14 - Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Our Southern Highlanders is a captivating memoir by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and librarian, who shares his profound experiences and cultural insights from his time in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Narrated by Meredith Womac Cook, this work offers a unique glimpse into a bygone era, though readers should be aware that it contains some offensive language and overt racism reflective of its time and setting.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section fourteen of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The law of
the wilderness. It is only a town dream ballegory that
represents nature as a fond mother suckling her young upon
her breast. Those who have lived literally close to wild nature,

(00:23):
nor for a tyrant void of pity and of mercy,
from whom nothing can be wrong without toil and the
risk of death. To all pioneer men, to their women
and children too. Life has been one long, hard, cruel
war against elemental powers. Nothing else than warlike arts, nothing

(00:44):
short of warlike hazards, could have subdued the beasts and
savages felt the force, and made our land habitable for
those teeming millions who can exist only in the state
of mutual dependence and cultivation. The first life, yes, and
of pioneering, was self reliance. Provide with thine own arm,

(01:05):
said the wilderness, against frost and famine and skulking foes,
or thou shalt surely die. But there were compensations, as
the School of the Woods was harsh and stern, so
it brought up sons and daughters of lion Heart and
its reward to those who endured was the most outright

(01:25):
independence to be had on earth. No king was so
irresponsible as the pioneer, no czar so absolute as he.
It needed no martyr spirit in him to sing, I
am the master of my fate, I am the captain
of my soul. We have seen that the Appalachian region

(01:46):
was peculiar in this, that good bottom lands were few
and far between. So our mountain farmers were cut off
more from the world and from each other, were thrown
still more upon their individual resources than other pioneers. By compulsion,
their self reliance was more complete. Hence their independence grew
more haughty, their individualism more intense, And these traits, exaggerated

(02:12):
as they were by force of environment, remained unweakened among
their descendants to the present day. Here, then, is the
key to much that is puzzling and Highland character. In
the beginning, isolation was forced upon the mountaineers. They accepted
it as inevitable and bore it with stoical fortitude, until

(02:32):
in time they came to love solitude for its own
sake and to find compensations in it for lack of society.
Says a Native writer, Miss Emma Miles in a clever
and illuminating book on the Spirit of the Mountains. We
who lived so far apart that we rarely see more
of one another than the blue smoke of each other's chimneys,

(02:55):
are never at ease without the feel of the force
on every side. Room to breathe, to expand, to develop,
as well as to hunt and to wander at will.
The nature of the mountaineer demands that he have solitude
for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing room for
his eagle heart. Such feelings, such longing. Most of us

(03:18):
have experience in passing moods, but in the highlander, it
is a permanent state of mind, sustaining him from the
cradle to the grave to enjoy freedom and air and
elbow room. He cheerfully puts aside all that society can offer,
and stints himself and bears adversity with a calm and
steadfast soul. To be free, unbeholden, lord of himself and

(03:42):
his surroundings. That is the wine of life to a mountaineer.
Such a man cannot stand it to be bossed around.
If he worked for another, it must be on a
footing of equality poverty may oblige him to take a
turn in some public works, by which he means any
job where many men work together, such as lumbering or

(04:03):
railroad building, but he must be handled with more respect
than has shown common laborers elsewhere. At a sharp order
or a curse from the foreman, he will flare back,
that's enough out of you, and immediately he will drop
his tools. Generally, he will stay on a job just
long enough to earn money for immedia needs. Then back

(04:25):
to the farm he goes. Bear in mind that in
the Mountains every person has accorded the consideration that his
own qualities entitle him to, and no whit more. It
has always been so. Our Highlanders have neither memory nor
tradition of ever having been herded together, lorded over, persecuted,

(04:45):
or denied the privileges of free men. So even within
their clans there is no servility, nor any headship by
right of birth. Leaders arise when needed only by virtue
of acknowledgability and efficiency. In this respect there is no
analogy whatever to the clan system of ancient Scotland to
which the loose social structure of our own Highlanders has

(05:08):
been compared. We might expect such fiery individualism to cool
gradually as population grew denser, but oddly enough, crowding only
intensifies it. In the shy backwoodsman. Neighborliness has not grown
in the mountains. It is on the wain. There are
today fewer log rollings and house raisings, fewer husking bees

(05:31):
and quilting parties and in former times, and no new
social gatherings have taken their place. Our mountain farmer, seeing
all arable land taken up and the free range ever narrowing,
has grown jealous and distrustful, resenting the encroachment of too
many sharers in what once he felt was his own
unfenced domain. And so it has come about that the

(05:55):
very quality that is his strength and charm as a
man is stocked unch individualism is proving his weakness and
reproach as a neighbor and citizen. The virtue of a
time outworn has become the vice of an age new born.
The mountaineers are nonsocial as they stand today, each man

(06:16):
fighting for his own hand with his back against the wall.
They recognize no social compact. Each one is suspicious of
the other, except as kinsmen or partisans. They cannot pull together.
Speak to them of community of interests, Try to show
them the advantages of cooperation, and you might as well
be proffering advice to the north Star. They will not

(06:40):
work together a zealously even to improve their neighborhood roads,
each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage
over himself or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs
fail to organize unions or grangers among them because they
simply will not stick together. Miss Miles says of her people,

(07:02):
the italics are my own. There is no such thing
as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together and
a man as friends, but not as a body of men.
Our men are almost incapable of concerted action unless they
are needed by the government. Between blood relationship and the
federal government, no relations of master and servant, rich and poor,

(07:23):
learned and ignorant, employer and employee are interposed to bind
society into a whole. The mountaineers must awake to a
consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the
highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, our nature is one,
our hopes, our loves our daily life the same we

(07:45):
are yet of people asleep, a race without knowledge of
its own existence. This condition is due to the isolation
that separates the mountaineer from all the world but his
own blood and kin, and to the consequence and utter
simplicity of social relations. When they have established the unity
of thought corresponding to their homogeneity of character, then their

(08:09):
love of country will assume of practical form. And then
indeed America, with all her peoples, can boast no stronger
sons than these same mountaineers. To the highlanders of four
states here mentioned should be added all those of Old Virginia,
West Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, making an aggregate today of

(08:29):
close on four million souls. Together, they constitute a distinct people.
Not only are they all closely akin in blood, in
speech and ideas, in manners, in ways of living, but
their needs their problems are identical throughout this vast domain.
There is no other ethnic group in America so unmixed

(08:51):
as these mountaineers, and so segregated from all others. And
the strange thing is that they do not know it.
Their isolation and is so complete that they have no
race consciousness at all. In this respect, I can think
of no other people on the face of the earth
to which they may be likened. As compensation for the

(09:12):
peculiar weakness of their social structure, the Hollanders display an
undying devotion to family and kindred. Mountaineers everywhere are passionately
attached to their homes. Tear away from his native rock,
your Switzer, your Tyrolean, your Basque, your Montenegrin, and all
alike are stricken with homesickness beyond speech or cure. At

(09:35):
the first chance, they will return, and thenceforth will cling
to their patrimonies. However poor these be, so too are
men of the Appalachians. I went down into the valley once,
and I declare, and I saltered peers like the rain
breath enough to go around with all them people and

(09:57):
the water don't do a body no good. And you
can eat hardy nor sleep good at nights. Of course,
they pay big money down there, But i'd a heap
site rather catch me a big old coon for his hide. Boys,
I did hone for my dog Fiddler, and the times
we'd have a hunting, and the trout fishing, and the
smell of the woods, and nobody Boston and jourin at all.

(10:22):
I'm a hillbilly, all right, and I needn't to glory
their old flat lands. To me, domestic affection is seldom
expressed by the mountaineers, not even by motherly or sisterly kisses.
But it is very deep and real for all that.
In fact, the ties of kinship are stronger with them,
and extend to remoter degrees of consanguinity than with any

(10:44):
other Americans that I know. Here again we see working
the old feudal idea and anachronism, but often a beautiful one.
In this bustling commercial age, our hived and promiscuous life
in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith
and kin. God gives us our relatives, sighs the modern,

(11:07):
But thank God we can choose our friends. Such words
would strike a mountaineer deep with horror. Rather would he
go the limit of Stephenson's saint ives. If it is
a question of going to hell, go to hell like
a gentleman with your ancestors. When the wilderness came to
be settled by white men, courts were feeble to perility,

(11:29):
and every man was a law unto himself. Many hard
characters came in with the pioneers, bad neighbors, arrogant, thievish bold.
As society was not organized for mutual protection, it was
inevitable that cousins should look to cousin for help and
time of trouble, so arose the clan, the family league.

(11:51):
And as things change very slowly in the mountains, we
still have clan loyalty outside of and superior to the law.
My family right or wrong is a slogan to which
every highlander will rise with money or arms in hand,
and forward he will lay down his last dollar, the
last drop of his blood. There is scarce any limit

(12:14):
to which this fealty will not go. Your brother or
cousin may have committed a crime that shocks you, as
it does all other decent citizens. But will you give
him up to the officers and testify against him. Not.
If you are a mountaineer, you will hide him out
in the laurel, carry him food, keep him posted, help
him to break jail, perjure yourself for him in court,

(12:38):
anything everything to get him clear. We see here a
survival very real and widespread in this twentieth century Appalachia,
of a condition that was general throughout the Scotch Highlands
in the far past. The great virtue of the highlander,
says Lecky, was his fidelity to his chief and to

(13:00):
his clan. He took the place of patriotism and of
loyalty to his sovereign. In the reign of James the Fifth,
an insurrection of Clan Chattin having been suppressed by Murray.
Two hundred of the insurgents were condemned to death. Each one,
as he was led to the gallows, was offered a
pardon if he would reveal the hiding place of his chief,

(13:23):
But they all answered that were they acquainted with it,
no sort of punishment could induce them to be guilty
of treachery to their leader. In seventeen forty five, the
house of Macpherson of Clooney was burnt to the ground
by the King's troops. A reward of one thousand pounds
was offered for his apprehension. A large body of soldiers

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was stationed in the district, and a step of promotionless
promise to any officer who should secure him. Yet for
nine years the chief was able to live concealed on
his own property in the cave which his klansmen dug
for him during the night, and though upwards of one
hundred persons nervous place of retreat, no bribe or menace

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could extort the secret. The same chivalrous self sacrificing fidelity
to family and the clan leader is still shown by
our own highlanders, as scores of feuds and hundreds of
criminal trials attest. All. This is openly and unblushingly above
the law. But let us remember that the law itself,

(14:26):
in many of these localities is but a feeble, dilatory
thing that offers practically no protection to those who would
obey its lighter. So in an imperfectly organized society, it
is good to have blood ties that are faithful unto death.
And none knows it better than he who has missed it,
he who has lived strange and alone in some wild,

(14:48):
lawless region where everyone else has a clan to back him.
So far as primitive society is concerned, we may admit
with the Scotch historian Henderson that the Klan system of
government was, in its way an ideally perfect one, probably
the only perfect one that has ever existed. The klansman

(15:10):
was not the subject a term implying some sort of conquest.
But the kinsman of his chief, obedience became rather a
privilege than a task, and no possible bribery or menace
could shake his fidelity. Towards the sassanoch or the members
of clans that feud with him, he might act meanly,

(15:31):
treacherously and cruelly, without check and without compunction, for there
he recognized no moral obligations whatever. But as a klansman
to his clan he was courteous, truthful, virtuous, benevolent, with
notions of honor as punctilious as those of the ancient knight.
The trouble with klan government was, as this same writer

(15:55):
has pointed out, that it was the very thoroughness of
its adaptation to early needs that made it so hard
to adjust to new necessities. In its principles and motives,
it was essentially opposed to the bent of modern influences.
Its appeal was to sentiment rather than to law or
even reason. It was a system not of the letter,

(16:18):
but of the spirit. The clan system was efficient only
within a narrow area. It gave rise to interminable feuds,
and it was inapplicable to the circumstances created by the
rise of modern industry and trade everywhere throughout Highland Dixie.
Today we can observe how clan loyalty interferes with the

(16:40):
administration of justice. When a case involving some strong family
comes up in the courts, immediately a cloud of false
witnesses arises. Men who should testify on the other side
are bribed or run out of the country before subpoenas
can be served. And every juror knows that his peace
and prosperity in future depends largely upon which side he espouses.

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To what lengths the hostility of a clan may go
and defying justice was shown recently in the massacre of
almost the whole court by the Alan clan at Hillsville, Virginia.
The news of that atrocity swept like wildfire throughout all Appalasia,
its history being reviewed today in thousands of mountain cabins.

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And it is deeply significant that a way out here
in Western Carolina, where no allan blood relationship prejudices men's minds,
that prevailing judgment of our backwoodsmen is that the State
of Virginia did wrong in executing any of the offenders
there is something back of it. You mark my words.

(17:45):
Say the country folk and the drummers, cattle buyers, and
others who pass this way from southwestern Virginia tell us
everybody up our way sympathizes with the Allens in some measure.
This morbid center is due to the spectacular features of
the Hillsville tragedy. If there be one human quality that

(18:06):
the mountaineer admires above all others, it is nerve. And
what greater display of nerve had been made in this
generation than for a few clansmen to shoot down a
judge at the bench, the public prosecutor, the sheriff, the
clerk of the court, and two jurymen then take to
the mountain laurel like Corsicans to the maquis, and defy

(18:28):
the arm power of the country. The cause does not
matter to a mountaineer. Our highlanders are anything but robbers,
for instance, And yet the only outsider who has ballad
sung in his memory throughout Appalachia is Jesse James, unless
Jack Donahue is one I do not know. Come all,

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you bold, undaunted men and outlaws of the day who'd
rather wear the ball and chain than work in slavery.
Said Donahue, doing comrades. If you'll prove true to me
this day, I'll fight with all my might. I'll fight
for liberty. Be of good courage, be bold and strong,

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be gallant, and be true this day, all fight with
all my might, says bull Jack Donahue. Six policemen he
shot down before the fatal ball pierced the heart of
Donahue and ocasioned him to fall. And then he closed
his struggling eyes and bid this world adieu. Come all

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you boys at fear no noise, and pray for Donihue.
No doubt, the mount minstrels are already composing ballads in
honor of the Allens. For it is a fact we
cannot blink at that the outlaw is a popular hero
of Appalasia today, as Rob Roy and Robin Hood were

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in the Britain of long ago. This is not due
to any ingrained hostility to lie order as such, but
simply to admiration for any man who fight desperately against
overwhelming odds. There is a glamour about bold and lawless
adventure that fascinates mature men and women who have never
outgrown youthful habits of mind. Whoever has reputation of being

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a dangerous man to cross. The marked man who carries
his life upon his sleeve, but bears himself as a
smiling cavalier. He is the only true aristocrat among a
valorous but primitive people. But this is only half an explanation.
The statement that our highlanders are not hostile to law

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and order must be qualified to this extent. They have
a profound distrust of the courts. The mountaineers not only
a born fighter, but is also litigious by nature and tradition.
A stranger will be surprised to find how deeply the
average backwards man is versed in the petty subtleties of
legal practice. It comes from experience. Court week draws, beer, crowds,

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and a circus. The mountaineer who has never served as
juror witness or principle in a lawsuit is a curiosity,
and this familiarity has bread secret contempt. I violate no
confidence in saying that many a mountaineer would hold up
one hand to testify his respect for the law while
the other hand hovered over his pistol. Why so, just

(21:28):
because his experience has taught him rightly or wrongly, But
he firmly believes it that courts are swayed by sinister
influences when important matters are at stake. Those influences are
clan money and clan votes. Hence, if he or a
kinsman be involved in lawn with a member of some
rival tribe, he does not look for impartial treatment, but

(21:52):
prepares to fight cunning with cunning, local influence with local influence.
There are no moral obligations here. All's fair in love
and war, and this is one form of war. If
the reader will take down his David Balfour and read
the intrigues, plots and counterplots of David's attorneys and those

(22:12):
of the Crown, he will grasp our own highlander's viewpoint
that mound courts are often impotent is due in part
to the limitations under which their officers are obliged to serve.
For example, in the judicial district where I reside, the
solicitor state's attorney receives nothing but fees, and then only

(22:34):
in case of conviction. It might seem that this would
stir him to extra zeal and perhaps it does, but
he has a large circuit. There are no local officials
specially interested in securing evidence for him while the case
is white hot. Everything spurs are defendant to get rid
of dangerous witnesses before the solicitor can get at them.

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Public opinion is extremely lenient toward homicide and manslayers, so
often get off scot free after the most faithful and
laborius efforts of the solicitor that he becomes discouraged. The sheriff, too,
serves without salary, getting only fees and a percentage of
tax collections. How this works in securing witnesses may be

(23:19):
shown by an anecdote. I looked out for my work
one day to see a neighbor striding swiftly along the
trail that passed my cabin. You seem in a hurry,
John Woods a fire. No, I'm dodging the sheriff. Whose
pig was it? Ah? He wants me as a witness
and a concealed weeping case one of your boys. Huh uh?

(23:44):
Nobody is I'm caring for? Then? Why don't you go?
I can't afford to. I'd have to walk nineteen miles
out of the railroad, pay seventy cents for a round
trip to the county site, pay my board there for
maybe a week, and then a witness don't get no
fee at all unless they convict. What does the sheriff

(24:05):
get for coming away up here? Thirty cents for each
witness he catches. You won't get me, mister Mann, not
if I know these woods since yesterday. Rarely the law
of Swain is hard on the solicitor, hard on the sheriff,
and hard on the witness too. Mountaineers place a low
valuation on human life. I need not go outside my

(24:28):
own habitat for illustrations. In our judicial district, which comprises
the westernmost seven counties of North Carolina, their present yearly
toll of homicides varies, according to counties, from about one
in one thousand to one in two thousand, five hundred
of their population, and ours is not a few districts,

(24:49):
nor are there any negroes to speak of. Compare these
figures with the rate of homicide in the United States
at large about one to eight thousand, three hundred, population
of Italy one to sixty six thousand, Great Britain one
to one hundred eleven thousand, Germany one to two hundred thousand.

(25:11):
And the worst of it is that no black handed
conspirators or warred gunmen or other professional criminals figure in
these killings. Practically all of them are committed by representative citizens,
mostly farmers. Take that back home and think what it means.
Remember too, that most of these murderers either escape with
light penal sentences or none at all. The only capital

(25:34):
sentence imposed in our district within the past ten years
was upon an Indian who had assaulted and murdered a
white girl. There is no red tape or procrastination about
that trial, the courthouse being filled with men who were
ready to lynch him under the judge's nose if the
sentence were not satisfactory. I said at the very outset

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of this book that our mountain folks still live in
the eighteenth entry. The progress of mankind from that age
to this is no heritage of theirs, And so in
order to be fair and just with these are backward kinsmen,
we must for the time decivilize ourselves to the extent
of going back and getting an eighteenth century point of

(26:18):
view as regards the valuation of human life. What was
that point of view? The late Professor Shaler of Harvard,
himself a Southerner, one time, explained the prevalence of manslaughter
amongst Southern gentlemen. His remarks apply with equal truth to
our mountaineers, for they, or of the poor they may

(26:39):
be in worldly goods, are by no means poor white trash,
but rather patricians, like the ragged but lofty chiefs and
clansmen of old Scotland. Nothing so surprises the northern people
as the fact that Southern men of good estate will,
for what seems to the distant onlooker trifling matters of dispute,

(27:00):
proceed to slay each other. Nothing so gravely offends the
characteristic Southern man as the incapacity of his brethren of
northern societies to perceive that such action is natural and
consistent with the rules of gentlemanly behavior. The only way
to understand these differences of opinion is by a proper
consideration of the history of the moral growth of these

(27:23):
diverse peoples. The Southerner has retained and fostered, in a
certain way, reinstated the medieval estimate as to the value
of life. In the opinion of those ages, it was
but lightly esteemed. It was not a supreme good for
which almost all else was to be sacrificed. But something
to be taken in hand and put at risk in

(27:45):
the pursuit of manly ideals. Modernism has worked to intensify
the passion for existence, until those who are the most
under its dominion cannot well conceive how a man, except
for some supreme duty to which he is pledged by
altruistic motives, can give up his own life or take
that of his neighbor. If these people of today will

(28:07):
but perceive that the characteristic Southerner has preserved the motives
of two centuries ago, If they will but inform themselves
as to the state of mind on this subject which
prevailed in the epoch when these motives were shaped in men,
they will see that their judgment is harsh and unreasonable.
It is much as if they judge the actions of

(28:29):
Englishmen of the seventeenth century by the changed standards of today.
Nor will it be altogether reasonable to condemn the lack
of regard of life which we find in the southern
gentleman as compared with his northern contemporary. We must, of
course reprobate in every way the evil consequences of this
state of mind. But the question as to the propriety

(28:50):
of that extreme devotion to continued mundane existence, which is
so manifest in our modern civilization, is certainly open to debate.
Irrational and brutal, as are the ways in which the
old fashioned gentlemen of the South shows that his regard
for his own honor or that of his household awaytes
his love of life. It must be remembered that the

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same condition existed in the richest ages of our race,
those which gave proportionately the larger share of ability and
nobility to its history. As long as men are more
keenly sensitive to the opinions of their fellows than they
are to the other goods which existence brings them, as
long as this opinion makes personal valor and truthfulness to

(29:35):
jewels of their lives, we must expect now and then
to have a degradation of the essentially noble motives. It
is undoubtedly a dangerous state of mind, but not one
that is degraded North American Review, October eighteen ninety the
motives of two centuries ago or the motives of present

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day Appalacia. Here the right of private way war is
not questioned outside of a judge's charge from the bench,
which everybody takes as a mere formality, a convention that
is not to be taken seriously. The argument exists that
when society, as represented by the state, cannot protect a
man or secure him his news, then he is not

(30:19):
only justified, but in duty bound to defend himself or
sees what is his own. And in the mountains, society
with the big ass is often powerless against the klan
with a bigger c and of Section fourteen read by
Bryce chrys Ohio