High Mountains Rising (7 page)

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

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 brought 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