs as farmers or craftsmen. Others were distrusted simply because they were from New England, and, as one Borderlander put it, “no good can come from hence.”
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Yankees also had difficulty understanding Appalachian dialects and vocabulary. In Indiana one noted the difference in how the members of the two cultures would describe a runaway team of horses. “It run into the bush and run astride astraddle, and broke the neap, reach, and evener,” a Yankee would say. His Hoosier neighbor would interpret these remarks thus: “The horses got skeert and run astraddle of a sapling and broke the tongue, double-tree, and couplin pole.” Yankees were perplexed when young Borderlanders called their spouses “old woman” or “old man” and amused by their use of “yon” for “that,” “reckon” for “guess,” “heap” for “a lot of” and “powerful” where a New Englander would say “very.”
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There were other differences, as well. Yankee Midwesterners placed their homes on the road, ate potatoes as their starch, planted fruit orchards, built barns and straight board fences, harnessed their horses to carts for a race, negotiated written contracts, and buried their dead in town graveyards. Appalachian Midwesterners built their homes near the center of their plots (for privacy), preferred corn as their starch, spurned orchards, built open sheds if they sheltered their livestock at all, enclosed pastures with split-rail fences, rode their horses when racing, negotiated verbal, honor-bound agreements, and put their relatives to rest in family plots or isolated graves.
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The Borderlanders had resented the arrogance of their Tidewater and Deep Southern overlords, and they resented Yankee condescension, as well. Orlando Ficklin, a Kentucky-born Illinoisan, was thankful “that God made the world before He made the Yankees, for they would have interfered with His business and destroyed the beautiful world in which we live.” Kentuckians reportedly regarded a Yankee “as a sort of Jesuit” because of his religious zeal, while in Illinois the term
yankeed
was synonymous with
cheated
.
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Not surprisingly, Borderlanders also had very different political preferences from those of their Yankee neighbors. They generally championed the “honest farmer and mechanic” in their struggle against educated professionals, the wealthy, aristocratic planters, or lowland slave lords. One Hoosier editorialist urged his countrymen to vote for “men who know what it is to eat their bread in the sweat of the face” because “they will know how to represent your interest.” Otherwise, “the produce of our labor shall be filched from us to support an aristocracy that in the end will overturn our liberties.” Appalachian people everywhere distrusted political parties, seeing them as cartels of powerful interests, and voted for whichever one appeared to advocate for ordinary individuals.
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For Appalachian Midwesterners it was the meddlesome Yankees who represented the greatest threat to their ideas of individual freedom. As a result, Borderlander-dominated regions solidly supported the Deep Southern–led Democratic Party throughout the nineteenth century and right up into the civil rights era. As Kevin Phillips has observed, “Butternut Democrats did not care much about slavery, but they could not stand the Yankees.” Their political representatives railed against Yankee efforts to use the federal government to impose their morals on the other nations. “The Puritan Roundhead of New England and the Cavalier of Virginia—the slavery-hating, though sometimes slave-trading, saint of Boston and the slaveholding sinner of Savannah . . . all joined hands in holy brotherhood to ordain a Constitution which, silent about temperance, forbade religious tests and establishments, and provided for the extradition of fugitive slaves,” Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham noted, before blaming Yankees for endangering the Union by opposing the expansion of slavery. “You are a peculiar people,” he said of New Englanders, “for you have dethroned Jehovah, and set up a new and anti-slavery god of your own.” On a national level the Democrats capitalized on this libertarian zeal by emphasizing the need to protect personal freedom—including the freedom to own slaves—from government interference. Borderlander-settled counties generally supported Jefferson over Adams in 1800, Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams in 1828 and 1832, and Douglas over Lincoln in 1860, while sending Democrats to represent them on Capitol Hill.
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Farther south, migrating Borderlanders contended not with Yankees but with a powerful nation that was in the midst of adopting European ways. In the 1740s the Cherokee Indian nation controlled the core of what we now think of as Appalachia: most of what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, a third of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia, and the westernmost swaths of Virginia and North Carolina. For centuries the Cherokees had defended their farming villages and hunting turf from incursions by Iroquois, Creeks, and Shawnee. When Borderlanders began invading their land in the 1750s, they fought back. During the American Revolution they sided with the British on the accurate assumption that imperial power was the only thing keeping land-hungry backcountry squatters in check. “The great God of Nature has placed us in different situations,” Cherokee elder Corn Tassel told negotiators at a Revolutionary-era peace conference. “It is true he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people.”
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