Appalachia's Path to Dependency

Rethinking a Region's Economic History, 1730-1940

Paul Salstrom

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188393
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

The debate over the source of Appalachia's economic problems has been going strong since Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands appeared in 1963. Now a new study illuminates the region's plight, making a vital contribution to the understanding of this area's critical economic dilemma.

In Appalachia's Path to Dependency, Paul Salstrom examines the evolution of economic life over time in southern Appalachia. Moving away from the colonial model to an analysis based on dependency, he exposes the complex web of factors—regulation of credit, industrialization, population growth, cultural values, federal intervention—that has worked against the region.

Salstrom argues that economic adversity has resulted from three types of disadvantages: natural, market, and political. The overall context in which Appalachia's economic life unfolded was one of expanding United States markets and, after the Civil War, of expanding capitalist relations.

Covering Appalachia's economic history from early white settlement to the end of the New Deal, this work is not simply an economic interpretation but draws as well on other areas of history. Salstrom compares Appalachia with the Midwest at mid-nineteenth century, today's Appalachia with Third World countries, and the region with Japan.

Whereas other interpretations of Appalachia's economy have tended to seek social or psychological explanations for its dependency, this important work compels us to look directly at the region's economic history. This regional perspective offers a clear-eyed view of Appalachia's path in the future.

1

Early Settlement and Self-Sufficiency, 1730–1860

Precapitalist economies have an internal logic and solidity which should not be underestimated. . . . So long as the direct producers retained direct access to their means of [economic] reproduction, they would not voluntarily turn to specialization, unless there previously had been massive improvements in the security of the food supply. . . . [But on the other hand, direct producers] could, relatively easily, find themselves without access to the land required for their reproduction simply as a result of the demographic growth and parcelization of holdings which were the unintended outcomes of previous generations of peasants pursuing their individually rational patterns of reproduction and inheritance.

—Robert Brenner, “The Social Basis of Economic Development”

The settlement of North America, including the settlement of Appalachia, occasioned major examples of what Robert Brenner calls “massive improvements in the security of the food supply.” Between 1714 and 1775, for example, thousands of rent-racked flax and linen producers abandoned their tiny leaseholds in Northern Ireland and flooded across the Atlantic to America, where many or most of them “lit out for the territories” of that day. Their venturesome settlement of Older Appalachia multiplied their direct access to their means of economic reproduction.

But why, then, did their descendants eventually find themselves economically dependent on other American regions? Here the four main causes already mentioned in the Introduction bear repeating: (1) the expansion of population, (2) the depletion of resources, (3) the destruction attendant on the Civil War, and (4) federal homestead and banking legislation enacted during the Civil War.

How these four causes affected the various areas within Appalachia was determined largely by each area’s position in the sequence of the region’s settlement. And the sequence of settlement, in turn, was determined mainly by geography. As Frederick Jackson Turner once put it, early American settlers poured “their plastic pioneer life into geographic moulds.”¹

Appalachia’s permanent white settlement began in the late 1720s in the Shenandoah Valley and continued rapidly southwestward with little topographic obstruction, soon spilling over into the rest of the Valley of Virginia—into what is called the upper valley—and continuing with it in the same southwesterly direction. Those two fertile troughs, the Shenandoah and the rest of the Valley of Virginia, together extend for several hundred miles and at points they widen to sixty miles—encompassing a vast amount of land. But both valleys, underlain by limestone, proved so favorable for colonial agriculture that their first settlement wave peopled their vastness in little more than a single generation, by 1776.² This scale of settlement was only possible because natural increase and transatlantic migration raised population in the thirteen colonies more than threefold during that generation, from about 630,000 in 1730 to about 2,150,000 in 1770.³

Even so, that first wave of Appalachian settlement filled only the northern half of the Great Appalachian Valley—which continues south-westward as the Valley of East Tennessee, and then extends far into northeastern Alabama. By the time of the American Revolution, white settlement was well under way in East Tennessee, although not in northeastern Alabama.

Broadly defined (as it will be defined in this study), the Great Appalachian Valley includes not only the seldom-obstructed six-hundred-mile southwesterly course of its major trough but also the many similarly long and wide valleys that run parallel to it, mostly to its west. Land seekers soon spilled over into those parallel valleys—turning northwestward out of the Valley of Virginia, for instance, to enter the fertile valleys of the New River and its tributary the Greenbrier. Here, in the area that would later become southeastern West Virginia, the Big Levels of the Greenbrier Valley became an early center for cattle raising.⁴

Colonial Virginia applied stringent land-settlement laws, yet, even so, many of the official land titles issued by Virginia became targets for conflicting claims. Land-ownership questions grew particularly vexed in the Shenandoah Valley.⁵ Such manmade obstacles influenced the settlement pattern far less, however, than geography. In Kentucky, too, land titles often faced conflicting claims, yet many land seekers took their chances by passing northwestward to Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, located where Virginia joins Tennessee. When the Revolution ended in 1783, Kentucky contained only twelve thousand settlers, but by the first national census seven years later, their number had grown to about seventy thousand.

Meanwhile, other land seekers were not entering the Great Appalachian Valley at all but were bypassing its northern mouth (which is the Shenandoah Valley’s northern ingress) and traveling farther up the Potomac River. There they found rich land along the Potomac’s two headwater branches, especially along its south branch in what would later become part of northeastern West Virginia. Like the Big Levels of the Greenbrier Valley, the South Branch of the Potomac soon became a cattle-raising center.

By 1820 Appalachia contained almost half a million inhabitants—four-fifths of them in the benign valleys just described. Western North Carolina could also boast of some wide and fertile valleys, but these were harder of access and higher in altitude. North Carolina’s mountain section was settled both from the Carolina Piedmont to its east and from the Valley of East Tennessee to its west. In far southwestern North Carolina, some white pioneers appropriated fields that had previously been cultivated by Cherokees, and this occurred also in northern Georgia.⁶ Nonetheless, from 1800 through to the Civil War, Appalachian North Carolina contained only a third as many inhabitants as the better-endowed East Tennessee.

In Kentucky, migration at first left little residue in that state’s eastern mountain area, which acted mainly as an obstacle to settlement in the rest of state. By 1830 eastern Kentucky could not yet claim fifty thousand inhabitants. As for northern Georgia, little white settlement was allowed there until 1832—five years after gold was discovered in the area. White settlement was then allowed concurrently with the ousting of Georgia’s Cherokees.⁷

Those were still fringe areas, however. As of 1830, three-fifths of Appalachia’s population remained huddled together in Old Virginia’s long, fertile valleys and in the Valley of East Tennessee. As of the 1830 census, East Tennessee’s population overtook that of Appalachian Old Virginia, but West Virginia (counted here as though it were already a separate state) accounted for another one-fifth of the region’s total population, and West Virginia’s residence pattern was then still heavily weighted toward what would later (during the Civil War) become its border with its mother state. Thus as of 1830, about four-fifths of the region’s population was still concentrated in the Great Appalachian Valley, broadly defined.⁸

Early New England has recently been subjected to scores of case studies by practitioners of the “new rural history,” but that is not true of early Appalachia. Of the book-length new rural histories, only Robert D. Mitchell’s Commercialism and Frontier deals extensively with the very earliest period of settlement in an Appalachian area. It considers the Shenandoah Valley and finds that its first generation of settlers typically managed to sell less than one-tenth of their total production (hunting items included) but that “commercial tendencies were present from the beginnings of permanent settlement.” As the Shenandoah Valley’s population became “larger, more occupationally varied and credit-dependent . . . the proportion of goods for sale increased typically from one-third to one-half or more of total output.” Mitchell concludes that commercial tendencies were “the most dynamic element in the emerging pioneer economy.”⁹

This judgment is consistent with information about the area that later became West Virginia. Guns, for instance, were typical of the investments pioneers made not merely to provision their families but to acquire extra income by selling animal pelts. As of 1822, when pelts were still being traded at stores in the relatively rugged northwestern corner of Older Appalachia, rabbit skins sold for two cents each, raccoon skins sold for twenty cents, fox skins for fifty cents, deer skins for fourteen cents a pound, bear skins for $1.25, and otter skins for $3.00. That trade in peltry virtually disappeared there by 1830, however, as fur-bearing animals grew scarce.¹⁰

Some of Appalachia’s earliest whites were looking not so much for game as for ginseng, the medicinal root coveted by Americans who traded with China. Many early pioneers discovered such plentiful ginseng that its high exchange value could finance most of their store purchases. One merchant family in the Greenbrier Valley of Virginia (now of West Virginia) made only 2 percent of its sales in 1784 on a cash basis. Of its £906 ($4,403) worth of sales that year, 70 percent were paid for by ginseng root—at the rate of 2s. 6d. ($0,625) worth of store goods in exchange for each pound of the customers’ ginseng.¹¹ Thus this merchant family acquired almost two and a half tons of ginseng in 1784.

Although ginseng often grew scarce,¹² the forests and the early clearings continued to provide settlers with a very easy subsistence and extra income through livestock raising. By 1754 the Shenandoah Valley had become well known for its cattle.¹³ And prior to the revolutionary war, the practice of fattening cattle on corn had become common on the Big Levels along the Greenbrier River (near today’s Lewisburg, West Virginia) and also along the South Branch of the Potomac River. By the time of the Revolution, lean cattle were already being bought up by leading South Branch cattlemen so they could fatten them and drive them to market. As early as 1761, a herd of stall-fed cattle were driven from this vicinity to Pittsburgh and sold there to provision British troops.¹⁴

The herds of individual owners were not large by today’s standards. Partial surveys of western Virginia’s cattle holdings in the early 1770s reveal that the average herd contained about seventeen head and the average weight per animal was probably only about 375 pounds. Nonetheless, in the valley of the Potomac River’s south branch (in today’s Hampshire, Hardy, Grant, and Pendleton counties of northeastern West Virginia), cattle raising became more than merely a temporary pioneer expedient of extensive farming. Later it would be supplemented, but not replaced, by more intensive farming. The valley itself was intensively farmed for corn (maize), but the uplands also were relatively fertile and they offered such ideal grazing conditions that stock raisers were able to use the valley’s corn not only to carry cattle through the winters but also to fatten them for market. Furthermore, by 1785 progressive breeders on the South Branch were improving the quality of breeding stock there with cattle imported from Britain. This selective breeding, combined with better feeding, soon increased the average weight of South Branch cattle.

In the late 1790s, several South Branch cattlemen moved west, driving choice cattle with them and settling near present-day Chillicothe in the Scioto Valley of south-central Ohio. These cattlemen maintained contact with friends and relatives on the South Branch who initially provided a way station for cattle that were market bound eastward from the Scioto Valley.¹⁵ The first recorded cattle drive directly from that part of Ohio to eastern markets occurred in 1805.¹⁶

Meanwhile, a large absentee landowner reported in 1804 that most of the cattle then reaching the markets of Washington, Alexandria, and Baltimore originated in the valleys of the Monongahela River and its tributary the Cheat River (which included parts of today’s West Virginia counties of Preston, Tucker, Randolph, Barbour, Taylor, Harrison, Marion, and Monongalia). Later the Kanawha River valley (now in west-central West Virginia) became a major thoroughfare for stock drives eastward. According to a woman writing in 1823, the road along the Kanawha River was then “alive from morning till night, with people, horses, cattle, but principally hogs: myriads of hogs are driven this way annually, to the east. They commence driving in September, and from that [month] till Christmas, you can look out no time in the day without seeing a line of hogs.”¹⁷ In 1826, sixty thousand hogs went east to market along this Kanawha Turnpike, twenty-six thousand of them within the space of two autumn months.¹⁸

Robert D. Mitchell’s judgment that in the early Shenandoah Valley, commercial tendencies were “the most dynamic element in the emerging pioneer economy” is consistent with all of this continued commercialization westward, and also with evidence from an early period in the settlement of upcountry Carolina and Georgia. Thriving commercial activity during the eighteenth century in North Carolina’s Piedmont has recently been reconstructed in detail by Daniel B. Thorp, using the account book that a rural store-and-tavern-keeping family maintained from 1755 to 1775. The account book reveals few money transactions and yet mentions frequent export-import trips to Charleston, South Carolina—a five-hundred-mile round trip.¹⁹

Another newly studied ledger is one that was kept from 1782 to 1794 by a merchant in northeastern Tennessee’s present-day Hawkins County. Studying that ledger, Lucy K. Gump has found that “about 68 percent of the credit total was paid [to the merchant] in traditional barter items. Cash was named in only 7 percent of all payments; however, about 19 percent may have had a cash component.”²⁰ Most of that merchant’s customers paid him in skins, furs, iron, cattle, horses, or salt.

Lewis Atherton, after examining many country-store account books from the 1800–1860 period, wrote of highland farmers in the Carolinas and Georgia that “the barter record of their efforts in the field of production offers little evidence to sustain the popular impression that inhabitants of the Piedmont and mountainous regions of the South were shiftless and degenerate.”²¹

Thorp, Gump, and Atherton all describe a rural life in which cash was scarce and yet conside...