16 - 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 sixteen of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Who are the mountaineers?
The Southern Appalachian Mountains happen to be parceled out among
eight different states, and for that reason they are seldom
considered as a geographical unit in the same way their

(00:23):
inhabitants are thought of as Kentucky mountaineers or Carolina mountaineers
and so on, but not often as a body of
Appalachian mountaineers. And yet these inhabitants are as distinct and
ethnographic group as the mountains themselves are a geographic group.
The mountaineers are homogeneous so far as speech and manners,

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and experiences and ideals can make them. In the aggregate,
they are nearly twice as numerous and cover twice as
much territory as any one of the states among which
they have been distributed, But in each of these states
they occupy only the backyard and generally take back seats
in the councils of the Commonwealth. They have been fenced

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off from each other by political boundaries, and have no
such coherence among themselves as would come from common leadership
or a sense of common origin and mutual dependence. And
they are people without annals back of their grandfathers. They
have neither screed nor hearsay, born in the country, and
ain't never been out of it. Is all that most

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of them can say for themselves. Here and there one
will assert my four parents were principally Scotch or us
Bumbyarners bomb Gardeners was Dutch. But such traditions of a
far back foreign origin are uncommon. Who are these Southern Mountaineers?

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Whence came they? What is the secret of their belatedness
and isolation? Before the Civil War they were seldom heard
of in the outside world. Vaguely it was understood that
the Appalachian Highlands were occupied by peculiar people called mountain whites.
This odd name was given them not to distinguish them

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from mountain negroes, for there were practically no mountain negroes,
but to indicate their similarity in social conditions and economic
status to the poor whites of the Southern Lowlands. It
was assumed, on no historical basis whatever, that the Highlanders
came from the more venturesome or desperate element of the

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poor whites, and differed from these only to the extent
that environment had shaped them. Since this theory still prevails
throughout the South and is accepted generally elsewhere on its
face value, it deserves just enough consideration to refute it.
The unfortunate class known as poor whites in the South
is descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants with

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which England supplied labor to the Southern plantations before slavery days.
The cavaliers who founded and dominated Southern society came from
the conservative, the feudal element of England. Their character and
training were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not town dwellers,
but masters of plantations. Their chief crop and article of

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export was tobacco. The culture of tobacco required an abundance
of cheap and servile labor on the plantations. There was
little demand for skilled labor, small room anywhere for a
middle class of manufacturers and merchants, no inducement for independent
farmers who would too with their own hands. Outside of

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the planners and a small professional class, there was little
employment offered save what was menial and degrading. Consequently, the
South was shunned from the beginning by British yeomanry, and
by the thrifty teutons such as flocked into the northern provinces.
The demand for menials on the plantations was met then

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by importing bond servants from Great Britain. These were obtained
in three ways. One convicted criminals were deported to serve
out their terms on the plantations. Some of these had
been charged only with political offenses and had the making
of good citizens, But the greater number were rogues of
the shiftless and pettied delinquent order, such as were too

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lazy to work but not desperate enough to have incurred
capital sentences. Two boys and girls, chiefly from the slums
of British seaports, were kidnapped and sold into temporary slavery
on the plantations. Three impoverished people who wished to emigrate
but could not pay for their passage voluntarily sold their

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services for a term of years in return for transportation. Thus,
a considerable proportion of the white laborers of the South
in the seventeenth century were criminals or ne'er do wells
from the start. A large number of the others came
from the dregs of society. As for the remainder, the
companionships into which they were thrust, the brutalities to which

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they were subjected, their impotence before the law, the contempt
in which they were held by their ruling caste, and
the wretchedness of their prospect when released, were enough to
undermine all but the strongest characters. Few ever succeeded in
rising to respectable positions. Then came a vast social change.

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At a time when the labor and classes of Europe
had achieved emancipation from serfdom and feudalism was overthrown, African
slavery in our own Southland laid the foundation for a
new feudalism. Southern society reverted to a type that the
rest of the civilized world had outgrown. The effect upon

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white labor was deplorable. The former bond servants were now freedmen,
it is true, but freedmen shown and of such opportunities
as they were fitted to use. Sprung from a more
or less degraded stock, still branded by cast untrained to
any career, demanding skill and intelligence, devitalized by evil habits

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of life, densely ignorant of the world around them, these
the naturally shiftless, were now turned out into the backwoods
to shift for themselves. It was inevitable that most of
them should degenerate even below the level of their former state,
for they were no longer forced into steady industry. The

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white freedmen generally became squatters on such land as was
unfit for tobacco, cotton, and other crops profitable to slave owners.
As the plantations expanded, these freedmen were pushed further and
further back upon more and more sterile soil. They became
pinelanders or piney woods people, sand hillers, knob people, corn

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crackers or crackers, gaining a bare subsistence from corn planted
and tended chiefly by the women and children, from hogs
running wild in the forest, and from desultory hunting and fishing.
As a class, such whites lapsed into sloth and apathy.
Even the institution of slavery they regarded with cynical tolerance,

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doubtless realizing that if it were not for the blacks,
they would be slaves themselves. Now, these poor whites had
nothing to do with settling the mountains. There was then
and still is, plenty of wild land for them in
their native lowlands. They had neither the initiative, nor the
courage to seek a promised land far away among the

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unexplored and savage peaks of the western country. They were
brave enough folk and facing familiar dangers, but they had
a terror of the unknown. Being densely ignorant and superstitious,
the mountains, to those who ever heard of them, suggested
nothing but labourer's climbing amid mysterious and portentous perils. The

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poor whitesmen not Highlanders by descent, nor had they a
wit of the bold, self reliant spirit of our western pioneers.
They never entered Appalachia until after it had been won
and settled by a far manlier race, and even then
they went only in driblets. The theory that the southern
Mountains were peopled mainly by outcasts or refugees from old

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settlements in the lowlands rests on no other basis than imagination.
How the mounds actually were settled is another, and a
very different story. The first frontiersmen of the Appalachians were
those Swiss and Palatine Germans who began flocking into Pennsylvania
about sixteen eighty two. They settled westward of the Quakers

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in the fertile limestone belts at the foot of the
Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. Here they formed the Quaker's
buffer against the Indians, and for some time theirs were
the westernmost settlements of British subjects in America. These Germans
were of the Reformed or Lutheran faith. They were strongly
democratic in a social sense, and detested slavery. They were

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model farmers, and many of them were skilled workmen at trades.
Shortly after the tide of German immigrations set into Pennsylvania,
another and quite different class of foreigners began to arrive
in this province, attracted hither by the same lodestones that
drew the Germans, namely democratic institutions and religious liberty. These

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newcomers were the Scotch Irish or Ulstermen of Ireland. When
James the First in sixteen o seven confiscated the estates
of the Native Irish and six counties of Ulster, he
planted them with Scotch and English Presbyterians. These outsiders came
to be known as Scotch Irish because they were chiefly

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of Scotch blood and had settled in Ireland. The Native Irish,
to whom they were alien both by blood and by religion,
detested them as usurpers, and fought them many a bloody battle.
In time, as their leases in Ulster began to expire,
the scotch Irish themselves came in conflict with the Crown,

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by whom they were persecuted and evicted. Then the ulstermen
began emigrating in large numbers to Pennsylvania. As fraud says,
in the two years that followed the Antrim evictions, thirty
thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was
no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed
could reap the harvest. So it was that these people became,

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in their turn, our westernmost frontiersmen, taking up land just
outside the German settlements. Immediately they began to clash with
the Indians, and there followed a long series of border
wars waged with extreme ferocity, in which sometimes it is
hard to say which side was most to blame. One thing, however,

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is certain, if any race was ordained to exterminate the Indians,
that race was the scotch Irish. They were a brave
but hot headed folk, as might be expected of a
people who for a century had been planted amid hostile Hibernians.
Justin Windsor described them as having all that excitable character

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which goes with a keen minded adherence to original sin,
total depravity, predestination and election, and as seeing no use
in an Indian but to be a target for their bullets.
They were quick witted as well as quick tempered, rather visionary, imperious,
and aggressive, being by tradition and habit of board of

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people the Scotch Irish pushed to the extreme western fringe
of settlement amid the alleghenies. They were not over solicitous
about the quality of soil. When Arthur Lee of Virginia
was telling doctor Samuel Johnson in London of a colony
of Scotch who had settled upon a particularly sterile tract
in western Virginia, and had expressed his wonder that they

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should do so, Johnson replied, well, sir, all barrenness is comparative.
The Scotch will never know that it is barren. West
of the Susquehanna. However, the land was so rocky and
poor that even the Scotch shied at it, And so
when eastern Pennsylvania became crowded. The overflow of settlers passed

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not westward, but southwestward along the Cumberland Valley into western Maryland,
and then into the Shenandoah and those other long, narrow,
parallel valleys of western Virginia that we noted in our
first chapter. This western region still lay unoccupied and scarcely
known by the Virginians themselves. Its fertile lands were discovered

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by Pennsylvania Dutchmen. The first house in western Virginia was
erected by one of them, Joist Height, and he established
a colony of its people near the future site of Winchester.
A majority of those who settled in the eastern part
of the Shenandoah Valley were Pennsylvania Dutch, while the Scotch
Irish following in their train pushed a little to the

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west of them and occupied more exposed positions. There were
representatives of other races along the border, English, Irish, French, Huguenots,
and so on, but everywhere the Scotch, Irish and Germans predominated,
and the southwestward movement, once started, never stopped. So there

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went on a gradual but sure progress of northern peoples
across the Potomac up to Shenandoah, across the Staunton, the Dan,
the Adkin, until the western Piedmont and Foothill region of
Carolina was similarly settled, chiefly by Pennsylvanians. The archivists of
North Carolina, the late William L. Saunders, Secretary of State, said,

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in one of his historical sketches to Lancaster and York
Counties in Pennsylvania, North Carolina owes more of her population
than to any other known part of the world. He
called attention to the interesting fact that when the North
Carolina boys of Scotch Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch descent followed

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Lee into Pennsylvania in the Gettysburg Campaign, they were returning
to the homes of their ancestors by precisely the same
route that these ancestors had taken in going south. Among
those who made the long trek from Pennsylvania southward in
the eighteenth century were Daniel Boone and the ancestors of
David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun, Stonewall Jackson, and

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Abraham Lincoln. Boone and the Lincolns, although English themselves had
been neighbors in Burkes County. One of the most German
parts of all eastern Pennsylvania, So the western Piedmont in
the mountains were settled neither by cavaliers nor by poor whites,
but bio radically distinct and even antagonistic people who are

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appropriately called the Roundheads of the South. These roundheads had
little or nothing to do with slavery, detested the state church,
loathe tithes, and distrusted all authorities say that of conspicuous
merit and natural justice. The first characteristic that these pioneers
developed was an intense individualism, the strong and even violent

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independence that made them forsake all the comforts of civilization
and prefer the wild. Freedom of the border was fanned
at times in the turbulence and riot, but it placed
fourth at a happy time for this country, when our
liberties were imperiled. Daniel Boone first appears in history when
from his new home on the Yadkin, he crossed the

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Blue Ridge and the Unakas into that part of western
Carolina which is now eastern Tennis. He was exploring the
Awatoga region. As early as seventeen sixty. Both British and
French Indian traders and soldiers had been in this region
before him, but had left few marks of their wanderings.
In seventeen sixty one, a party of hunters from Pennsylvania

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and contiguous counties of Virginia, piloted by Boone, began to
use this region as a hunting ground on account of
the great abundance of game from them, and especially from Boone.
The fame of its attractions spread to the settlements on
the eastern slope of the mountains, and in the winter
of seventeen sixty eight sixty nine, the first permanent occupation

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of eastern Tennessee was made by a few families from
North Carolina. About this time there broke out in Carolina
a struggle between the independent settlers of the Piedmont and
the rich, trading and official class of the coast. The
former rose in bodies under the name of regulators, and
a battle followed in which they were defeated. To escape

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from the persecutions of the aristocracy, many of their regulators
and their friends crossed the Appalachian Mountains and built their
cabins in the Watauga region. Here. In seventeen seventy two,
there was established by these rebels the first republic in America,
based upon a written constitution, the first ever adopted by

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a community of American born freemen. Of these pioneers, in
the Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt says, as in
western Virginia, the first settlers came for the most part
from Pennsylvania. So in turn, in what was then western
North Carolina and is now eastern Tennessee, the first settlers

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came mainly from Virginia, and indeed in great part from
this same Pennsylvania stock Boone first visited Kentucky on a
hunting trip in seventeen sixty nine. Six years later, he
began to colonize it in flat defiance of the British
government and in the face of a menacing proclamation from

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the Royal Governor of North Carolina on the Kentucky River.
Three days after the Battle of Lexington, the flag of
the new Colony of Transylvania was run up on his
fort at Boonsborough. It was not until the following August
that these rebels of Kentuck heard of the signing of
the Declaration of Independence and celebrated it with shrill war

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whoops around a bonfire in the center of their stockade.
Such was the stuff of which the Appalachian frontiersmen were made.
They were the first Americans to cut loose entirely from
the seaboard and fall back upon their own resources. They
were the first to establish governments of their own in
defiance of king and aristocracy, says John Fiske. Jefferson is

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often called the father of modern American democracy. In a
certain sense, the Shenando Valley and adjacent Appalachian regions may
be called its cradle. In that rude frontier society, life
assumed many new aspects. Old customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished,
social equality acquired even more importance, and unchecked individualism. The notions,

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sometimes crude and noxious, sometimes just and wholesome, which characterized
Jeffersonian democracy, flourish greatly on the frontier, and have thence
been propagated eastward through the older communities, affecting their legislation
and their politics more or less according to frequency of
contact and intercourse. Massachusetts, relatively remote and relatively ancient, has

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been perhaps least affected by this group of ideas, but
all parts of the United States have felt its influence powerfully.
This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so
long as frontier life retains any importance can nowhere be
so well studied in its beginnings as among the Presbyterian
population of the Appalachian region in the eighteenth century. During

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the Revolution, the Appalachian frontier was held by a double
line of men whom we have been considering, one line
east of the mountains and the other west of them.
The mountain region itself remained almost uninhabited by whites, because
the pioneers who crossed it were seeking better hunting grounds
and farmsteads than the mountains afforded. It was not until

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the buffalo and elk and beaver had been driven out
of Tennessee and Kentucky, and those rolling savannahs were being
fenced and tilled that much attention was given to the
mountains proper. Then, small companies of hunters and trappers from
both east and west began to move into the highlands
and settle there. These explorers, pushing outwards from their cross

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mountain trails in every direction, found many interesting things that
had been overlooked in the scurry of migration. Westward. They
discovered fair river valleys and rich coves adapted to tillage,
which soon attracted settlers of a better class and so
gradually the mountain solitudes began to echo with a ring
of axes and the lowing of herds. By eighteen thirty,

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about a million permanent settlers occupied the southern Appalachians. Naturally,
most of them came from adjoining regions, from the foot
of the Blue Ridge on one side, and from the
foot of the Unakas or of the Cumberlands on the other,
and hence they were chiefly of the same frontier sock
that we have been describing. No colonists of farmers from

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a distance ever has been imported into the mountains down
to our own day. Deterioration of the mountain people began
as soon as population began to press upon the limits
of subsistence. At first, naturally the best people among the
mountaineers were attracted to the best lands, and there today
in the generous river valleys we find a class of

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citizens superior to the average mountaineers that we have been
considering in this book. But the number and extent of
such valleys was narrowly limited. United States topographers report that
in Appalachia as a whole, the mountain slopes occupied ninety
percent of the total area, and that eighty five percent
of the land has a steeper slope than one foot

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in five. So as the years passed, a larger and
larger proportion of the Highlanders was forced back along the
creek branches and up along the steep hillsides to scrabble
for a living. It will be asked why did not
this overplus do as other crowded Americans did, move west. First,

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because they were so immrored in the mountains, so utterly
cut off from communication with the outer world, that they
did not know anything about the opportunities offered new settlers
in far away lands. Moving west to them would have
meant merely going a few days wagon traveled down into
the lowlands of Kentucky or Tennessee, which already were thickly

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settled by a people of very different social class. Here
they could not hope to be anything but tenants or menials,
ruled over by proprietors or bosses, and they would rather
die than endure such treatment. As for the new lands
of the farther west. There was scarce a peasant in
Ireland or in Scandinavia, but knew more about them than

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did the southern mountaineers. Second, because they were passionately attached
to their homes and kindred to their own old fashioned ways.
The mountaineer shrinks some lowland society as he does from
the water and the climate of such regions. He is
never at ease until back with his home folks, footloose
and free. Third, because there was nothing in his environment

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to arouse ambition. The hard, hopeless life of the mountain
farm sustained only by a manager and ill cooked diet,
begat laziness and shiftless unconcerned. Finally, the poverty of the
hillside farmers and branchwater people was so extreme that they
could not gather funds to emigrate with. There is no

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industries to which a man might turn and earn ready money,
no markets in which he could sell a surplus from
the farm. So while the transmontane settlers grew rapidly in
wealth and culture, their kinsfolk back in the mountains either
stood still or retrograded. And the contrast was due not
nearly so much to any difference of capacity as to

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allow of nature that dooms and isolated and impoverished people
to deterioration. Beyond this, it was not to be overlooked
that the mountains were cursed with a considerable incubus of
naturally weak or depraved characters. Not lowland poor whites, but
a miscellaneous flotsam from all quarters, which, after more or

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less circling round and round, was drawn into the stagnant
eddy of highland society, as derelicts drift into the Sargasso Sea.
In the train of western immigration. There were some feeble
souls who never got across the mountains. These have been
described tersely as men who lost heart on account of
our broken axle. The anemic element thus introduced is less

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noticeable in Kentucky than in Virginia and the states further south,
for the reason no doubt that it took at least
two axles to reach Kentucky, but it exists in all
parts of Appalacia. Moreover, the vast roffs of the mountain
region offered harbords for outlaws desperadoes of the border, and
here many of them settled and propagated their kind. In

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the backwoods. One cannot choose his neighbors all around equal footing.
Hence the contagion of crime and shiftlessness spreads to decent
families and tends to undermine them. We understand, then, how
it happened in many cases that Highland families founded by
well informed and thrifty pioneers deteriorated into illiterate and idle triflers,

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all run down at heels Lincoln's family as an apt illustration.
His grandfather sold his Virginia farms for seventeen thousand dollars
and bought large tracts of land in Kentucky. But Abraham
Lincoln's father set up housekeeping in a shed, later built
a log hut of one room without doors or windows,

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although he was a carpenter by trade, then moved to
another cabin a little better. Tired of it, moved over
into Indiana and made his family spend the winter in
a half faced camp, where they were saved from freezing
by keeping up a great log fire in front of
the lean to through days and nights where the temperature
was far below zero. The Lincolns were not mountaineers, but

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they were of the same stock and were subjected to
much the same visuses. So the Southern Highlanders languished in isolation,
sunk in a rip van winkled sleep until aroused by
the thundercrash of the Civil War. Let John Fox tell
the extraordinary result of that awakening, the American Mountaineer, was discovered,

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i say, at the beginning of the war, when the
Confederate leaders were counting on the presumption that Mason and
Dixon's line was the dividing line between the North and South,
and formed therefore the plan of marching an army from
Wheeling in West Virginia to some point on the lakes,
and thus dissevering the North at one blow. The plan

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seemed so feasible that it is said to have materially
aided the sale of Confederate bonds in England. But when
Captain Garnett, a West Point graduate, started to carry it out,
he got no farther than Harper's ferry. When he struck
the mountains, he struck enemies who shot at his men
from ambush, cut down bridges before him, carried the news

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of his march to the Federals, and Garnett himself fell
with a bullet from a mountaineer's squirrel rifle at Harper's ferry.
Then the South began to realize what a long, lean,
powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern
Mountaineer stretched through its very vitals. For that arm helped
hold Kentucky in the Union by giving preponderance to the

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Union's sympathizers in the Bluegrass. It kept the East Tennesseeans
loyal to the man. It made West Virginia, as the
phrase goes, secede from secession. It drew out a hoard
of one hundred thousand volunteers when Lincoln called for troops,
depleting Jackson, count of Kentucky, for instance, of every male
under sixty years of age and over fifteen, and raised

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a hostile barrier between the armies of the coasts and
the armies of the Mississippi. The North has never realized,
perhaps what it owes for its victory to this non
slave holding Southern Mountaineer. President Frost of Berea College says
the loyalty of this region in the Civil War was
a surprise to both Northern and Southern statesmen. The mountain

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people owned land but did not own slaves, and the
national feeling of the revolutionary period had not spent its
force among them. Their services in West Virginia and East
Tennessee are perhaps generally known, but very few know or
remember that the whole Mountain region was loyal, except where conscripted.
General Carl Schuers had soldiers enlisted in the mountains of Alabama.

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And the writer has recently seen a letter written by
the Confederate Governor of South Carolina in which he relates
to General Hardy the troubles caused by Union sentiment in
the Mountain counties. It is pathetic to know that these
mountain regiments disbanded with no poet, or historian, or monument
to perpetuate the memory of their valor. The very flag

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that was first on Lookout Mountain and waved above the clouds,
was lost to fame in an obscure mountain home until
Bury discovered and rescued it from oblivion and destruction. It
may be added that no other part of our country
suffered longer or more severely from the aftermath of war.
Throughout that struggle, the mountain region was a nest for

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bushwhackers and bandits that preyed upon the aged and defenseless
who were left at home, and thus there was left
an evil legacy of neighborhood wrongs and private grudges. Most
of the Mountain counties had incurred the bitter hostility of
their own states by standing loyal to the Union. After Appomatics,

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they were cast back into a worse isolation than they
had ever known. Most unfortunately too, the federal government at
this juncture, instead of interposing to restore law and order
in the highlands, turned the loyalty of the mountaineers into outlawry,
as in seventeen ninety four, by imposing a prohibitive excise

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tax upon their chief merchantable commodity. Left then to their
own devices, unchecked by any stronger arm. Inflamed by a
multitude of personal wrongs, hapituated to the shedding of human blood,
contemptuous of state laws did not reach them. Enraged by
federal acts that impunged, as they thought and inalienable right

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of man, it was inevitable that this fiery and vindictive
race should fall speedily into warring among themselves. Old scores
were now to be wiped out in a reign of terror.
The open combat of bannered war was turned into the
secret ferocity of family feuds. But the Mountaineers of today

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are face to face with a mighty change. The feud
epoch has ceased throughout the greater part of Appalasia. A
new eradons everywhere. The highways of civilization are pushing into
remote mountain fastnesses, and prices are being installed. The timber
and the minerals are being garnered. The mighty water power

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that has been running to waste since these mountains rose
from the primal sea, is now about to be harnessed
in the service of man. Along with this economic revolution
will come inevitably good schools, newspapers, a finer and more
liberal social life. The Highlander, at last is to be
caught up in the current of human progress. End of

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section sixteen, read by Bryce chrys Ohio