Drake’s melancholy night thoughts and Burn’s strident poetry were far apart in mood, but to one another in similar one important way. Drake was only mildly interested in what lay in store in the next world, but he was obsessed with the question of how death should come to him in this one. This question, for a Puritan or a Quaker, was a mere triviality compared with the great business of salvation. But for Daniel Drake, as for Robert Burns, the secular circumstances of death loomed as large as its sacred nature. Both men were fatalistic about the inevitability of death, but they were deeply affected by its uncertainties.
This is an attitude that commonly exists in the face of endemic violence. In the twentieth century the same paradox of nescient fatalism—that is, of fatalism without foreknowledge—may be observed among men at war. It has also existed in entire cultures where sudden, violent and senseless death was a constant fact of life—as in the British borders and the American backcountry.
A woman of the Bell clan who understood this backcountry culture very well, tried to explain the special quality of its fatalism to outsiders:
The fatalism of this free folk is unlike anything of the Far East; dark and mystical though it be … it is lighted with flashes of the spirit of the Vikings. A man born and bred in a vast wild land nearly always becomes a fatalist. He learns to see nature not as a thing of field and brooks, friendly to man and docile beneath his hand, but as a world of depths and heights and distances illimitable, of which he is a tiny part. He feels himself carried in the sweep of forces too vast for comprehension, forces variously at war, out of which are the issues of life and death. … Inevitably he comes to feel, with a sort of proud humility, that he has no part in the universe save as he allies himself, by prayer and obedience, with the order that rules.8
Here was a fatalism very different from those of Puritan Massachusetts, Quaker Pennsylvania and Anglican Virginia. Many back-settlers were stern Calvinists, and they shared a concern for salvation. But they rarely expressed the same obsessive angst which had appeared among the Puritans, and did not engage in rituals of “daily dying.” Backcountry folk, like their border ancestors, had no need of those spiritual calisthenics. They knew death intimately as the cruel and violent destroyer of life, and they also knew how capricious it could be. The main thing was to cultivate courage in the face of these cosmic uncertainties. One wrote, “Courage seems to me the keynote of our whole system of religious thought.” This was a courage that could triumph not only over danger, violence and evil, but most of all over the uncertainty of the world:
“You can’t foretell nothing in this world certainly,” said a hard-headed man to a valley preacher who was arguing certain prophecies of his own. “Didn’t Christ refuse to give them Pharisees a sign? Didn’t he tell ’em, ‘Ye say when ye see the sky red at morning,’ and so on?—I fergit the words, but he never even told ’em, ‘Ye say’ thus and so. He knowed the weather does just as it pleases!”9
The rituals of dying in the backcountry also differed from those of other English-speaking people, in ways that were connected to these attitudes and to the conditions which produced them. When the last moment came, the dying man or woman was gently lifted from the bed and lowered to the floor, where the spirit was thought to be in touch with the mysterious forces of the earth. Then the corpse was laid upon a board and watched constantly by friends and relations. A platter of salt was mixed with earth and placed on the stomach of the corpse. The salt was a symbol of the spirit; earth represented the flesh.10
Everyone in the neighborhood was expected to pay a visit, friend and foe alike. All were compelled to touch the corpse. This practice derived from an ancient belief that when a murderer laid hands upon the body of his victim, the corpse would begin to bleed again. Every “touching” was closely watched, for on the borders foul play was often suspected.11
The death watch was followed by a wake in which many folk rituals were performed by family, friends and neighbors:
On the death of a person, the nearest neighbors cease working till the corpse is interred. Within the house where the deceased is, the dishes and all other kitchen utensils are removed from the shelves or dressers; looking-glasses are covered or taken down, clocks are stopped, and their dial-plates covered. Except in cases deemed very infectious, the corpse is always kept one night, and sometimes two. This sitting with the corpse is called the Wake, from Like-Wake (Scottish), the meeting of the friends of the deceased before the funeral. Those meetings are generally conducted with great decorum; portions of the Scriptures are read, and frequently a prayer is pronounced, and a psalm given out fitting for the solemn occasion. Pipes and tobacco are always laid out on a table, and spirits or other refreshments are distributed during the night. If a dog or cat passes over the dead body, it is immediately killed, as it is believed that the first person it would pass over afterwards, would take the falling sickness. A plate with salt is frequently set on the breast of the corpse.
These customs were recorded in Carrickfergus, northern Ireland, during the eighteenth century. They continued to be kept in Appalachia for two hundred years.12
In North Britain, the corpse was carried to the burying ground while the church bells were rung in a complex rhythm that announced many things about the deceased. The cadence of the bells told the age, gender, estate and reputation. The funeral itself was a great event; guests were “bidden” to attend in large number. The Cumbrian “statesman” Benjamin Browne invited 271 guests to the funeral of his first wife. His own funeral was attended by 258. The service and burial were followed by an elaborate ritual of dining and drinking. Small cakes called “arval bread” were served to the guests. These were taken home by the mourners, as “a parting gift from the deceased.”13 Most wills in the border country contained a provision for these presents, which often consumed a large portion of a small estate. The will of a Cumberland statesman named John Wilson declared, “I hereby order that all persons that shall attend my funeral shall be treated with ale and bread according to the custom.”14
People of wealth distributed presents to the entire community on a lavish scale. An example was the funeral which a rich Cumbrian gentleman named Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall arranged for his wife, who died 13 April 1675, two days after having given birth to her fourteenth child. Her grieving husband ordered six quires of paper (150 large sheets) for folding “sweetmeats.” He also ordered that the poor of Cumberland should receive four pennies apiece, and for that purpose he set aside the sum of 30 pounds, ten shillings, and four pence—enough for 1,831 poor people.15
Daniel Fleming also spent another large sum on ringing, singing, sermons, gravemaking, and a “coffin and clasp.” But this was an exceptional event. Coffins were not generally used in this impoverished region. Borderers were buried in cloth sacks. A statue of 1678 required that south of the Scottish border, only English wool could be used. The Scots and Irish preferred linen, but in most respects the customs were much the same.16
These border customs were carried to the American backcountry in the eighteenth century. The same process of death-watching and laying-out was followed. Even the smallest details were observed in the New World. The corpse was laid out on an open board, and touched by the mourners, just as on the border.17 A plate of salt and earth was placed on the body in the back settlements, as it had been in North Britain. One North Carolinian told a folk-lore collector in the twentieth century: “The corpse is stretched on a board. On it is placed a platter of salt and earth, unmixed. The salt is an emblem of the immortal spirit, the earth of the flesh.”18
A backcountry funeral was a great event which brought large crowds together. When a North British immigrant named Robert Stuart and his three sons were killed by sulphur vapors in a well that they were digging, their burial attracted a great throng. “They were buried in one ground, where was judged to be a thousand people,” one neighbor noted in 1767. This was not an unusual attendance. In the same neighborhood, two years later, an ordinary funeral of a borderer named John Scarborough drew “above a thousand people.”19
Death rituals which had long existed in the borderlands of North Britain were preserved in the southern highlands for two hundred years. Even in the twentieth century, folklore collectors were astonished by the continuities which they observed in the death ways of this American region.20
Backcountry Religious Ways:
The North British Field-Meeting Style
Strong continuities also existed in the religious customs of this culture. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason learned about their power the hard way. In 1766, he packed his saddlebags with prayerbooks and a pint of rum, and “heavy loaded like a trooper,” rode bravely into the Carolina backcountry to convert the heathen. His self-appointed task was a heavy one, for Wood-mason’s idea of the heathen was as spacious as the land itself, embracing Indians, Africans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, Irish of any denomination, and even Anglicans of “low church” opinions.
Traveling into the interior of Carolina, Woodmason met a reception which was very mixed, to say the least. Some settlers welcomed him to their cabins. Others drove him away by force. One family of Scottish Presbyterians told him plainly that “they wanted no damned black gown sons of bitches among them,” and threatened to use him as a backlog in their fireplace. Others stole his horse, rifled his clothing, drank his rum and even purloined his prayer books.
After many adventures which might have flowed from the pen of Swift or Fielding, the grand climax came when this missionary fell into an “ambuscade,” and was captured by a gang of old-fashioned border reivers. They carried him captive to a secret settlement where they lived with their women and children. The clergyman prepared himself for Christian martyrdom, but when he arrived at their cabins his treatment suddenly changed. To his astonishment, the reivers began to treat him with “great civility,” returned his property and promised to restore his freedom on one condition: that he preach a hellfire-and-damnation sermon, which he heartily agreed to do.1
That curious experience expressed a central paradox in back-country Christianity—its intense hostility to organized churches and established clergy on the one hand, and its abiding interest in religion on the other. This version of militant Christianity did not fit well with the plans of Britain’s imperial authorities, who intended that the backcountry should become an Anglican garden. Governor William Bull of South Carolina observed in a genteel manner that “tho I charitably hope every sect of Christians will find their way to the kingdom of heaven, yet I think the Church of England best adapted to the kingdom of England”—in which he included the provinces of British North America.
Governor Bull’s desire was doomed to frustration, even within his own English colony. By 1770, he was complaining that the Anglicans had already lost the backcountry to what he called “illiterate enthusiasm.” He wrote:
Our toleration comprehends every denomination of Christians but the Roman Catholic, and these are subdivided ad infinitum in the back parts, as illiterate enthusiasm or wild imagination can misinterpret the Scripture. … I am informed that between the Congarees, the Indian boundary and the Saludy River, where there are fourteen hundred fencible men, there are not less than six meeting houses built and ministers maintained by the poor inhabitants, besides the French Protestants at Hillsborough and German Lutherans at Londonburgh, and not one Church of England congregation.2
The backcountry was indeed very mixed in its religious denominations—much as the borders of North Britain had been. But most visitors observed that Presbyterians generally predominated by the middle decades of the eighteenth century.3 The English also tended to include growing numbers of dissenters of many different sects. Even members of the Church of England behaved like dissenters in the backcountry, as they had often done in the north of England. On both sides of the British border there had been a strong antipathy to state churches, religious taxes and established clergy.4
Throughout the backcountry and borderlands, Anglican priests were held in special contempt for their lack of personal piety, and for their habit of subservience to landed elites. Clerical diaries from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century suggest that there was truth in these complaints. The diary of an Anglican clergyman named George Williamson in the English county of Cumberland was an extraordinarily secular document, full of detail about his hunting, fishing, coursing, drinking and gambling but with little mention of spiritual questions. One of the few references to church affairs was the record of a bet on whether a colleague would continue as rector of a parish. Established clergymen such as Williamson were regarded as corrupt and alien presences on the borders. That prejudice was carried to the backcountry where Anglican missionaries met with much hostility, not only from Scots and Scots-Irish, but from English settlers as well.5
There was, however, no hostility to learned and pious ministers of acceptable opinions. Presbyterian settlers sent home to Scotland and Northern Ireland for their own college-trained clergy who came out to serve them. As early as 1736, it was written that “about this time, the people began to form into societies and sent back to Ireland for a minister.”6 These Presbyterian ministers were proud of their learning. One of them infuriated a Quaker by allegedly arguing that “the most ignorant College learnt man could open the true meaning of the Scriptures better then the best and wisest of God’s children that had not College learning.”7
These ministers were valued for their skill at preaching, which combined appeals to reason with strong emotions. In the back-country, before the end of the eighteenth century, a familiar form of evangelical religion was the camp meeting. This was an outdoor gathering, commonly convened in some sylvan setting, where a large number of people worshiped together for several days. Many historians have mistakenly believed that the camp meeting was invented on the American frontier. In fact it was transplanted to America from the border counties of Britain, where it was well established by the eighteenth century. Even the Anglican population of that region often met in outdoor “field meetings” during the eighteenth century. So also did Scottish Presbyterians who held frequent “Holy Fairs,” which were camp meetings by another name.
The following hostile description of a Scottish Holy Fair dates from the year 1759:
At the time of the administration of the Lord’s supper, upon the Thursday, Saturday and Monday, we have preaching in the fields near the church. Allow me then, to describe it as it really is: at first you find a great number of men and women lying upon the grass; here they are sleeping and snoring, some with their faces toward heaven, others with their faces turned downwards, or covered with their bonnets; there you find a knot of young fellows and girls making assignations to go home together in the evening, or to meet in some ale-house; in another place you see a pious circle sitting around some ale-barrel, many of which stand ready upon carts for the refreshment of the saints. … In this sacred assembly there is an odd mixture of religion, sleep, drinking, courtship, and a confusion of sexes, ages and characters. When you get a little nearer the speaker, so as to be within reach of the sound, tho’ not of the sense of his words, for that can reach only a small circle … you will find some weeping and others laughing, some pressing to get nearer the tent or tub in which the parson is sweating, bawling, jumping and beating the desk; others fainting in the stifling heat, or wrestling to extricate themselves from the crowd; one seems very devout and serious, and the next moment is scolding or cursing his neighbours for squeezing or treading on him; in an instant after, his countenance is composed to the religious gloom, and he is groaning, sighing and weeping for his sins: in a word, there is such an absurd mixture of the serious and comick, that were we convened for any purpose than that of worshipping the God and Governour of Nature, the scene would exceed all power of farce.8
Many borderers deeply believed in this form of worship and had been persecuted for it in Great Britain and Ireland. Robert Witherspoon remembered that his father had been “one of the sect that followed field meetings, some of his kindred and himself were much harassed.”9
Presbyterian emigrants such as the Witherspoons introduced field meetings to the American backcountry as early as 1734, probably earlier. Outdoor assemblies of the same sort were held by Presbyterians and Baptists before the Revolution. Woodmason recorded many instances of “big meetings,” as they were called, as early as 1768.10 After the Revolution, Presbyterians and Methodists began to sponsor large “field meetings” on a regular basis.
At Mabry’s Chapel, Brunswick circuit, Virginia, a quarterly meeting was thought to have drawn 4,000 souls, black and white together, on 25 and 26 July 1785. An even larger one was held at Jones Chapel, 17-28 July 1785. On the first day, 5,000 people attended; on the second day, the meeting was so large that nobody could count it. More startling than the size of the crowd was the intensity of its behavior. The shouting was heard half a mile away, and on the ground there were wild displays of emotion. “Such a sight,” wrote one observer, “I never had before. Numbers were saints in their ecstasies, others crying for mercy, scores lying with their eyes set in their heads, the use of their powers suspended, and the whole congregation in animation.”11
The Methodist itinerant Francis Asbury preached at many such meetings in the 1780s—500 people at Bayside Chapel, on Maryland’s eastern shore (1783); 400 gathered round a great sycamore in western Virginia (1784); 1,000 in an urban meeting at Baltimore (1785).12 Most were held for two days. These assemblies began with prayer and preaching, reached their climax in what was called a “great shout,” and ended in a Christian “love feast.”
Other camp meetings followed in a series of waves, spreading south into the Carolinas and west to the far frontier. There they developed into something called the “Kentucky style” which was marked by close cooperation among denominations, careful preparation and much advance work, a battery of skillful preachers, the use of anxious seats, and fellowship meetings.13
The borderers also introduced another form of worship which had spread widely among reformed Christians throughout Europe. This was a ceremony of fellowship which in North Britain was called the “Feast of Fat Things” or the “Love Feast.” A backsettler named Benjamin Ferris wrote, in the year 1726,
I came into communion with the Presbyterian Church and ate bread and drank wine with them at that feast of fat things as they often called it and many times they used to call it a love feast. But I could not see it to be so; for many of the members was often in contention and quarreling, back-biting and slandering.14
Ferris later became a Quaker and rejected this form of worship. But for many it was a profoundly moving experience, and also came to be practiced by Methodists and Baptists and many small sects. It has remained part of the religious folkways of the southern highlands for two centuries. Here were the major ingredients of backcountry religion: the camp meeting, the Christian fellowship, the love feast, the evangelical preacher, the theology of Protestant fundamentalism and born-again revivalism. All of them had appeared in that region by the mid-eighteenth century.
Altogether, this form of reformed religion—intensely emotional, evangelical and personal—was a central part of backcountry culture. Robert Witherspoon wrote of his family:
As I have had an opportunity of having personal knowledge of their lives and deaths, I bear them this testimony, that they were servers of God, that they were well acquainted with the Scriptures, they were much in prayer, they were strict observers of the Sabbath, in a word, they were a stock that studied outward piety and inward purity.15
This form of Christianity was not invented on the frontier. It was an adaptation of religious customs which had long existed on the borderlands of North Britain.
Backcountry Magic Ways:
The Border Obsession with Sorcery
As recently as 1920 a traveler in the Ozark mountains observed a startling sight. Early on a spring morning as the birds began to sing, he watched in astonishment as a farmer and his wife hurried from their cabin to a new-ploughed field, stripped off their clothing, began “chasing each other up and down like rabbits,” and then copulated on the ground. The couple were known as “quiet, hardworking folk,” who came of good family and went to the local church.
In southwestern Missouri, Ozark ethnographer Vance Randolph collected many similar reports:
A very old woman said that before sunrise on July 25, four grown girls and one boy did the planting. “They all stripped off naked,” she told me, “The boy started in the middle of the field patch with them four big gals a-prancin ‘round him. It seems like the boy throwed all the seed, and the girl kept a-hollering ‘Pecker deep! Pecker deep.’ And when they got done, the whole bunch would roll in the dust like some kind of wild animals. There ain’t no sense to it,” the old woman added, “but them folks always raised the best turnips on the creek.”1
This type of magic has persisted in the backcountry even to our own time. It may serve to remind us of an important theme in this history. Each Anglo-American folk culture was the product not merely of a place but of a period. The people of the back-country brought with them the magic that existed on the borders of North Britain in the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. These beliefs included an interest in witchcraft, wizardry and other forms of diabolical magic—but not the same sort of witchcraft obsession that had flourished among the Puritans a century earlier.
Witchcraft still survived in this culture. Daniel Drake remembered meeting a borderer in the American backcountry named Old Billy Johnson who was “an implicit believer in witchcraft, and ‘raising’ and ‘laying’ the Devil.”2 The folklore of the southern mountains was full of witches and goblins for many generations. As late as the 1930s, collectors of folk beliefs in the southern mountains were told of many witch-beliefs:
If an old woman has only one tooth, she is a witch.
If a warm current of air is felt, witches are passing.
If you are awake at eleven, you will see witches.
The twitching of an eye is a sign that one is bewitched.
If there are tangles in your hair early in the morning, the witches have been riding you.
The howling of dogs shows the presence of witches.
If your shoestring comes untied, the witches are after you.
If you see a cross-eyed person you must cross your fingers to ward off the evil eye.3
Many backcountry folk dabbled in witchcraft themselves.
Wet a rag in your enemy’s blood. Put it behind a rock in the chimney. When it rots your enemy will die.
To work evil upon one, get the person’s picture.
Take seven hairs from a blood snake, seven scales from a rattlesnake, seven bits of feathers from an owl, add a hair from the person you desire, a bit of nail paring, and cook these for seven minutes over a hot fire in the first rainwater caught in April. Sprinkle the concoction on the clothes of the person to be charmed. It cannot fail.
To point an index or dog finger of the right hand at a person will give that person bad luck.
In early settlements, there was apt to be a specialist in superstition called the witchmaster whose services were much in demand. Samuel Kercheval recalled: “I have known several of these witch-masters, as they were called, who made a public profession of curing these diseases, inflicted by the influence of witches.” The practice of witchmasters was often as fixed and regular as those of physicians in the twentieth century. Witchmasters were expected to make house calls. When their services were not available, the backsettlers were trained to administer a sort of magical first-aid.
If you want to keep witches away, lay a straw broom in the doorway.
To kill a witch, draw a heart on a holly tree, and drive a spike into her heart for nine mornings.
But these practices had nothing like the urgency that had existed in seventeenth-century New England. No person is known to have been executed for witchcraft anywhere in the southern highlands, though a goodly number were hanged for other crimes. Here was an important difference from the culture of an earlier period.
Backcountry folk also showed an intense interest in astrology and divination. It was widely believed that the stars and planets had a power over earthly events:
Plant flowers in the blooming days [under the sign of Virgo].
Never castrate stock when the sign of the zodiac point to the loins. Bleeding will be profuse. … Altering hogs is best when the zodiac sign is in the head [Pisces].
Zinnias should be planted when the sign is in the scales [Libra].
Never gather fruit in the watery signs, or in the new moon, because the fruit will spoil.
These beliefs were never cultivated with the same degree of refinement that had existed among Virginia planters or Renaissance gentlemen throughout western Europe. In its highest pitch of development, this also had been the obsession of an era which was passing when the back settlements were born. But it persisted in more popular forms.
The folk culture of the backcountry ran strongly to another category of magic, which might be called experimental sorcery or secular superstition. It consisted mainly in the pragmatic use of conjuring, sorcery, charms, omens, spells, potions, incantations and popular astrology to change the course of events, or to predict them.4
This magic contained a vast repertory of practices for any imaginable occasion—for troubles with animals, crops, neighbors, children, weather, illness. It recommended actions for the control of any possible emotion, and for the execution of any imaginable purpose in the world. In the early twentieth century, one group of folklorists collected nearly 10,000 of these prescriptions in North Carolina, from which a few examples might be selected. A few of these prescriptions have been confirmed by science:
Eating cornbread causes pellagra.
For scurvy, apply uncooked potatos sliced and soaked in vinegar.
To cure snake bite, if no wound is in the mouth, suck out the poison and spit it out; cauterize, cut so as to make the place bleed freely.
Others were positively lethal:
A cure for homesickness is to sew a good charge of gunpowder on the inside of the shirt near the neck.
To cure a fever, climb a tall tree with your hands (do not use feet), and jump off.
It is lucky for a bird to come into the house.
If a bird flies into the house there will be bad luck.
It is bad luck to kill a cat.
For good luck, boil a black cat alive.
Many charms and potions showed a spirit of extreme brutality:
Against epilepsy wear a bit of human cranium.
A piece of rope by which a person has been hanged will cure epilepsy by its touch.
For fever, cut a black chicken open while alive, and bind to the bottom of a foot. This will draw the fever.
The blood of a bat will cure baldness.
Eating the brain of a screech owl is the only dependable remedy for headache.
For rheumatism, apply split frogs to the feet.
To reduce a swollen leg, split a live cat and apply while still warm.
Bite the head off the first butterfly you see, and you will get a new dress.
Open the cow’s mouth and throw a live toad-frog down her throat. This will cure her of hollow horn.
These good-luck charms, whatever they may have done for their human users, brought very bad luck to large numbers of back-country cats, bats, frogs, owls, snakes, chicks and puppy dogs. Samuel Kercheval remembered that the first glassblowers in the backcountry “drove the witches out of their furnaces by throwing live puppies into them.” He also recalled that “there was scarcely a black cat to be seen, whose ears and tail had not been frequently cropped off for a contribution of blood.”5
Other magical folk-beliefs shaped the manners, dress, diet and appearance of backcountry folks in ways that startled visitors from other cultures:
Some old people let the nails of their little fingers grow very long, and they called it “a luck nail.”
It is good luck to put a garment on wrong side out and leave it that way all day.
It is bad luck to say thank you.
It is bad luck to bathe on your wedding day.
A small piece of shit worn in a bag round the neck will keep off disease.
Water is poisonous during dog days.
Some of these customs tell us about conditions of life in crowded backcountry cabins.
When three people wake up abed together, the oldest will die first.
If two people wash their hands in the same water, they will be friends forever.
Others were often desperate attempts to control one’s destiny.
If a woman is pregnant, and drinks some of her own urine, she will miscarry.
To sit over a pot of stewed onions will cause a miscarriage.
But most were innocent omens and harmless charms.
To cure sore eyes, kiss a red-head.
To take away freckles, wash your face in cobweb dew.
If a butterfly comes into the house, it means a stranger is coming to visit.
Three drops of your own blood, fed to another, is an effective love charm.
If you carry a lock of hair of a person, you will have power over that person.
Get the ugliest person you know to look in the cream jar so you can churn it.
Potatoes should be planted on St. Patrick’s Day.
Much of this folklore was brought from Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. But backcountry magic was an eclectic body of beliefs, constantly growing by borrowings from Indians, Africans, Germans, and other cultures. Novel folk practices were continuously invented within this culture. It is important to note that when these “traditional” backcountry prescriptions were recorded in the twentieth century, some were not very old. The people of Appalachia endowed many modern industrial products with magical properties. A particular favorite was kerosene:
Take kerosene for asthma.
To stop a wound from bleeding, pour kerosene on it.
To cure a burn use kerosene oil.
Rub your feet with kerosene and salt for chilblain.
Take a teaspoonful of sugar wet with kerosene, and it will cure a bad cold.
Take kerosene as a cure for the colic.
Kerosene will prevent swelling in a snake bite.
It is bad luck to leave a kerosene lamp burning until all the oil is burned out.
Hang up a bottle of kerosene in a tree to prevent blight.
Umbrellas were also endowed with special powers:
If you open an umbrella in the house, you will not get married that year.
If you drop an umbrella, let someone else pick it up, or disappointment will come to you.
Raising an umbrella in the house is bad luck.
To put an umbrella on a bed causes disputes.
The railroad and the motor car acquired a magic of their own:
If one walks sixteen railroad ties without falling off, any wish made will come true.
[If] a cat cross [es] the road in front of your automobile, make a crossmark on the windshield.
This self-renewing backcountry magic needed none of the institutional apparatus which the Puritans of New England brought to bear upon witchcraft. It did not require any of the intellectual refinement which country gentlemen in Virginia devoted to the study of fortune. The magic of the backcountry was a simple set of homespun superstitions, designed for use by small groups of unlettered people.
The magic of the backcountry was remarkably secular in its nature and purposes. It retained vestigial beliefs in the Devil, witches, stars and planets. But mainly it sought to control worldly events by the manipulation of worldly things.
Backcountry magic was highly materialist, experimental and empirical in its nature. Its ancient rituals and homespun remedies were mainly a device by which these people struggled to understand and control their lives in the midst of many uncertainties of their world.
Any modern social scientist might be able to “explain” the persistence of backcountry magic in half a dozen ways—Marxian, Freudian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, structuralist, empiricist. But mainly this folk magic flourished because none of those other “explanations” was intellectually available or acceptable within this culture. Active and highly intelligent backcountry minds had no better system of accounting for the secular uncertainties that surrounded them. A mountain woman has written:
Speaking for my own people, I am sure that almost every one has had some experience he can not explain away. Perhaps he has heard a warning of some one’s death, a strange noise, a shriek on the roof. Perhaps a man has passed him in the open road and disappeared suddenly, leaving no tracks. … My people, like the Hindoos and the Scotch Highlanders, have the faculty of dealing with the occult, of seeing and hearing that which is withheld from more highly educated minds. Always there is some souvenir of the spirit-world in a nook of the mountainer’s brain. He is unwilling to accept it, never believes quite all that it seems to imply. Still, there it is.6
Backcountry Literacy
On the subject of literacy, backcountry folk liked to tell a tall tale about themselves. They bragged that one interior county of North Carolina had so little “larnin” that the only literate inhabitant was elected “county reader.” That story is apocryphal, but in Moore County, North Carolina, a battered book has survived with an inscription on its flyleaf: “David Kennedy his Book he may read good but God knows when.”1
These colorful examples have misled unwary historians into thinking that levels of literacy were uniformly low in the back-country. This was not the case. Throughout the southern highlands as a whole, the pattern was very mixed. Charles Woodmason in 1767 observed of one settlement that “few can read—fewer can write. … these people despise knowledge.” Similar impressions were recorded by many travelers.2 But in other communities a different pattern appeared. In the backcountry settlement of Williamsburg, South Carolina, which was planted by Scots-Irish Presbyterians, historian William Boddie finds that “not more than one man out of the first hundred [signers of] wills and transfers or property had to make his mark.” Further, Boddie discovered that 98 percent of Revolutionary soldiers from Williamsburg were able to write their own names: a remarkably large proportion.3
Rates of literacy varied broadly throughout the backcountry, not only by place, but also by wealth and rank. Many men without property were unable to write; but most large wealthowners could sign their names to wills and deeds. Differences of this sort appeared in many parts of British America, but were exceptionally great in the backcountry. Large variations in literacy also existed from one ethnic group to the next. Several studies have found that German Protestant and French Huguenot settlers were the most literate: more than 90 percent could write their names. Scottish highlanders were the least so among the free population; of highland Scots who made their wills in Cumberland County, North Carolina during the late eighteenth century, 50 percent signed by mark. Between these broad extremes were immigrants from the north of England, the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland, of whom approximately 20 to 30 percent signed by mark in the mid-eighteenth century—a level which was very near the average for the region as a whole.4
This pattern of backcountry literacy was similar to that in the borderlands of North Britain in both its central tendency and its variations. Recent revisionist historical research has found that rates of literacy were much the same in the lowlands of Scotland and the northern counties of England.5 On both sides of the border, the proportion of male tenants and craftsmen who signed by mark was in the range of 20 to 30 percent—almost exactly the same as in the backcountry. This was the lower-middling class that produced the majority of emigrants to America.6
Variations by social rank were very great in the borderlands, as they would be in the backcountry. Nearly all the gentry were literate as early as the seventeenth century. But less than 15 percent of laborers could write their names in the lowlands of Scotland and in the north of England as late as 1770. These differences also were carried to America.7
The British borderlands and the American backcountry were also similar in the distribution of books and libraries. A few exceptional individuals and families owned remarkably large libraries. An outstanding example in the county of Westmorland was the Brownes of Troutbeck, a highly literate “statesman” family who owned 2,000 volumes in 1700.8 A few major collections were also to be found in the American backcountry. But in North Carolina before 1783, forty to fifty volumes were thought to be a large library.9 Most estates in probate included at least a few books—primers, prayer books, and practical handbooks on farming and medicine. But by comparison with New England, Pennsylvania and even Virginia, private libraries in North Carolina were remarkably secular. Before 1753, only about one in five titles was religious. In the late eighteenth century, that ratio fell to one in nine—an exceptionally small proportion.10 These back-country libraries tended to be entirely vernacular collections. One survey of more than 500 North Carolina inventories from 1733 to 1783 found not a single work in Latin or Greek. Typical of the backcountry elite was Andrew Jackson, who was said to have read only two books in his lifetime, the Bible and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield.11
These patterns must be seen in perspective. By comparison with other parts of the world, the backcountry was not illiterate. At a time when 20 to 30 percent of males in the southern highlands were unable to read and write, the proportion of illiteracy in Italy and Spain was 70 to 80 percent.
Even so, the backcountry was an oral culture in which writing was less imporant than the spoken word. The backsettlers maintained an attitude of cultivated contempt for orthography. The future President Andrew Jackson once declared that he could never respect a man who knew only one way to spell a word. He was not entirely joking. This attitude was widely shared in the backcountry, as it had been in the British borderlands, where it was observed that “the spelling even of well-educated people was highly variable,” for a much longer period than in other regions.12
This culture was impoverished in its written literature, but it was rich in ballads and folktales which were carefully handed down from one generation to the next. Samuel Kercheval remembered that a favorite entertainment of the backsettlers during the eighteenth century was the singing of old folksongs. “The tunes were rude enough to be sure,” he wrote. “Robin Hood furnished a number of our songs; the balance were mostly tragical, and were denominated ‘love songs about murder.’” Another popular pastime was what he called “dramatic narration”:
Many of those tales were lengthy, and embraced a considerable range of incident … and were so arranged as to the different incidents of narration, that they were easily committed to memory. They certainly have been handed down from generation to generation from time immemorial.13
One of the earliest recorded folktales was a memoir published in 1859 by H. E. Taliaferro, a native of Surry County in western North Carolina.14 One of these tales told of a backcountryman named Walker who felt the call to preach, and asked his pastor for a license. The following exchange took place:
PASTOR: |
Do you believe, brother Walker, that you are called of God to preach, “as was Aaron?” |
WALKER: |
Most sartinly I does. |
PASTOR: |
Give the Church, that is, the bruthering, the proof. |
WALKER: |
I was mightily diffikilted and troubled on the subjeck, and I was detarmined to go inter the woods and wrastle it out. |
PASTOR: |
That’s it, Brother Walker. |
WALKER: |
And while there wrastlin, Jacob-like, I hearn one ov the curiousest voices I uver hearn in all my borned days. |
PASTOR: |
You are on the right track, Brother Walker. Go on with your noration. |
WALKER: |
I couldn’t tell for the life ov me whether the voice was up in the air ur down in the sky, it sounded so curious. |
PASTOR: |
Poor creetur! how he was diffikilted. Go on to norate, Brother Walker. How did it appear to sound unto you? |
WALKER: |
Why, this a-way: “Waw-waw-ker—Waw-waw-ker! Go preach, go preach, go preach, go preachee, go preach-ah, go preach-uh, go preach-ah-ee-uh-ah-ee.” |
PASTOR: |
Bruthering and sisters, that’s the right sort of a call. Enough said, brother Walker. That’s none ov yer college calls, nor money calls. No doctor ov divinity uver got sich a call as that. Brother Walker must have license, fur sartin.15 |
This tale was recorded in the Appalachian highlands before 1830, and published in 1859. The man who told it had been born in the eighteenth century, perhaps in the English border country. He spoke a dialect that is still heard among older people in Appalachia. And his contempt for “college-calls,” doctors of divinity, learned professions, and book learning of every kind became an important part of backcountry culture.16
The importance of oral communication in the backcountry created a special form of knowing, in which testimony had a peculiar importance. The power of testimony, in turn, gave a special importance to truth-telling, which was defined in the biblical sense as not bearing false witness—an idea different from other cultures. The memoirs that come to us from this culture spoke often of the problem of truth. Thomas Meriwether in Georgia was remembered as “a man who never prevaricated … he had the greatest reverence for truth, and never violated its spirit, knowingly at least.”17 A lawyer named Thomas Gilmer was described as “a man of good sense, aided but little by reading … he was truthful and upright.”18
This obsession with truth created a curious custom in the back-country—the “lye bill,” as it was called. “If you speak of a libel in a crowd of old Georgia people,” Gilmer wrote, “they suppose that you are using a dandy phrase for lye bill … in old times a writing acknowledging that the writer had told a lie.” These curious documents were entered into the court records of the backcountry.19
An oral culture placed an exceptionally high value on speaking the truth. The penalty for lying or breaking one’s “word of honor” was ostracism from the society, and even from one’s kin. One twentieth-century lawman in the southern highlands reported from long experience that “no matter how hardened a criminal a hillman may be, those who know him insist that his word of honor would never be broken.”
This oral culture also put a high value on memory, which was often strong in proportion to the weakness of the written word. A case in point was George Mathews, a backcountry governor of
Georgia, who was barely able to read and write. “He was unlearned,” an acquaintance recalled:
when he read it was always aloud, and with the confidence which accompanies the consciousness of doing a thing well. He pronounced full the l in “would,” “should,” &c, &c, and ed at the termination of compound words with a long drawling accent. He spelt “coffee,” Kaughphy. He wrote “congress” with a k. When Governor, he dictated messages to his secretary, and then sent them to James Mason Simmons, the Irish schoolmaster, to put them into grammar.
At the same time, Governor Mathews was a highly intelligent man, capable of heroic feats of memory:
His memory was unequalled. Whilst he was a member of Congress, an important document which had been read during the session, was lost. He was able to repeat its contents verbatim.
As sheriff of Augusta County before the revolution, Mathews kept the county tax lists in his head, and “recollected for a long time the name of every taxpayer.”20
The oral culture of the backcountry had an epistemic structure that set it apart from other Anglo-American folkways. It gave great importance to experience, memory, testimony and truth-telling. It also showed an actual antipathy to fixed schemes of grammar, orthography and punctuation. Here again the four folkways of early America did not merely know different things. They also knew them differently.
Backcountry Learning Ways:
North British Rituals of Schooling
Throughout the southern highlands, average levels of formal schooling were very low—in fact, the lowest in British America. When enrollment data first became available in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the proportion of white children enrolled at school in one county of North Carolina amounted to less than 10 percent of the school-age-population. This dismal statistic meant that children in this culture went to school only about 1.5 years on the average. Given the annual length of school sessions in the backcountry, they received only a few weeks of formal education during their entire lives. Other evidence suggests that the pattern in North Carolina was not very different from upcountry South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia.1
Education increased with length of settlement, but low rates of school enrollment remained a regional tradition throughout the southern highlands for many generations. Levels of schooling were lower here than in any other part of the United States from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth.2
This pattern cannot be explained merely as the reflex of poverty alone, for poor communities in other regions gave strong support to schools. It was not primarily the product of frontier conditions, for other frontiers behaved very differently. It was not caused by that diabolus ex machina of southern historiography—the ethos of race slavery—for rates of school enrollment were lowest in those parts of the southern highlands where slavery did not exist. A more satisfactory explanation might combine these three factors with a fourth: the weight of cultural tradition that was carried from the borders of North Britain.
In northern Ireland, the north of England, and parts of rural Scotland which were largely untouched by the educational reforms of the Scottish Reformation and the Edinburgh Enlightenment, formal education was very limited. There were many some exceptions in Scotland, which had founded a system of parish schools supported by taxes on landowners and centrally controlled by the Presbyterian church. These Scottish schools have been much celebrated—by Scottish scholars. But they were not strong in areas of the southwest which contributed much to the American migration. In Ayrshire, whence many backsettlers came, half the parishes had no schools at all at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Further, where parish schools existed, their primary purpose was to seek out exceptionally gifted boys and send them on to higher places, rather than to provide mass education. For children of modest means, levels of schooling were very low on both side of the border. This was especially the case for females.3
These border patterns were transplanted to the American backcountry, where there were no institutions comparable to New England’s town schools, or even to Virginia’s system of parish education. Charles Woodmason wrote, “ … through the non-establishment of public schools, a great multitude of children are now grown up, in the greatest ignorance of ev’ry thing save vice—in which they are adepts.”4 This judgment was repeated in less pejorative terms by others who lived in the colonies. Governor Bull of South Carolina wrote in 1770, “Literature is but in its infancy here. We have not one good grammar school, tho’ foundations for several [exist] in our neighbouring parishes. All our gentlemen, who have anything of a learned education, have acquired it in England.”5
Backcountry education occurred mostly in small “neighborhood schools” maintained by private subscription and taught by itinerant masters for a few weeks each year. These humble institutions were similar to schools in the British borderlands where masters were hired ad hoc by local gentry.6 Individual parents in the backcountry and the borderlands sometimes made heroic efforts to obtain a little schooling for their children. Wills often expressed deep concern about the education of the young, and set aside large sums for that purpose. But the cultural circumstances which created thse anxieties also conspired to defeat them.7
To this general rule of educational poverty in the back settlements, there was an important exception in the growth of Presbyterian academies. These institutions were modeled on dissenting academies in Ireland and North Britain during the seventeenth century. Their primary purpose was to prepare candidates for the ministry. The American prototype of these academies was founded in 1727/28 by Presbyterian minister William Tennent at Little Neshaminy Creek, in Pennsylvania. Tennent was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. His object was to create what he called a “converted ministry” in America. George Whitefield visited Tennent’s school in 1739 and wrote, “The place wherein the young men study now is in contempt called the College. It is a log-house, about twenty feet long and near as many broad, and to me it seemed to resemble the schools of the old Prophets.”8
At least twelve of these Presbyterian academies were founded in the backcountry by the year 1750. More than thirty-three had opened their doors by 1770. Some were flourishing institutions. David Caldwell’s academy in Guilford County, North Carolina, survived from 1767 to 1820, and was faithfully attended by fifty or sixty students a year. But most were small and struggling institutions which collapsed after few years. Still, they helped to supply the need of the back settlements for an educated ministry and a literate elite.9
We tend to think of formal education as the enemy of folkways. But most societies have a folklore of learning which might be called their school ways. The backcountry was a case in point. It adopted educational folk customs which had long existed in North Britain. One example was the curious custom called “barring out.” This was a ritual of rebellion which occurred regularly before Christmas and sometimes at other seasons of the year. The larger students would forcibly bar the master from the schoolroom, until he granted them a long vacation. When he did so, the master commonly received small presents in return.10
In England this custom had many names—barring out, shutting out, penning out, or merely “the exclusion.” Its origins were described as “ancient” as early as the year 1558. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, barring out was a regional custom in the northernmost counties of England, and in the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland. It was most common in the English border counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Northumberland and Yorkshire.11
This curious custom was transplanted to America, where it also became a backcountry folkway. Barring out was not unknown in other colonies, but it happened very rarely in New England, and was uncommon in the coastal south.12 Mainly it occurred in the backcountry, where it spread from Pennsylvania into the southern highlands, and west to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It was specially common among American descendants of the British borderers in the back settlements.13
Sometimes barring out ceased to be merely a ritual, and developed into a pitched battle between older scholars and the teacher’s friends:
At our first common school we had a contest, which I mention here, because it shows the habits of the times. The schoolboys determined to turn out William P. Culbertson, the schoolmaster, for a day’s holiday. They assembled early in the morning, and barred the entry into the school-house by filling the door with benches and other heavy things. The school-master was then boarding with Abram’s father. He and all his brothers took part with him against the boys. They got to the school-house before Culbertson, and commenced threatening the boys inside with the master’s hickory. They dared any boy inside to come out. Those inside shoved me through the opening cut in a log for lighting the writing bench, to accept Abram’s banter. At it we went. I made a missing blow, slipped, or somehow else got down on the ground, and Abram on me. His brothers surrounded us, urging Abram to give it to me well. This was too much for the boys inside to bear. They tore away the fastenings from the door, and rescued me from my perilous position, put me upon my feet, and secured a fair fight.14
The custom of barring out was consistent with many aspects of border and backcountry culture. In this warrior society, even the most able scholar was literally compelled to fight for the esteem of the community. Even where barring out became merely a ritual, it preserved the old spirit of violence in a vestigial form.
The ritual of barring out was also an expression of restlessness under institutional restraint—an act which was sometimes violent in its form and always libertarian in its spirit. In one early instance of barring out (1587), Scottish schoolboys taunted their teacher:
Liberty, liberty under a pin
Six weeks holiday or never come in!15
This was, as we shall see, a very special conception of liberty, far removed from the ordered liberty of the Puritans, the reciprocal liberty of the Quakers and the hierarchical liberty of the cavaliers. It was an act deeply rooted in backcountry culture.
Barring out was merely one of many educational folkways in the backcountry. Another was what might be called educational magic. When Appalachian children went to school they adopted
(and continuously reinvented) a system of scholastic superstition which developed from the culture of their ancestors. Folklorists recorded many of these beliefs in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas:
If you sleep with your books under your pillow, you will know your lesson the next day.
If you sleep with your book under your head the night before an examination, you will pass successfully.
Put a willow leaf in the book that you are to pass an examination on, and you will pass successfully.
If you drop a book, you will miss that lesson unless you kiss the pages at which it opened.
Never write on the first sheet of a pack of paper. If you do your work will be poor.
The first lizard that you see running in the spring is a sign that you’ll be smart.
Put a stick in your book and you can walk a footlog without becoming dizzy.16
Educational magic flourished in the backcountry, as part of an inherited pattern of school ways which were carried from North Britain to the New World.
Backcountry Food Ways:
North British Origins of Southern Highland Cooking
In regard to diet, the southern back settlements differed fundamentally from other regions of British America. Samuel Kercheval recalled that the “standard” supper dish in the mid-eighteenth century was a wooden bowl of milk and mush—seasoned with a splash of bear oil. The Anglican missionary Charles Wood-mason regarded these backcountry meals with horror, and complained incessantly about what he was expected to eat. “Clabber, butter, fat mushy bacon, cornbread,” he wrote, “as for tea and coffee they know it not … neither beef nor mutton nor beer, cyder or anything better than water.” When he visited a community of Ulster emigrants, Woodmason noted that “the people are all from Ireland, and live wholly on butter, milk, clabber and what in England is given to hogs.”1
Many visitors remarked that backsettlers ate food which other English-speaking people fed to their animals. This observation was repeated so often that it became a cliché of travel literature in the southern highlands. It is interesting to discover that precisely the same statements were made by English travelers in the borderlands of North Britain.2
Backcountry food ways are sometimes thought to be the product of frontier conditions. So they were, in some degree. But mainly they were an expression of the folk customs that had been carried from the borders of North Britain. Strong continuities appeared in favored foodstuffs, in methods of cooking and also in the manner of eating.
One important staple of this diet was clabber, a dish of sour milk, curds and whey which was eaten by youngsters and adults throughout the backcountry, as it had been in North Britain for many centuries. In southern England it was called “spoiled milk” and fed to animals; in the borderlands it was “bonny clabber” and served to people. Travelers found this dish so repellent that some preferred to go hungry.3
Another important foodstuff in the borderlands and the back settlements was the potato. This American vegetable had been widely introduced to western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became especially popular in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. Despite its American origins, the potato had been uncommon in the English colonies until the North Britons arrived during the eighteenth century, and made it an important part of backcountry diet.4
Yet another staple was a family of breadstuffs variously called “clapbread,” “haverbread,” “hearth bread,” “griddle cakes,” and “pancakes.” Sometimes they were also called scones, after an old Norse word for crust. Ingredients varied, but methods of cooking were often the same: small cakes of unleavened dough were baked on a flat bakestone or a circular griddle in an open hearth. These breadstuffs were brought from the borderlands to the backcountry, where they remained a major part of regional cuisine for many generations.5
In other respects, backcountry food ways necessarily departed from the customs of North Britain. Oats yielded to maize, which was pounded into cornmeal and cooked by boiling. But this was merely a change from oatmeal mush to cornmeal mush, or “grits” as it was called in the southern highlands. The ingredients changed, but the texture of the dish remained the same.
Another change occurred in the consumption of meat. The people of North Britain had rarely eaten pork at home. Pigs’ flesh was as loathesome to the borderers as it had been to the children of Abraham and Allah. But that taboo did not survive in the New World, where sheep were difficult to maintain and swine multiplied even more rapidly than the humans who fed upon them. Pork rapidly replaced mutton on backcountry tables, but it continued to be boiled and fried in traditional border ways.6
New American vegetables also appeared on backcountry tables. Most families kept a “truck-patch,” in which they raised squashes, cushaws (a relative of squash), pumpkins, gourds, beans and sweet roasting ears of Indian corn. Many families also raised “sal-let” greens, cress, poke and bear’s lettuce. Here again, the ingredients were new, but the consumption of “sallet” and “greens” was much the same as in the old country.7
The distinctive backcountry beverage was whiskey. A taste for liquor distilled from grain was uncommon in the south and east of England. But it was highly developed in north Britain, and was brought to the American backcountry by the people of that region. “‘Wheyski,’” the Marquis de Chastelleux wrote in back-country Virginia, “was our only drink, as it was on the three days following. We managed however to make a tolerable towdy [toddy] of it.”8
A change of ingredients was made necessary by the new environment.
In the back settlements Scotch whiskey (which had been distilled from barley) yielded to Bourbon whiskey (which was made mainly from corn and rye). But there was no other change from the borders, except perhaps in the quantity of consumption. Whiskey became a common table drink in the backcountry. Even little children were served whiskey at table, with a little sugar to sweeten its bitter taste.9 Temperance took on a special meaning in this society. Appalachia’s idea of a moderate drinker was the mountain man who limited himself to a single quart at a sitting, explaining that more “might fly to my head.”10
Other beverages were regarded with contempt in the back-country. “Tea and coffee were only slops,” Kercheval remembered, “ … they were designated only for persons of quality who did not labor, or the sick. A genuine backwoodsman would have thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for these slops. Indeed many of them have to this day very little respect for them.”11
Methods of food preparation also showed strong continuities from the borderlands to the back settlements. In the southern highlands, backcountry cooking ran more to boiling than to baking or roasting. This had also been the case in North Britain. Studies of regional cooking methods in Britain, as we have seen, find that the south and west of England had a taste for frying; East Anglia, a preference for baking; and the North, a penchant for boiling. The “simmering pot” became a cliché of border poets and antiquarians. John Gough observed that border breakfasts consisted “chiefly of porridge … boiled in milk.” Many travelers to the backcountry noted the taste for “mush boiled in milk.” Both borderers and backcountry people also consumed soups, stews and potpies for their second meal.12
Backcountry cuisine was less fastidious than that of other Anglo-American cultures—“all the cooking of these people being exceedingly filthy and most execrable,” Woodmason grumbled.13 This observation was made by many travelers in the American back settlements, and in the British borderlands. One visitor was astonished when his hostess proceeded to wash her feet in the cookpot. Another was given the tablecloth for a bedsheet. The folklore of that region actively discouraged cleanliness. To wash a milk churn was thought to be unlucky. Frogs were dropped into the milk to make it thicken. The quality of butter was believed to be improved in proportion to the number of human hairs embedded in it. “The mair dirt the less hurt,” Appalachian housewives liked to say.14
The backsettlers also differed from other cultures in their eating habits. They tended to take only two meals a day—a plain breakfast and a hearty meal in mid-afternoon. “These people eat twice a day only,” Woodmason declared, and complained that he was unable to find a proper English breakfast, lunch and dinner. The rhythm of two daily meals was a North British custom, carried to the interior of America by the border people.15
Tables were set with trenchers and noggins of wood and pewter. The utensils were two-tonged forks, heavy spoons and hunting knives. Kercheval remembered that the use of china was actively opposed. “The introduction of delft ware was considered by many of the backwoods people as a culpable innovation,” he wrote. “It was too easily broken, and the plates of that ware dulled their scalping and clasp knives.”16
There was much feasting in the back settlements. On these grand occasions, the major dishes were not baked as in New England, or roasted as in Virginia, but boiled in black-iron cooking pots which hung over backcountry hearths. Kercheval remembered that “the standard dinner dish” for a “log-rolling, or house-raising and harvest-day” was a “pot-pie, or what in other countries is called sea-pie.”17 There was little of the dietary asceticism that marked the food ways of Puritans and Quakers. When backsettlers and borderers could eat and drink abundantly they did so with high enthusiasm. Altogether, the food ways of these people were the product of a cultural tradition which had a long past in the British borderlands, and a long future in America’s southern highlands.18
Backcountry Dress Ways:
Border Origins of Country Western Costume
Travelers also expressed surprise at the costume of the backsettlers. Men, women and even children tended to adorn themselves in a manner that seemed fundamentally alien to other English-speaking people.
Backcountry women dressed in what Anglican clergyman Charles Woodmason called “shift and petticoat,” which were its nearest equivalents in the south of England. But in fact it was a different style of clothing altogether—a full bodice with deep décolletage, tight-fitted waist, short full skirt and a hem worn high above the ankle. The Anglican missionary thought it scandalously revealing.
Married women covered themselves more modestly in long dresses, with heavy woolen shawls draped across their head and shoulders. Elderly women wore heavy-hooded bonnets made of what was called “six or seven hundred” linen, and covered their feet with coarse shoes or heavy “shoepacks” as they were called in the eighteenth century.1
Backcountry women of all ages normally wore homespun linsey-woolsey garments, often of exquisite beauty and refinement. Even the acidulous Anglican Charles Woodmason was moved to admiration by the sight of fifty Presbyterian ladies, “all dressed in white of their own spinning.”2 These dresses were not shut away in closets but draped upon the cabin walls as a form of decoration. A backcountry writer remembered that in the eighteenth century:
The coats and bedgowns of the women … were hung in full display on wooden pegs around the walls of their cabins, so that while they answered in some degree the place of paper hangings or tapestry, they announced to the stranger as well as neighbor the wealth or poverty of the family in the articles of clothing. This practice has not yet been laid aside among the backwoods families.3
Male backsettlers also had a style of dress that startled strangers. They commonly wore shirts of linen in the summer and deerskin in the wintertime. Kercheval recalled,
The hunting shirt was universally worn. This was a kind of loose frock, reaching halfway down the thighs, with large sleeves open before, and so wide as to lap over a foot or more when belted. The cape was large, and sometimes handsomely fringed with a raveled piece of cloth of a different color. The bosom of this dress served as a wallet to hold a chunk of bread, cakes, jerk, tow for wiping the barrel of the rifle, or any other necessary for the hunter or warrior. The belt, which was always tied behind, answered for several purposes. … The hunting shirt was generally made of linsey, sometimes of coarse linen and a few of dressed deerskins.4
This upper garment was cut full in the chest and shoulders, with broad seams that ran horizontally across the front and back, and was drawn or “cinched” tightly at the waist. The effect was to enlarge the shoulders and the chest. Much as female costume created an exceptionally strong sense of femininity, male dress in the backcountry put equally heavy stress on masculinity. The dress ways of the backcountry were designed to magnify sexual differences.
The men of the backcountry also wore loose, flowing trousers or breeches or “drawers” as Kercheval called them. The lower legs were sometimes sheathed in gaiters called “leather stockings,” which writers such as James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales made the hallmark of the backcountryman.
Children in the backcountry also dressed differently from youngsters in other parts of British America. They were allowed great freedom in articles of clothing. “No shoes or stockings,” Charles Woodmason wrote, with his accustomed air of disapproval. “Children run half-naked. The Indians are better cloathed and lodged.”5
These backcountry dress ways were often compared with those of the Indians. But in fact the costume of adult backwoodsmen and women was very different from the breechclouts, tight leggings, and matchcoats of the eastern tribes. It was also highly impractical in the eastern woodlands—“very cold and uncomfortable in bad weather,” Kercheval remembered, and was put aside in time of military campaigning, when according to Kercheval young Europeans tended to copy the more functional clothing of their Indian counterparts.6
Later generations remembered this backcountry costume as aboriginally American—the pioneer dress of the frontier. But it was not worn on most frontiers, and was not invented in America. It was similar to dress ways described by travelers in the north of England, the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland. This male costume in the British border country was very similar to that which would be worn in the American backcountry—the same linsey or leather shirts, the same broad cut across the shoulders and chest, the same horizontal seams, the same heavy stress on masculinity, the same “drawers” and trowsers, the same leather stockings. Leather shirts and leggings were not frontier inventions. They were commonly worn throughout the borders in the eighteenth century. The account books of one Cumbrian yeoman recorded the cost of covering his legs in sheepskin leggings.7 Another bought gaiters which he called “leather stockings” at Carlisle in 1742. That phrase, which American writers such as Cooper tied to the frontier, was in fact a common north border expression. The distinctive dress of the American frontiersman was adapted from the customs of the British borderlands in all respects except the moccasins and coonskin cap.8
Equally striking were the similarities in women’s costume. One English traveler from Cheshire noticed on a trip to the lowlands of Scotland in 1639 that older women wore a “garment of the same woolen stuff whereof our saddlecloths in England are made: which is cast over their heads, and covers their faces on both sides.” He also observed that “young maids not married are bareheaded,” and “ancient women” wore “a broad boungrace coming over their brows.” A boungrace was a cloth shade or curtain attached to the front of a woman’s bonnet. It was also worn in the northern counties of England, and called an “Ugly” in Northumberland.9
Children’s costume on the borders was also much the same as in the backcountry. On the borders, children normally went barefoot, just at they did in the back settlements. One observer wrote that they tended to leap “as if they had hoofs, but it is almost the same all over the north.”10
These various dress ways spread through the southern highlands and onto the southwestern frontier. Many elements survive to this day, in the clothing style that is called “western dress” in the United States. Derivative forms also appear in the stage costumes of country-western singers, and in the wardrobes of back-country presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. They may still be seen in the ordinary dress of men and women throughout a broad region from Nashville to Dallas. The whirl of fashion has modified this costume in many ways with the introduction of Spanish elements in the nineteenth century and a touch of Hollywood glitz in the twentieth. But strong continuities linked the costume of North Britain in the seventeenth century to backcountry dress ways in the eighteenth century, frontier fashions in the nineteenth century, and “country western” clothing today.
Backcountry Sport Ways:
North British Origins of Southern Highland Games
The people of the backcountry also brought their own folk games which had long been popular on the borders of north Britain. These entertainments were often very violent—as many folk amusements had been throughout England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the games of the border country had a special quality which derived from the endemic fighting in that region. “Scots and English,” for example, was a favorite game on both sides of the border. Two teams of boys faced each other with their hats and coats in piles behind them. The object was to make a raid across the line, and to plunder the other team of its possessions without being captured. The boys shouted the ancient war cries of their region.1
Border folk-games, like so many other parts of its culture, not only reflected the insecurity of life in that region. They also prepared men to deal with it. More than other parts of England, the sports of the border were contests of courage, strength and violence.
Special importance was given to wrestling—an ancient sport on the borders, commonly pronounced “wrasslin” or “russlin.” There were two types of wrestling in this region. One was carefully regulated and elaborately staged in annual tournaments. The burly contestants commonly dressed in sleeveless vests, long tights tucked into stockings, and velvet trunks incongruously embroidered with delicate flowers. Each man stood facing the other, arms locked around the opponent’s body and chins tucked into each other’s right shoulder:
When both men have taken hold, the bout begins, slowly at first as competitors move crab-like, sizing each other up, but suddenly with a flutter of legs there is action as one man is thrown. If any part of his body other than his feet touches the ground, the bout is lost; similarly if a competitor loses his hold he forfeits the bout. Clearly such a sport calls for not only great reserves of strength but also for skill, stamina and physical fitness.2
This sport was brought to Appalachia where wrestling tournaments were regularly held. A North Carolina settler named Cyrus Hunter recalled that “wrestling and jumping [were] two of the most prominent sports” of that early period.3
The borderers also engaged in another sort of combat called “wrassling” or “fighting.” This was a wild struggle with no holds barred that continued until one man gave up—or gave out.4 These events often began with a contest in “bragging and boasting” between men who had been drinking heavily beforehand. In the Lake District of England, one gentleman justice witnessed such a happening, and put a stop to it. “On Thursday,” he wrote, “I went again to Ambleside … to see the wrestling. It was very good. A man from Cumberland with a white hat and brown shirt threatened to fling everybody, and fight them afterwards. The fighting I put a stop to.”5
The border sport of bragging and fighting was also introduced to the American backcountry, where it came to be called “rough and tumble.” Here again it was a savage combat between two or more males (occasionally females), which sometimes left the contestants permanently blinded or maimed. A graphic description of “rough and tumble” came from the Irish traveler Thomas Ashe, who described a fight between a West Virginian and a Kentuckian. A crowd gathered and arranged itself into an impromptu ring. The contestants were asked if they wished to “fight fair” or “rough and tumble.” When they chose “rough and tumble,” a roar of approval rose from the multitude. The two men entered the ring, and a few ordinary blows were exchanged in a tentative manner. Then suddenly the Virginian “contracted his whole form, drew his arms to his face,” and “pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent,” sinking his sharpened fingernails into the Kentuckian’s head. “The Virginian,” we are told, “never lost his hold … fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, [he] gave them a start from the sockets. The sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint.” Even after the eyes were gouged out, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two pieces. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in.” The victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was “chaired round the grounds,” to the cheers of the crowd,6
Sporadic attempts were made to suppress “rough and tumble.” Virginia’s tidewater legislators passed a general statute against maiming in 1748, and in 1772 added a more specific prohibition against “gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stomping.”7 In 1800 the grand jury of Franklin Country, Tennessee, in the manner of American juries, generally indicted the “practice of fighting, maiming and pulling out eyes, without the offenders being brought to justice.”8
But in the southern highlands, rough and tumble retained its popularity. During the War of Independence, and English prisoner named Thomas Anburey witnessed several backcountry gouging contests. “An English boxing match,” he wrote, “ … is humanity itself compared with the Virginian mode of fighting,” with its “biting, gouging and (if I may so term it) Abelarding each other.”9 Anburey described “a fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both his thumbs and second fingers very long and pointed; nay, to prevent their breaking or splitting … he hardened them every evening in a candle.” Bloodsports have existed in many cultures, but this was one of the few that made an entertainment of blinding, maiming, and castration.10
Also very popular on the borders of North Britain were individual competitions in running, jumping, leaping, throwing axes and spears. An example in the Lake District of Cumbria were annual gatherings at Ferry, Ambleside and later Grasmere.11 Some of these tournaments were very ancient. One of them was held in a ruined earthwork of great antiquity called Stone Carr near Greystoke. Wrestlers competed for a leather belt, leapers for a pair of gloves, and footracers for a handkerchief. These tournaments were great festivals, with large crowds, heavy drinking, food stalls, brandy booths, tambourine girls and accordion boys.12
These athletic contests were also brought to the American backcountry by emigrants from North Britain. The young Andrew Jackson first came to eminence for his skill in running and leaping. Other contestants competed in sledge-throwing and “long bullets,” in which young sportsmen hurled iron cannon-balls—sometimes at each other. Large crowds gave these contests the same carnival air that had existed in border tournaments.13
Athletic competitions of this sort were introduced to America mainly by borderers and Scots, whose traditional “Caledonian Games” became the ancestor of track and field in the United States. These meets commonly included the shot-put, hammer-throw, running broad jumps and high jumps, pole-leaping, hop-step-and-jump, hurdles, a “long race” of one mile, a walking match, sack races, wheelbarrow races, three-legged races, highland dancing, and tossing the caber. All of this activity occurred within a ring 500 feet in circumference.14
“Caledonian games” became very popular in America, and were gradually opened to non-Scottish competitors. As early as
1836 the New York Highland Society held a “sportive meeting” in the Elysian Fields across the Hudson River. Other athletic clubs, schools and colleges began to sponsor them, eliminating the competitions which were thought to be too strenuous for undergraduates (caber-tossing), or not strenuous enough (sack-races), or not in keeping with the ideology of masculine athletics (male dancing). The first college in North America to sponsor these games in a formal way was McGill University in Montreal. In the United States, the leader was Scots Presbyterian Princeton, with its Scottish president James McCosh and its sports-loving Scottish teacher George Goldie. By the mid-nineteenth century, Caledonian games were being held in 125 American cities, and the field sports of North Britain had become the foundation of track and field throughout the United States.15
Many other folk games were also carried from the border to the backcountry. An example was the ancient and primitive game called shinny.16 This ancestor of hockey had originally been played with the long bones of a sheep. The game was known throughout the British Isles. In the west of England, it was called not; in London it was named hockey; on the borders it was known as shinny. Of the Scots Irish it was said that “great numbers of men and boys resorted to the fields on this day to play at shinny.” The backsettlers preserved the northern name, and played the game in a ritual way at Christmastime. This custom persisted throughout Appalachia into the twentieth century. Here again, there were strong continuities from the borders of North Britain to the American backcountry, and to Appalachia in our own time.17
The sport ways of the back settlements were not a static set of inherited customs but a dynamic folk tradition. Amusements unknown to the British borderlands were invented in the American backcountry within the framework of an existing sport culture.
A case in point were games involving guns. “Shooting at marks was a common diversion among the men, when their stock of ammunition would allow it,” Kercheval remembered. Backcountry gunnery games were very different from the casual snap shooting of English country gentlemen who competed in the slaughter of prodigious quantities of half-domestic birds by offhand hip and shoulder shots at point blank range, with prodigious expenditures of ammunition. In the Appalachians, a marksman had to make every bullet count at great distances. Kercheval recalled that “shooting off-hand was not then in practice; it was not considered as any trial of the value of the gun, nor indeed as much of a test of the skill of a marksman.” The backsettlers achieved astounding feats of marksmanship by firing very carefully and slowly at distant marks, their rifles resting in a cushion of moss on a branch or tree trunk.18
Another backcountry amusement was throwing the tomahawk. Samuel Kercheval remembered that “a little experience enabled the boy to measure the distance with his eye, when walking through the woods, and strike a tree with his tomahawk in any way he choose.”19 Competitions were also held in imitating the cries of animals. “The bleating of the fawn brought its dam to death,” Kercheval recalled, “the cries of turkeys and owls were requisite as a measure of precaution in war.” Altogether, Kercheval observed that “the sports of the early settlers of this country were imitative of the exercise and stratagems of hunting and war.” In this respect, they were much the same as the war games of the British borderlands. Only the nature of war itself had changed.20
Backcountry Work Ways:
Border Attitudes toward War and Work
Where the warrior ethic is strong, the work ethic grows weak. This was so among the borderers and backsettlers, on both sides of the water. A traveler in North Britain remarked that the inhabitants were “indolent in high degree, unless roused to war.”1 In the American backcountry, other travelers frequently repeated similar observations. “They are very poor owing to their extreme indolence,” wrote an itinerant clergyman. A Philadelphia Quaker wrote: “ … the Irish are mostly poor beggarly idle people.”2
This “indolence” was in some ways more apparent than real. The impression of idleness rose in part from the fact that men and women in this culture worked differently from others. Most of them lived by a combination of farming and herding which required heavy labor in some seasons and little effort in others. In their new American environment the backsettlers adopted an old North British system of agriculture called the “infield-outfield” farming. The “infields” were given over to the most valuable crops, and cultivated with the light plows that were common in North Britain or with hoes that became more common in the backcountry. The outfields were allowed to lie fallow. The land was fertilized by confining animals in movable enclosures called “cowpens.”3
Crop farming remained very primitive in Appalachia. It was mainly a system of hoe-husbandry that was also introduced from North Britain. In the 1730s, the tools for each hand in one settlement were “one axe, one broad hoe and one narrow hoe,” with very little use of the plow.4 Except for the abandonment of the plow, this system of farming had been followed very generally throughout the English border counties, the Scottish lowlands and northern Ireland. It was introduced to the American back-country at an early date.5 A traveler in the backcountry noted, “A fresh piece of ground … will not bear tobacco past two or three years unless cow-penned; for they manure their ground by keeping their cattle … within hurdles, which they remove when they have sufficiently dunged one spot.”6
At some seasons of the year, large herds of grazing animals were allowed to browse freely in the forests and canebreaks of the old southwest, and later on the open range of Texas. In 1773, a surveyor for South Carolina described this system in detail. He reported that vast herds of cattle, often more than a thousand animals, were raised in the woods throughout the backcountry between the Savannah and Ogechee rivers. They were tended by “gangs under the auspices of cow-pen keepers, which move (like unto the ancient patriarchs or the modern Bedouins in Arabia) from forest to forest in a measure as the grass wears out or the planters approach them.” Once a year, these animals were rounded up, penned and driven to market on the hoof.7
This system of herding had also been practiced in the North British borderlands, and was transferred to the American back-country. A few important changes were made necessary by the new environment. Sheep, which had been the main support of British animal husbandry, became an easy prey for predators in the American wilderness. They were replaced by swine which were allowed to breed freely on the range, rapidly reverting to the wild species from which they had descended. This process of devolution produced the backcountry razorback, which was more like a wild boar than a barnyard pig. It became so wild that it was hunted with a rifle.
A similar process also created tough and dangerous Texas Longhorn cattle, which were American descendants of similar animals that had flourished in Scotland, northern Ireland, and the north of England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8
For both swine and cattle, this system of herding was fully developed in the backcountry by the mid-eighteenth century. Robert Witherspoon remembered that “as the range was good, they had no need of feeding creatures for some years.”9 A petition of the inhabitants in 1767 made reference to “our large stocks of cattle,” and described the system of “cowpens” and infield-outfield husbandry. This method of farming was land-consuming, but labor-saving. By one estimate, each head of range cattle in the southern backcountry required fifteen acres of piney woods—a total of 1,500 acres for a herd of 100 cattle.10
The backsettlers also sought to introduce a mixed economy of domestic manufacturing. The raising of flax and the weaving of linen became a flourishing cabin industry throughout the southern highlands, as it had been for many generations on the borders of North Britain. Governor William Bull of South Carolina wrote in 1770, “The Irish from Belfast have now raised flax for their own wear, and barter the superfluous linen to supply their wants with their neighbours.” A correspondent in 1768 reported that in the back settlements the “inhabitants now manufacture most of their linens (such as cost in England from 12d to 18d a yard) linsey-woolsey and even coarse cloths: that it has been proposed shortly to establish a stocking manufactory amongst them.” This movement toward a factory system was abandoned in Appalachia during the nineteenth century, and not revived until the twentieth. But in the eighteenth century it was developing strongly. In this way as in so many others, the people of the backcountry transplanted the work ways of their kin on the borders of North Britain.11
Backcountry Time Ways:
The Border Idea of “Passing the Time”
The backsettlers were also distinctive in their ways of thinking about time. Like others of their age, they believed in the ancient rule of Ecclesiastes that “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.” But backcountry seasons and times were not the same as in other regional cultures of British America. The rhythms of life in the southern highlands differed from those of New England, tidewater Virginia, and the Delaware Valley.
A case in point was the season of marriage. In Congregational New England, as we have seen, the “marrying time” came in the autumn—especially in November and December. In Anglican Virginia, on the other hand, the favorite season of marriage fell between Christmas and Lent. The Quakers of the Delaware Valley kept a third custom, in which the rhythm of marriage showed two annual peaks in spring and autumn. All of these American patterns followed regional folkways in England.
In the backcountry a fourth rhythm appeared: a single predominant season of marriage in April, May, June and July. Among Scots-Irish settlers of Augusta County, Virginia, the favorite month for marriage was May. Two-thirds of all recorded marriages occurred in the spring and summer; the least active period was the fall.1
This rhythm was not invented in America, nor was it the product of frontier conditions. It had long appeared on the borders of north Britain, where weddings were normally held in the spring during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.2
The rhythms of backcountry life were different in other ways as well. The backsettlers organized their lives by events in the Christian calendar, but not in the same way as other cultures of British America. They preserved ancient Christian rituals which had lingered in the borderlands of North Britain long after they had been abandoned in other regions.
For example, many borderers kept a day which they called the “Old Christmas” on January 6 when there was a feast in even the poorest houses, and bonfires at night with much gunplay and fireworks. This had also been a folk custom in North Britain, where the revelry of “Old Christmas” reached its climax in a practice called “stanging,” a rough and sometimes violent ceremony in which a victim was hoisted on a long pole and made to dangle in the air until he bought himself free.3 In America’s southern highlands, these customs survived for many generations. Even in the twentieth century, folklore collectors were startled to find that the custom of the “Old Christmas,” with its roaring bonfires and gunplay, still flourished in Appalachia. In the highlands of North Carolina, one noted:
In some parts of this county it is the custom to observe what is known as Old Christmas. Opinion varies as to the date; some believe it is the fifth and some the sixth of January. This day is believed by the people who keep it to be the real Christmas, the birthday of Christ. They say the Christmas we regularly keep is the “man-made” Christmas.4
Another folklorist observes that “the shooting of firecrackers and the discharging of firearms at Christmastime are customs rarely, if ever, observed anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.”5
Other ancient Christian customs also came from North Britain to the backcountry. The borderers celebrated Easter in a special way, with “pace-egging,” and the ritual performance of a folk play called St. George and the Black Morocco Dog. Easter Monday was a day of wild revelry, with much cockfighting. Whitsuntide was a time for hiring laborers. In late summer English borderers kept the ritual of Rushbearing, when they collected bundles of rushes “to carpet the muddy floors of the churches afresh.” The fall was celebrated by Halloween customs of exceptional extravagance. At various appointed times the borderers also observed “young folks days” and “old folks nights,” “bidden weddings,” wrestling tournaments, field days and various other events.6
Some of these rituals did not survive in the New World. Quickly abandoned were events such as rushbearing which had been tied to the established church. But folk rituals which centered on the family and neighborhood became an established part of back-country culture. The folk custom of wild revelry on Easter Monday survived in the southern highlands, together with cockfighting and heavy drinking on that day. Most of these customs were kept in the backcountry for a longer time than in other parts of British America.7
The backsettlers also kept other temporal customs of high complexity. Their culture assigned many fixed seasons for doing things. Their folklore told them, for example:
Never mix April 30th milk with that of May 1st or the butter will be slow in coming.
Make soap on the full of the moon or else it won’t set.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon
A swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly.
As slow as Christmas coming.
Sprinkle ashes on animals and fowl on Ash Wednesday.
The flow of life was regulated by many of these rhythms—annual, monthly, weekly, even daily. Sunday, of course, was a day of worship. Mondays and Tuesdays were favorite days for visiting. Fridays were days for going to market. But Friday and Saturday were thought to be unlucky for new enterprises. President Andrew Jackson, “to the end of his life, never liked to begin any thing of consequence on Friday, and would not if it could be avoided.”8 At the same time that these folk rules were kept with great care, the people of the back settlements startled travelers from other cultures by their complaisant attitudes toward the use of time. The proverbs of the backcountry showed a strong spirit of temporal fatalism in a world of insecurity:
To-day’s to-day and tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Come day, go day, God send Sunday.
You can’t rush God.
Never trouble trouble, ’til trouble troubles you.
Do not argue with the wind.
These were not a people who took time by the forelock. The folkways of the backcountry differed very much in that respect from the attitudes of New England, the Delaware, and even tidewater Virginia. Of all the inhabitants of British America, the back settlers were the most conservative and the least instrumental in their time ways. By and large the people of the backcountry tended to believe that the rhythms of life were inexorable and ineluctable, and beyond the capacity of mere mortals to change in any fundamental way. In place of the more instrumental attitudes of improving time, or redeeming time, or even killing time, the backsettlers had a fatalistic idea of passing the time—letting it happen in its ineluctable way. Here was another striking paradox of backcountry culture. The more these people moved through space, the more rooted they became in time.
Backcountry Wealth Ways:
Border Ideas of the Material Order
Across so vast a global space, the great magnet that drew the British borderers to American backcountry was land—the dream of fertile farmland to be had for the taking. This motive dominated the settlement of the southern highlands for many generations. In the year 1796, Moses Austin observed the steady stream of settlers moving west along the Wilderness Road. As they passed by he asked why they were traveling, and recorded their replies in the backcountry dialect.
Ask these Pilgrims what they expect when they git to Kentuckey the Answer is Land, have you any. No, but I expect I can git it. have you any thing to pay for land. No. did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land, can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds travelling hundreds of miles, they know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky … and when arrived at this heaven in idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. Exhausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Obliged to become hewers of woods and drawers of water.1
Their frequent disappointment was caused by the pattern of land distribution in the southern backcountry, which differed very much from that in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and tidewater Virginia.
In the southern highlands, many different sovereignties created a chaos of conflicting claims that “overlapped like shingles on a roof,” as one historian has written. Small tracts of land were given out on a headright or bounty system. Individual patents of a few hundred acres that were sold for small sums.2 At the same time, huge tracts were granted to a few great landowners with connections in London and colonial capitals. A majority of adult males in the southern highlands owned no land at all. The result was a system of landholding characterized by a large landless underclass of tenants and squatters, a middle class that was small by comparison with other colonies, and a few very rich landlords.
By far the largest individual holding in the backcountry was Granville District in North Carolina, which had been granted to John Carteret, Earl of Granville (1690-1763) in settlement of a proprietary claim. The Granville District was so vast that it was measured not in acres or miles but degrees of latitude and longitude. North Carolina’s Governor William Tryon described it in a letter to the Earl of Shelburne in 1767:
His Lordship’s District contains nearly one Degree of Latitude, and better than five Degrees of Longitude, from Currituck Inlet to … the western boundary. … There is thirteen counties in his Lordship’s District, the two westernmost of which counties contain a tract more than ten times the contents of Rhode island.
One county alone (of thirteen) was sixty miles square; another measured 60 by 150 miles. Altogether, Granville District encompassed approximately twenty million acres—and all of it was the property of one Englishman. Granville was able to defend his title, and by the 1760s he was collecting rents from backsettlers who had moved upon his land.
Many of these settlers had very modest estates. There was a class of small landowners in the backcountry who have been called the southern yeomanry. Their numbers were relatively smaller than in New England or the middle colonies. At the same time, large numbers of backsettlers owned no land at all, but merely squatted on the lands of others. Many remained poor and landless for generations. This pattern of land distribution—a few large absentee owners, a small class of yeomanry, and many landless families, was characteristic of the southern highlands.
One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition. This national folk legend is, unhappily, very much mistaken. With some exceptions, landed wealth was always highly concentrated throughout the southern highlands, as it would be in the lower Mississippi Valley, Texas and the far southwest. Inequality was greater in the backcountry and the southern highlands than in any other rural region of the United States.
In this respect, as in so many others, the southern backcountry resembled the borderlands of North Britain. Every region of Great Britain has been marked by deep and pervasive inequalities. But some regions have been more unequal than others, and among the most inegalitarian of all were the borderlands of North Britain. Throughout the northern counties of England, and the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland, a large part of the best land was owned by a small number of people—many of them absentees.
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, England’s richest peers owned a large part of productive resources in Cumberland and Westmorland, but in the year 1680, not a single peer of the realm actually lived in either of those counties.3 The majority of adult males in Cumberland and Westmorland owned no land of their own. Most were tenants or subtenants who held their farms on terms that were increasingly exploitative. On Cumberland manors the majority of tenants (55% by one historian’s count) paid arbitrary rents which could be raised at will by the owner. Tenants were also required to pay many feudal dues and fines. “Fines,” writes historian Charles Searle, “were the principal means by which the lords pumped the surplus out of Cumbria.”4 Between great landlords and humble tenants, there was also a small middling order of “statesmen,” as they were called in Cumbria. Some of these middling families did very well for themselves during the seventeenth century. But many were hard pressed, and the general drift was toward greater inequality.5
In Scotland and northern Ireland, the concentration of wealth was even more extreme. One historian writes that “except for parts of southwestern Scotland, virtually the whole of the Lowland countryside belonged to wealthy landowners. There were very few small owners in Scotland, and freeholding as a status did not exist. In many areas all landed property was in the hands of as little as one or two percent of the population … an extreme stratification probably greater than any other rural area of England.”6
This system of inequality was rooted in the conditions of life which shaped so many other parts of border culture. An historian of Northumberland and Durham observes that “forms of land tenure long outmoded further south had been maintained by the crown, which owned many of the border manors, in order to retain a sufficient supply of fighting men. … Customary tenure was very secure, and in the larger manors of Wark and Harbottle descent was by partible inheritance, so that potential fighting men were virtually guaranteed enough land for subsistence. … The resultant overpopulation had deleterious effects.”7
The pacification of the borders was followed by the eviction of tenants in both England and Scotland. Large numbers of landless poor were created by this process. Local officeholders were compelled to devote much of their attention to this problem of poverty in their region. Many emigrants who sailed from North Britain to America had been the victims of this social process.8
Ironically, parts of the same exploitative system were also carried to the New World. Before the end of the eighteenth century, the distribution of landed wealth had become highly unequal in the southern highlands. There were, of course, many local variations, but the same general pattern appeared in seventeen out of nineteen counties of western North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky where distribution of wealth could be measured for the eighteenth century.
Throughout this great region where virgin land existed in abundance, most men were landless. At the same time, a few families owned very large tracts. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, Gini ratios for landed wealth were in the range of .60 to .88 throughout many counties in this region—the highest levels of concentration in any rural part of the United States at that time. The top decile of wealthholders owned between 40 and 80 percent of the land. In many areas, one-third to one-half of taxable white males owned nothing. This was the case in eight counties of East Tennessee, from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.9
A similar pattern also appeared in eleven counties of Kentucky from 1792 to 1819, where Gini ratios ranged from .66 to as high as .92 for property in land and slaves. A few of these counties (Cumberland and Christian) were more equal than others. But by comparison with rural parts of New England and the Delaware, most counties were highly unequal.10
As time passed, inequalities diminished in some of these counties and increased in others, but the general pattern persisted throughout much of the region into the nineteenth century for many years. The United States Census in 1850 and 1860 found evidence of extreme rural inequalities throughout the old southwest. Studies of eight sample counties of Tennessee in 1850 showed that more than half of all adult males (free and slave altogether) owned no land at all. The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of improved land and 99 percent of the slaves. In between was a rural middle class of yeoman farmers who were a minority of the adult male population of Tennessee in 1850.11
The same patterns persisted into the twentieth century, when an elaborate study of wealth distribution in eighty counties of Appalachia came to this conclusion:
The image of Appalachia as the land of rugged individuals, owning and working relatively small family holdings, is strong in the literature about the region. But … the reality is a region where the ownership of land is concentrated in relatively few hands.12
In 1983, the top 1 percent of owners possessed half of the land in Appalachia. The top 5 percent owned nearly two-thirds. This pattern of wealth distribution in the southern highlands in the twentieth century was much like that which had existed two hundred years earlier.13
Backcountry Rank Ways:
A System of Stratification Without Orders
As these patterns of wealth and inheritance suggest, social stratification in the backcountry was a system of high complexity. Extreme inequalities of material condition were joined to an intense concern for equality of esteem.
Visitors of exalted rank complained that they were not treated with the same respect as in other parts of British America. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason filled his journal with angry accounts of “ill treatment” by “insolent” and “impudent” settlers who stubbornly refused to display the deference which he thought his due. He complained that these people were “the most audacious of any set of mortals I ever met with.”1 William Byrd, on his various backcountry rambles, also complained of undue “familiarity,” and a lack of deference to age, wealth, birth and breeding. Militiamen in the backcountry commonly refused to obey orders from their officers, unless persuaded to do so. Colonel David Stokes of backcountry Lunenburg, Virginia, characterized the militia of his county as marked by “unruly licentiousness.”2
These complaints rose from fundamental differences in social manners and expectations. In the backcountry, rich and poor men dealt with one another more or less as social equals. They wore similar clothing, and addressed each other by first names. They worked, ate, laughed, played, and fought together on a footing of equality. Many backcountry proverbs captured the equality of manners that coexisted with inequalities of material condition in this culture:
The rain don’t know broadcloth from jeans.
No man can help his birth.
Poor folks have poor ways, and rich folk damned mean ones.
Any fool can make money.
Don’t care keeps a big house.
As Black as the Earl of Hell.
A falling master makes a standing man.
All Stuarts are not kinsmen of the king.3
These attitudes were not invented on the frontier. They had long been characteristic of the borderers. Travelers in this region frequently described the manners of the natives in terms such as “insolence,” “impudence,” “forwardness,” “familiarity,” “unruliness,” “licentiousness” and “pride.” The authorities complained for example that the famous border reiver Sandie Scott was worse than a thief—he was a “proud thief who not only stole from his superiors, but believed himself to be their equal. Here was another border pattern that came to the American backcountry.4
Despite this equality of manners, a clear-cut system of social status existed in both the borderlands and the backcountry, which differed from ranking customs in other parts of British America. At the top of this system was the “ascendancy” whom we have already noticed. These families cherished the memory of immigrant-ancestors who had been highly placed in North British society—not at the very top, but high enough to have a coat-of-arms on the silverware, or to send a younger son to the university, or to marry a daughter to a good family, or at least to dress and act like a gentleman. In the American backcountry this elite rapidly acquired a firm hold on wealth and power throughout the region. They owned a large part of the best lands and held most of the top military and political offices. Their manners tended to be very rough, and were not much refined by their new environment. But they knew who they were, and instantly recognized one another, and cemented their status by ties of marriage and friendship. Andrew Jackson’s violent courtship of Rachel Donelson, for example, was not a spontaneous event, but a calculated act of high consequence. Jackson thought of himself as a gentleman, and took a wife who was appropriate to his rank. She was described as “the daughter of a man of considerable prestige, one of the richest and most distinguished of the western Virginians, but she went into the forest when a young girl, and the result was that she was barely literate, and she smoked a pipe on occasion.”5
This backcountry elite was not distinguished by learning, breeding, intellect or refinement. In consequence, its eminence was always directly contingent upon its wealth and power. In the southern highlands (and indeed on the southern rim to this day) one rarely finds the tattered respectability of old families in Massachusetts, or the threadbare gentility of tidewater Virginia. A backcountry family that lost its property fell instantly to a lower level of society, and disappeared from the ascendancy without a trace. The result was a highly materialistic system of social rank. Wealth alone became more important as a determinant of status than in New England, Pennsylvania or Virginia.
Below the ascendancy was a middle class which has sometimes been called the “yeomanry” of the southern highlands. Most were small farmers who owned their own land. A native of the region writes:
Differences in the status of families at either end of the group are striking, but often such disparity as exists is not noticeable save in the size of the houses and the land holdings. One may remark a less bountiful table. … He may note, too, if he is observing, less stock and scantier farm equipment; but the life of this class is homogeneous, and the absence of some things noted in the homes of the more well-to-do is not of necessity an indication of greater poverty. It may be merely a sign of greater simplicity in the taste of a family.6
Below this comparatively small backcountry middle class was a large rural proletariat, who owned no land and few personal possessions. Most were either tenants or squatters. Their property ran on four legs—consisting mostly of cattle and swine which they raised in the woods. Their pride was heavily invested in these animals. The Hatfield-McCoy feud, in which more than twenty people were killed, started as an argument over two hogs.
In the eighteenth century, this backcountry underclass was called by many names which have become a permanent part of the American language. By and large these words connoted a stubborn combination of poverty and pride which had existed on the borders of north Britain. The words themselves, though now thought of as Americanisms, were also carried from the borderlands. One such term was hoosier. Everitt Dick writes that
before it was used to designate the citizens of Indiana, the term “Hoosier” was used in the South to describe a rough or uncouth
Crackers, Rednecks, Hoosiers—words that described the largest social class in the American backcountry—were not coined in the New World. They were carried out of North Britain. For three centuries these terms were variously used as praise words and pejoratives, according to context and occasion. But always they described the same paradox of poverty and pride. Something of that spirit was captured by the American painter Frederic Remington in a sketch from which this drawing is taken.
person. … the name “hoosier” was often applied to these backwoodsmen even as far south as northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas. Everywhere the general characteristics of this tribe were the same, east to Georgia and from Mississippi and Alabama north to Illinois and Indiana.7
The word hoosier comes from hoozer or hoozier in the old Cumberland dialect, which meant something or someone who was unusually large and rough—in W. J. Cash’s phrase, “a hell of a fellow.” After coming to America in the eighteenth century, the noun migrated north to Indiana with so much of backcountry culture, and was attached to the citizens of that state to distinguish them from their Yankee neighbors.8
Another term for this rural proletariat was redneck, which was originally applied to the backsettlers because of their religion. The earliest American example known to this historian was recorded in North Carolina by Anne Royall in 1830, who noted that “red-neck” was “a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians.” It had long been a slang word for religious dissenters in the north of England.9
A third word for this rural proletariat which also came from Britain was cracker, which derived from an English pejorative for a low and vulgar braggart. In 1766, an informant wrote the Earl of Dartmouth about the American backcountry,
I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their abode.10
This distinctive backcountry underclass was in being by the mid-eighteenth century. Its call names had originated in North Britain. So also had its character and culture, which still survive today.
The Backcountry Comity:
Patterns of Migration, Settlement, and Association
The borderers were a restless people who carried their migratory ways from Britain to America. There had been many folk movements in their history before the Atlantic crossing, and many more were yet to come. The history of these people was a long series of removals—from England to Scotland, from Scotland to Ireland, from Ireland to Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania to Carolina, from Carolina to the Mississippi Valley, from the Mississippi to Texas, from Texas to California, and from California to the rainbow’s end.
Rates of geographic migration were very high in this culture. In Britain, some of the highest rates of rural migration were to be found on the northern borders. The Scottish village of Fintray, for example, had a turnover of 75 percent in five years (1696-1701)—a rate much above the parishes of southern England.1 Similar patterns also appeared in the American backcountry, where rates of internal migration were also higher than in the rural communities of New England, the Delaware and tidewater Virginia. In backcountry Lunenburg County, Virginia, for example, one historian found what he called “phenomenal movement” of the population. From 1750 to 1769, 80 percent of the population disappeared from the county; 40 percent did so in five years from 1764 to 1769. These rates of movement were exceptional by eighteenth-century standards.2
The backsettlers thought about moving in a way that was different from more sedentary people. There was a folk-saying in the southern highlands: “When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and start.” This was the footloose way in which Andrew Jackson was said to have come into the backcountry, with nothing but two riding horses, a gun at his side, and a pack of hunting dogs at his heel.3
Most geographic migration in both the British borderlands and the American backcountry consisted of short-distance movements that covered only a few miles, as families searched for slightly better living conditions. Frequent removals were encouraged by low levels of property-owning and by characteristic attitudes toward wealth and land and work in this culture.
During the first few years of settlement, backcountry folk settled close to one another for mutual protection. The result was the planting of “stations” in Tennessee, and “forts” in Kentucky. But as the backcountry gradually became more secure, another pattern appeared—one that was very different from the comities of Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The backcountry ideal was a scattered settlement pattern in isolated farmsteads, loosely grouped in sprawling “neighborhoods” that covered many miles. The German traveler Schoepf in 1784 observed that in North Carolina the farms were “scattered about in these woods at various distances, three to six miles, and often as much as ten or fifteen or twenty miles apart.”4 North Carolina Congressman Nathaniel Macon startled his Yankee colleagues by arguing that “no man ought to live so near another as to hear his neighbor’s dog bark.”5 That attitude was widely shared in the backcountry. In this culture, a house became a hermitage, beyond sight and sound of every human habitation. Once again, Andrew Jackson personified his culture. Jackson’s home in Tennessee was actually called the Hermitage. When he was away from it he wrote home to his wife expressing his longing for “sweet retirement,” apart from other people.6
There were, of course, physical limits to the realization of this idea. But the idea itself became an important reality in the culture of the backcountry. It persisted for many generations in the isolated homes that were built in the hollows of the Appalachians, the canebreaks of Kentucky, the flatlands of Texas and the ravines of southern California.
Samual Kercheval described the common settlement pattern. “The greater number of farms in the western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia,” he wrote, “bear a striking resemblence to an amphitheater. The buildings occupy a low situation, and the tops of the surrounding hills are the boundaries of the tract to which the family mansion belongs. Our forefathers were fond of farms of this description, because, as they said, they are attended with this convenience, “that everything comes to the house down hill.”7
This pattern of settlement had often occurred on the borders of North Britain, where even today one finds isolated farmsteads nestled in valleys, with barren hillsides rising high above them on every side. One geographer observes that “The Scotch-Irish brought the Celtic dispersed farm with cattle-grazing and kitchen garden common in Ireland and Scotland. Members of each group moved in single family units onto the uplands. The Scotch-Irish often squatted on land in forested coves and mountainsides.”8
Unlike the road-bound settlements of New England or the fluvial patterns of Virginia, the backsettlers built their houses near creeks or springs. Emma Miles wrote:
The site of a cabin is usually chosen as near as possible to a fine spring. No other advantages will ever make up for the lack of good water. There is a strong prejudice against pumps … cisterns are considered “dead water,” hardly fit to wash one’s face in. The mountaineer takes the same pride in his water supply as the rich man in his wine cellar, and is in this respect a connoisseur. None but the purest and coldest of freestone will satisfy him.9
This also had been a border habit, where a safe supply of water could be a matter of life or death.
This pattern of settlement engendered a distinctive style of association. Family, friends and neighbors visited one another over long distances, staying in each other’s houses, sleeping in the same beds, eating from the same dish. Few homes were so humble as not to have some accommodation for visitors, even if only a mattress, a stool and a spoon.
There was always a welcome for kin and friends, but an intense suspicion of strangers. This cultural attitude had deep roots in the borderlands of North Britain; one Cumbrian observed that anyone from a neighboring district was looked upon as a “‘foreigner.’”10 Precisely the same outlook long existed in the back-country, where there were many bizarre proverbs on the subject:
Put the stranger near the danger.
Let the blame of every ill be on the stranger.
The bad and no good on the back of a stranger.
The stranger is for the wolf.11
The backsettlers had little tolerance for those who broke their own rules. They dealt harshly with social deviance by a ritual which they called “hating out.” Kercheval explained “the punishment for idleness, lying, dishonesty and ill-fame generally was that of ‘hating the offender out,’ as they expressed it … a general sentiment of indignation against such as transgressed the moral maxims of the community.” Hating out could take many forms. Sometimes it was the “silent treatment,” or a form of ritual abuse called “tongue-lashing,” or petty harassment, or whipping, or banishment outright.12
These punishments derived their force from the importance of reputation in this culture. The backsettlers were as sensitive to questions of honor as the gentlemen of Virginia—but not in precisely the same way. In the backcountry, honor had very little to do with gentility. An Alabama planter summarized the prevailing attitude in a simple verse:
Honor and shame from all conditions rise;
Act well your part and their [sic] the honor lies13
Backcountry ideas of honor were understood more in terms of valor and virility. To behave dishonorably was to commit an “unmanly act.” Folk punishments in the backcountry were designed to inflict humiliation by depriving an offender of his manhood—sometimes in a direct and literal sense. One common penalty was called “riding the stang.” James Parton explained:
A kind of punishment was formerly inflicted occasionally, called Riding the Stang, meaning riding upon a sting, that is, receiving chastisement for some offense of which the common law did not take any cognizance. On these occasions, some low fellow, who represented the delinquent, was mounted on a long pole carried on men’s shoulders, and in this way he was taken about the streets, the bearers occasionally halting, and making loud proclamation of the person’s real or alleged offense, the crowd huzzaing. They afterwards repaired to the residence of the offender, where a grand proclamation was made of his crime, or misdemeanor; after which the common dispersed, giving three hearty cheers.14
Altogether, reputation in the back settlements was very much a matter of what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown calls “primal honor.”15
In all of its many aspects, this backcountry comity has sometimes been interpreted by historians as a product of “the frontier.” But it did not develop on other frontiers, and was remarkably similar to patterns of settlement, migration, association, and belonging on the borderlands of north Britain. Here again, the pattern of cultural persistence was very strong.
Backcountry Order Ways:
The Border Idea of Order as Lex Talionis
Within this comity, personal relations between backsettlers were often brutally direct. The mother of President Jackson prepared her son for this world with some very strong advice. “Andrew,” said she, “never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.”1
That folk saying was a classical expression of backcountry attitudes toward order, which differed very much from other regions of British America. In the absence of any strong sense of order as unity, hierarchy, or social peace, backsettlers shared an idea of order as a system of retributive justice. The prevailing principle was lex talionis, the rule of retaliation. It held that a good man must seek to do right in the world, but when wrong was done to him he must punish the wrongdoer himself by an act of retribution that restored order and justice in the world.
This backcountry idea of order rested upon an exceptionally strong sense of self-sovereignty. Something of the same principle had also existed in tidewater Virginia, where the gentry were fond of quoting the old English cliché that every man’s home was his castle. But the people of the backcountry went a step farther. A North Carolina proverb declared that “every man should be sheriff on his own hearth.”2 That folk saying had been brought to the backcountry from the borderlands of North Britain, where it existed in almost the same words: “Every man is a sheriff on his own hearth.”3 This idea implied not only individual autonomy, but autarchy. Further, it narrowly circumscribed the role of government, for if every man were sheriff on his own hearth, then there was not very much work for a county sheriff to do, except to patrol the roads that lay in between.
The same ideas also appeared in the ordering institutions of the backcountry. There were official sheriff’s and constables throughout that region, but the heaviest work of order-keeping was done by ad hoc groups of self-appointed agents who called themselves regulators in the eighteenth century, vigilantes in the nineteenth, and nightriders in the twentieth. This was not a transitional phenomenon—unless one wishes to think of a transition five centuries long. Nor was it the reflexive product of a frontier environment, for other frontiers experienced little or none of it. It rose instead from a tradition of retributive folk justice which had been carried from the British borderlands to the American backcountry.4
During the eighteenth century the back settlements suffered much from “banditti” whose depredations were punished by the summary justice of these self-styled “regulators.” When, for example, one robber gang grew so bold that it tried to steal the horses of an entire congregation as they sat in church, the back-country rose spontaneously. In retaliation, a “posse” of regulators reported it had “pursued the rogues, broke up their gangs, burnt the dwellings of all their harborers and abetters—whipped ’em and drove the idle, vicious and profligate out of the province, men and women without distinction.”5 Conflicts between bandits and “regulators” continued on the southwestern frontier for many generations. But it was not characteristic of the frontier itself. Nothing quite like it occurred on most parts of the northern frontier in New England or in the upper northwest.6
Vigilante movements began in the southern backcountry during the 1760s.7 Their legitimacy rested upon a doctrine called
“Lynch’s law,” which probably took its name from Captain William Lynch (1742-1820), of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, and later Pendleton District, South Carolina. Captain Lynch was a backcountry settler of border descent. “Lynch’s Law” began as a formal agreement among his neighbors:
Whereas, many of the inhabitants of Pittsylvania have sustained great and intolerable losses by a set of lawless men … we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained.8
Lynch’s law was swift and violent. Its victims were often flogged and sometimes killed without much attention to due process, or even to the evidence. One backcountry gravestone read: “George Johnson, Hanged by Mistake.”9
This system of justice captured the two vital principles of back-country order ways—the idea that order was a system of retributive violence and that each individual was the guardian of his own interests in that respect. Even sheriff’s in the backcountry shared the same ideal of retributive violence, and often took the law into their own hands. Alabama’s Tombigbee County, for example, had five justices of the peace in 1810, of whom three were themselves fugitives. Two were wanted on charges of murder, and a third for helping an accused murderer break jail.10
The idea of retributive justice was also reflected in common forms of disorder throughout the southern backcountry. One example was the prevalence of the blood feud in the southern highlands. The custom of feuding had been very common on the borders of North Britain. Bloody strife continued for many generations between families on both sides of the border.11
During the eighteenth century, this custom of the blood feud was introduced to the backcountry. In that new environment it flourished for more than two hundred years. Feuds occurred in many forms—between individuals, families, clans and communities. They began in a variety of ways—loss of property or reputation, political rivalries, sexual jealousies, moral insults and material injuries.12 In the classical feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, the casus belli was a dispute over two razorback hogs which led to the killing of twenty people and the wounding of at least twenty more. Both families were of border stock; their feud arose more generally from an entire culture and its concept of order as retributive justice.13
Another expression of lex talionis was the heavy preponderance of crimes against persons over crimes against property. One study of criminal indictments in Ohio County, Virginia (1801-10), found that murders and assaults were more common than all other crimes and misdemeanors combined, and more than five times as common as property offenses.14 This pattern persisted for two centuries. In the 1930s, an Appalachian lawyer wrote:
Our people … are as a rule only charged with crimes of impulse, such as assault and battery, homicides of the different degrees, etc., or crimes against prohibitory statutes which they think interfere with their personal freedom, such as moonshining, and offenses of that nature. Seldom do you find them accused of crimes such as larceny, burglary or what are known as social crimes.15
Treatment of the disorderly was also different from other regions of British America. Backcountry courts tended to punish property crimes with the utmost severity, but to be very lenient with crimes of personal violence. In Cumberland County, Virginia, during the eighteenth century, a court administered the following punishments: for hog stealing, death by hanging; for scolding, five shilling fine; for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine.16 This structure of values continued for many generations in the backcountry. Historian Edward Ayers finds that in the southern upcountry during the nineteenth century, county courts “treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.”17
This system of order created a climate of violence in the American backcountry which remained part of the culture of that region to our own time. The proverbs of the backcountry are full of the spirit of violence: “A word and a blow and the blow first,” Carolinians would say. “Evil words cut mair than swords.”18 This ethic of violence in the backcountry was far removed from the chivalric ideals of the tidewater elite. It is interesting that the proverbs of the backcountry justified the use of violence only when it promised to succeed. The backsettlers said:
Better a coward than a corpse.
Better a living dog than a dead lion.
He that fights and runs away
Will live to fight another day.
Backcountry proverbs did not glorify fighting for its own sake, but fighting for the sake of winning. Here was an ethic of violence which had been formed in ambuscades and border-raiding. It had nothing to do with combats of chivalry or the idea of war as a gentleman’s game. The classical example of this instrumental attitude toward violence was Andrew Jackson. A friend who knew him well for forty years said that “no man knew better than Andrew Jackson when to get into a passion and when not.” James Parton commented that Jackson’s anger was “a Scotch-Irish anger. It was fierce, but never had any ill effect upon his purposes; on the contrary, he made it serve him, sometimes, by seeming to be much more angry than he was; a way with others of his race.”19
But backcountry violence also had another side. Andrew Jackson’s strategy of controlled anger worked because most rage was genuine in this culture. Violence often consisted of blind, unthinking acts of savagery by men and women who were unable to control their own feelings. Much backcountry violence occurred within the family. Visitors recorded with horror the violence of parents against children, husbands against wives, and friends against neighbors.20
An example was Russell Bean, the first white child born to permanent settlers in what is now the state of Tennessee. He was of Scottish border stock—the family name was originally Baines—and he became a figure of high eminence in the backcountry. His life was filled with violence. In 1789 he was found guilty of beating and kicking the wife of a neighbor. In 1801 he went to New Orleans for a long period, and on his return found that his wife had given birth to an infant who could not have been his own. In a rage, Russell Bean took the child from its cradle, drew out his hunting knife and cut off its ears, declaring that he “had marked it so that it would not get mixed up with his children.” A warrant was issued for Russell Bean’s arrest. He was brought to justice, found guilty of maiming an infant, and sentenced to be branded with the letter M on the brawn of the thumb. Justice was swift in the backcountry. Bean’s hand was instantly lashed to the bar, and the red-hot branding iron was applied. But the defendant remained as violent as ever. When his hand was released, he bit out the brand with his teeth, and spat the charred and bleeding flesh defiantly on the courtroom floor.21
These backcountry order ways created an exceptionally violent world. In the eighteenth century, travelers often commented upon the frequency of murders and assaults in that region. Back-country bandits were as brutal and sadistic as border raiders had been. In 1767, for example, Carolina newspapers reported that robbers seized a man named Davis and tortured him at his own hearth with red-hot irons until he told them where his money was hidden. Then they burned his farm for their amusement, and “left the poor man tied to behold all in flames.” This gang included members of the infamous Moon family and the Black brothers, who sometimes mutilated their victims for sport. These backcountry bandits often worked in family groups. Some of the most violent members were women.22
Violence continued to be characteristic of the southern highlands for many years. An example was Edgefield District, South Carolina, a backcountry area which was known for its extraordinary violence from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. Parson
Weems made its violence the subject of a chapbook called The Devil in Petticoats, in which one character exclaims, “What! Old Edgefield again! Another murder in Edgefield! … for sure it must be pandemonium itself, a very district of devils.” In 1850, the South Carolina legislature found a “vast number of crimes in Edgefield,” and a homicide rate twice the average of the state. After the Civil War, the congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan found that Edgefield was “the most violent region in the state.” The mayhem continues even to our own time.23 Similar patterns also appeared in Hardin County, Kentucky, in parts of East Texas, and in Williamson County, Illinois, which, with the area of that state called Little Egypt, is culturally part of the backcountry.24
This world of endemic violence and retributive justice was very similar to the British borderlands, where for many centuries people had been forced to conquer their own peace. Well into the eighteenth century, the borders remained “a region notorious for its continuing lawlessness.”25 As late as 1714, Sir Henry Lid-dell presented his friend William Cotesworth with a pair of pocket pistols and advised him “never to travel without them.”26 In Cumberland, justices carried arms on the bench, and the public expenditures of the county included daggers for use of the judges.27
This border violence was highly instrumental in its nature, and was often encouraged by local elites. In 1712, for example, the board of directors of a powerful coal cartel in the North of England, “including gentlemen and citizens of the highest repute,” openly exhorted their tenants to “cut-up” a “wagon-way” that belonged to a rival group.28
Here was yet another continuity which extended from the border country of North Britain to the backcountry in the eighteenth century, and to the southern highlands in our own time.29
Backcountry Power Ways:
The Politics of Personal Government
This system of order gave rise to a special style of backcountry politics which was far removed from classical ideas of democracy and aristocracy. It was a highly distinctive type of polity which Charles Lee appropriately called “macocracy”—that is, “rule by the race of Macs.”1 This system of macocracy was a structure of highly personal politics without deference to social rank. In that respect it was very different from Virginia. In the early eighteenth century, William Byrd observed of the back settlements, “They are rarely guilty of flattering or making any court to their governors, but treat them with all the excesses of freedom and familiarity.”2 It was also a polity without strong political institutions, and in that regard very far removed from New England. There was comparatively little formal structure to local government—no town meetings, no vestries, no commissions, and courts of uncertain authority. But within the same broad tradition of self-government common to all English-speaking people, the borderers of North Britain easily improvised their own politics.
In the year 1770, an instance occurred aboard an emigrant ship which carried Major Pierce Butler, a high-born Anglo-Irish aristocrat who was destined to become part of the South Carolina elite. Soon after they sailed, Major Butler and his fellow travelers, in cabin and steerage alike, improvised a government of English laws and liberties for the duration of their voyage. One of them wrote:
Being so many we found it necessary to form ourselves into an assembly, and meet from time to time as occasion required. We made rules and established order amongst ourselves, for future regulation, and one of the first concerns that came before us was the due observation of the first day of the week. The assembly came to this result, viz that the first day of the week shall be set apart … for the performance of religious worship; and whereas men differ in their opinions as to the mode of religious worship, that everyone may enjoy liberty of conscience and have an opportunity of performing religious worship according to the mode and opinion of that particular church or people of which he or she is a member. … to give Major Butler his due, he interested himself much in behalf in setting up these meetings.3
Many American historians have observed this same process of political improvisation at work on the frontiers of settlement. Some attribute it to the frontier itself. But as Pierce Butler and British companions demonstrated, the process was fully at work before they reached the American shore. Their spontaneous shipboard polity rose not from the American environment but from their British culture, and it became an important ingredient of backcountry politics.
Another feature of this backcountry “macocracy” was strong personal leadership. The politics of the back settlements were dominated by leaders who possessed a quality called “influence” or ‘interest.” David Caldwell, one of the leaders of Lunenberg County in backcountry Virginia, was described as “a man of great interest in the county.”4 Colonel Thomas Fletchall of Fair Forest Creek in Carolina was described as having “great influence in that part of the country.” Another wrote, “Col. Fletchall has all of those people at his beck, and reigns among them like a little king.”5 Another example was Colonel Richard Richardson, of St. Mark Parish, South Carolina. He had moved south from Virginia, married into the backcountry ascendancy, acquired a large property called Big Home, commanded a regiment of militia in the Cherokee War of 1760, and became the leading man in his part of the country. It was said that he was:
judge and arbiter of most … feuds, bickerings and dissensions, and possessed an equity jurisdiction from the Santee to the North-Carolina boundary. … His family residence frequently presented the appearance of the assizes, and few, if any, even of the disappointed parties, ever left his hospitable board and cordial welcome with an inclination to dispute his position, or appeal to law.6
These “men of influence” could be found in most parts of the backcountry. They tended to be large landowners, magistrates, merchants, surveyors, millers and speculators—often all at once. But the “influence” and “interest” of these men had narrow limits. The authority of office or rank counted for very little, as many travelers observed:
Of what dignity is a North Carolina Justice in these times the following incident will show, which happened immediately after our arrival. A young man who rode up after us, offered his hand to another whom he found here but it was not accepted, because the latter fancied the man had injured him on some former occasion.
After a brief exchange of words, there was a challenge, and both young men, laying aside their coats and shirts, hurriedly prepared themselves for a boxing-match, which took place on the spot, in front of the house and in the presence of the Justice of the peace. Women, children and blacks gathered around, the women exclaiming at the contempt shown for the officer’s house.
The Justice himself stepped forward with folded arms and tranquil demeanor, and once, twice, three times bade the combatants to keep the peace, withdrew with the same measured step, and looked on in cold blood. Outraged at the disobedience, the Justice’s wife appeared and repeated the commands of her husband, but was received with derision. Finally the antagonists cooled, shook hands by the fighting code, and each rode on his way.
“By the law, must they not give obedience to your commands,” I asked the squire, “and abstain from their squabbling in your presence?”
“They should,” was the answer.
“Well! and could you not bring them into court for their behavior, and have them punished?”
“I could,” was the second laconic answer of the good-natured Justice, who seemed to make far less of the matter than his indignant wife, and was of the opinion that it was more in keeping with his official worth to pass over an apparent slight.7
Worse indignities were suffered by other backcountry magistrates. In 1767, when several gentlemen justices in South Carolina tried to bring some “banditti” to trial, the magistrates themselves were seized and tried before a kangaroo court by the intended defendants. One justice was dragged eighty miles at a horse’s tail.8
Men who rose to positions of leadership in this culture commonly did so by bold and decisive acts. An example comes from the life of Andrew Jackson. In the late eighteenth century, Jackson was in the backcountry hamlet of Jonesboro, Tennessee, for a court day. At midnight, fire suddenly broke out in a stable, and ignited a large quantity of hay. An eyewitness recalled:
The alarm filled the streets with lawyers, judges, ladies in their nightdresses, and a concourse of strangers and citizens. General Jackson no sooner entered the street than he assumed the command.
It seemed to be conceded to him. He shouted for buckets, and formed two lines of men reaching from the fire to a stream that ran through the town; one line to pass the empty buckets to the stream, and the other to return them full to the fire. He ordered the roofs of the tavern and of the houses most exposed to be covered with wet blankets, and stationed men on the roofs to keep them wet. Amidst the shrieks of the women, and the frightful neighing of the burning horses, every order was distinctly heard and obeyed. In the line up which the buckets passed, the bank of the stream soon became so slippery that it was difficult to stand. While General Jackson was strengthening that part of the line, a drunken coppersmith, named Boyd, who said he had seen fires at Baltimore, began to give orders and annoy persons in the line.
“Fall into line!” shouted the General.
The man continued jabbering. Jackson seized a bucket by the handle, knocked him down, and walked along the line giving his orders as coolly as before. He saved the town!9
The politics of the backcountry consisted mainly of charismatic leaders and personal followings, cemented by strong and forceful acts such as Jackson’s behavior at Jonesboro. The rhetoric that these leaders used sometimes sounded democratic, but it was easily misunderstood by those who were not part of this folk culture. The Jacksonian movement was a case in point. To easterners, Andrew Jackson looked and sounded like a Democrat. But in his own culture, his rhetoric had a very different function. Historian Thomas Abernethy observes that Andrew Jackson never championed the cause of the people; he merely invited the people to champion him. This was a style of politics which placed a heavy premium upon personal loyalty. In the American backcountry, as on the British borders, loyalty was the most powerful cement of political relationships. Disloyalty was the primary political sin.
Andrew Jackson’s political style was explicitly drawn from the borders of North Britain. He required his wards to read the history of the Scottish chieftains whom he deeply admired and made the models for his own acts. The memory of the great border captains continued to inspire leaders in the backcountry for many generations.10 This system of politics was nourished on its memories.
Andrew Jackson always remembered the stories that his mother told him about aristocratic oppression and the cruelties of rack-renting landlords in the old country.11 The result was a very strong tradition which John Roche has called “retrospective radicalism.” The folk memory operated as a powerful political amplifier when triggered by symbolic events.
There were many different ethnic groups in the backcountry. But it is interesting that this region never developed anything like the ethnic politics of Pennsylvania. For many generations, back-country politics were mainly a collision of highly personal factions and followings, rather than ethnic blocs or ideological parties or social classes. Charismatic appeals carried elections, which tended to be decided on questions of personal style.
Voting qualifications were highly permissive in this region, and even more permissively enforced. One bizarre bylaw in the borough of Campbellton, North Carolina, allowed any man to vote who came within two miles of the polls on election day.12 Turnout, however, tended to be low. In those parts of the Virginia backcountry where elections were held, participation was commonly in the range of 15 to 25 percent—the lowest in British America before 1776.13
This polity was in part the consequence of frontier conditions—of sparse settlements and a new territory. But it also reflected a political spirit which had existed on the borders of North Britain.
Backcountry Freedom Ways:
The Border Idea of Natural Liberty
The backsettlers, no less than other colonists in every part of British America, brought with them a special way of thinking about power and freedom, and a strong attachment to their liberties. As early as the middle decades of the eighteenth century their political documents contained many references to liberty as their British birthright. In 1768, the people of Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, declared, “We shall ever be more ready to support the government under which we find the most liberty.”1
No matter whether they came from the England or Scotland or Ireland, their libertarian ideas were very much alike—and profoundly different from notions of liberty that had been carried to Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The traveler Johann Schoepf was much interested in ideas of law and liberty which he found in the backcountry. “They shun everything which appears to demand of them law and order, and anything that preaches constraint,” Schoepf wrote of the backsettlers. “They hate the name of a justice, and yet they are not transgressors. Their object is merely wild. Altogether, natural freedom … is what pleases them.”2
This idea of “natural freedom” was widespread throughout the southern back settlements. But it was not a reflexive response to the “frontier” environment, nor was it “merely wild,” as Schoepf believed. The backcountry idea of natural liberty was created by a complex interaction between the American environment and a European folk culture. It derived in large part from the British border country, where anarchic violence had long been a condition of life. The natural liberty of the borderers was an idea at once more radically libertarian, more strenuously hostile to ordering institutions than were the other cultures of British America.
In 1692, for example, a British borderer named Thomas Brockbank, who had been born and raised in the county of Westmorland, sent a letter to his parents on the subject of natural liberty. “Honored parents,” he wrote, “liberty is a thing which every animate creature does naturally desire, yea and even vegetables themselves also seem to have a great tendency towards it. But man, the perfection of the vast creation, who is endowed with a rational soul, does more eagerly pursue freedom, because he has knowledge and can give a just estimate of the true value thereof.”3
In North Britain this idea of natural liberty as something which “every animate creature does naturally desire, yea and even vegetables themselves,” was rapidly in process of decay during the eighteenth century. But in the hour of its extinction, it was carried to the American back settlements, where conditions conspired to give it new life. The remoteness of the population from centers of government and the absence of any material necessity for large-scale organization created an environment in which natural liberty flourished.
A leading advocate of natural liberty in the eighteenth century was Patrick Henry, a descendant of British borderers, and also a product of the American backcountry. Throughout his political career, Patrick Henry consistently defended the principles of minimal government, light taxes, and the right of armed resistance to authority in all cases which infringed liberty.
In the first great issue that brought him to notice—the court case called the Parsons Cause—Patrick Henry amazed his audience in the backcountry courthouse of Hanover County, Virginia, by arguing that the King, in disallowing an obscure act of 1758, had “degenerated into a tyrant and forfeit[ed] all rights to his subjects’ obedience.”4 The tidewater gentry were astounded by this argument. An eyewitness on that occasion remembered that “amongst some gentlemen in the crowd behind me, was a confused murmur of ‘treason, treason!’” But the backcountry jury was “highly pleased with these doctrines.”5
The fame that Patrick Henry won by this address carried him to a prominent career in the House of Burgesses, where he made an even greater reputation by arguing that Virginia was too much governed, and by leading a crusade against the “spirit of favoritism” that lay at the center of Virginia’s oligarchical tidewater government.
He is even better remembered for his headlong assault upon
Patrick Henry gave classic expression to backcountry ideals of natural liberty. This great revolutionary leader, who is still remembered as a tribune of the people, was in f act a high-born backcountry gentleman whose forebears were closely related to powerful and highly cultivated North British families. Patrick Henry himself was the nephew of William Robertson, the Scottish historian and rector of the University of Edinburgh. He was also the cousin of Lord Brougham of Brougham Hall, Westmorland, the great English Whig reformer who was educated at Edinburgh, and whose home lay very near the North British border. Patrick Henry’s idea of natural liberty was itself a border folkway that took root in the American back settlements and still flourishes in the United States today. His mother described the American Revolution as another set of “lowland troubles.”
the Stamp Act, in a speech that threatened the King of England with tyrannicide: “Caesar had his Brutus,” he declaimed, “Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third …”—and he was stopped short by the tidewater gentry who had felt Henry’s lash upon their own backs. Patrick Henry went on to introduce the Virginia Resolves, which ended by declaring that all who dissented from his view of the question should be treated as an “enemy to this his Majesty’s Colony”—a classical expression of the intolerance for contrary opinions which was part of the backcountry’s idea of natural liberty.6
A decade later, Patrick Henry was a member of the first Continental Congress, and startled that body by arguing that as a result of the passage of Parliament’s Intolerable Acts, “Government is dissolved.” Henry insisted that “we are in a state of nature, sir!”7 Congressmen from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were as shocked as Virginia’s Burgesses had been. One described Patrick Henry as “in religious matters a saint; but the very Devil in politics.”8
In 1788, Patrick Henry led the opposition to the new national Constitution, primarily on the grounds that strong government of any sort was hostile to liberty:
When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object. We are descended from a people whose government was founded on liberty; our glorious forefathers of Great Britain made liberty the foundation of everything. That country is become a great, mighty and splendid nation; not because their government is strong and energetic, but sir because liberty is its direct end and foundation. We drew the spirit of liberty from our British ancestors; by that spirit we have triumphed over every difficulty. But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful empire. …9
These attitudes were broadly shared in Appalachia. “The Friends of Liberty will expect support from the back people,” Patrick Henry wrote in 1787. They got it.10
Patrick Henry’s ideas of natural liberty were not learned from treatises on political theory. His idea of a “state of nature” was not the philosophical abstraction that it had been for Locke. Thomas Jefferson said of Patrick Henry with only some exaggeration that “he read nothing, and had no books.”11 Henry’s lawyer-biographer William Wirt wrote, “Of the science of law he knew almost nothing; of the practical law he was so wholly ignorant that he was not only unable to draw a declaration or a plea, but incapable, it is said, of the most common or simple business of his profession, even of the mode of ordering a suit, giving a notice, or making a motion in court.”12
Patrick Henry’s principles of natural liberty were drawn from the political folkways of the border culture in which he grew up. He embibed them from his mother, a lady who described the American Revolution as merely another set of “lowland troubles.”13 The libertarian phrases and thoughts which echoed so strongly in the backcountry had earlier been heard in the borders of North Britain. When the backcountry people celebrated the supremacy of private interests they used the same thoughts and words as William Cotesworth, an English borderer who in 1717 declared: “ … you know how natural it is to pursue private interest even against that Darling principle of a more general good. … It is the interest of the Public to be served by the man that can do it cheapest, though several private persons are injured by it.”14
This idea of natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement. Deviance from cultural norms was rarely tolerated; opposition was suppressed by force. One of Andrew Jackson’s early biographers observed that “It appears to be more difficult for a North-of-Irelander than for other men to allow an honest difference of opinion in an opponent, so that he is apt to regard the terms opponent and enemy as synonymous.”15
When backcountrymen moved west in search of that condition of natural freedom which Daniel Boone called “elbow room,” they were repeating the thought of George Harrison, a North Briton who declared in the borderlands during the seventeenth century that “every man at nature’s table has a right to elbow room.” The southern frontier provided space for the realization of this ideal, but it did not create it.16
This libertarian idea of natural freedom as “elbow room” was very far from the ordered freedom of New England towns, the hegemonic freedom of Virginia’s county oligarchs, and the reciprocal freedom of Pennsylvania Quakers. Here was yet another freedom way which came to be rooted in the culture of an American region, where it flourished for many years to come.