Thanks to Sam and Phil, two of our readers, for suggesting the content of this article.
Sam J. September 19, 2016 7:33 PM EDT
In honor of our Highlanders
-From Sam J.
Clog Dancing On The Porch
How & Why I Shot My 1964 Clog Dance Film
This Gutenberg press book might interest you ....
-Phil B.
Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart
An excerpt from this lyrically bigoted book is extracted below. I encourage the reader to explore the balance of the text via the link provided above. The final chapter in the book begins with a discussion that should interest the postmodern reader or anyone that does not realize how mainstream the idea of servile industriousness as the penultimate social virtue of America was among the educated class. The Mountain People of Appalachia were regarded as commendably tragic freaks for choosing free-poverty over servile-plenty. The author does over simplify the origins of Appalachian people, but provides a valuable perspective, identifying with the proudest types.
“The unfortunate class known as poor whites in the South is descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants with 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 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 till with their own hands. Outside of the planters 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[Pg 357] yeomanry and by the thrifty Teutons such as flocked into the northern provinces. The demand for menials on the plantations was met, then, by importing bond-servants from Great Britain. These were obtained in three ways.—
“1. 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 petty delinquent order, such as were too lazy to work but not desperate enough to have incurred capital sentences.
“2. Boys and girls, chiefly from the slums of British seaports, were kidnapped and sold into temporary slavery on the plantations.
“3. Impoverished people who wished to emigrate, but could not pay for their passage, voluntarily sold their 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 they were subjected, their impotence before the law, the contempt[Pg 358] in which they were held by the 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. At a time when the laboring 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 white labor was deplorable. The former bond-servants were now freedmen, it is true, but freedmen shorn of such opportunities as they were fitted to use. Sprung from a more or less degraded stock, still branded by caste, untrained to any career demanding skill and intelligence, devitalized by evil habits 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 estate, for they were no longer forced into steady industry.
“The white freedmen generally became squatters[Pg 359] 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 “pine-landers” or “piney-woods-people,” “sand-hillers,” “knob-people,” “corn-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, doubtless realizing that if it were not for the blacks they would be slaves themselves.”
America in Chains
"In the United States people abolish slavery for the sake not of the Negroes but of the white men...When a century had passed since the foundation of the colonies, an extraordinary fact began to strike the attention of everybody. The population of those provinces that had practically no slaves increased in numbers, wealth and well-being more rapidly than those that had slaves...On the left bank of the Ohio (Kentucky) work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right (Ohio) with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other side it is honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank; the white man's intelligent activity is used for work of every sort. Hence those whose task it is in Kentucky to exploit the natural wealth of the soil are neither eager nor instructed, for anyone who might possess those qualities either does nothing or crosses over into Ohio so that he can profit by his industry and do so without shame." - Alexis De Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", Vol. I, Part II, Chapter Ten "The Three Races that inhabit the United States', 1838.
James, I am thankful, for my posterity, my ancestors removed to the west!