Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

Harry M. Claudill

• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786252005
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"At the time it was first published in 1962, it framed such an urgent appeal to the American conscience that it actually prompted the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia.Caudill's study begins in the violence of the Indian wars and ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. Two hundred years ago, the Cumberland Plateau was a land of great promise. Its deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands. The surrounding mountains were teeming with game and covered with valuable timber. The people who came into this land scratched out a living by farming, hunting, and making all the things they need-including whiskey.The quality of life in Appalachia declined during the Civil War and Appalachia remained "in a bad way" for the next century. By the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Appalachia had become an island of poverty in a national sea of plenty and prosperity. Caudill's book alerted the mainstream world to our problems and their causes. Since then the ARC has provided millions of dollars to strengthen the brick and mortar infrastructure of Appalachia and to help us recover from a century of economic problems that had greatly undermined our quality of life."-Print ed.

PART I — The Wilderness Seed

CHAPTER ONE — Our Disinherited Forebears

SYSTEMATIC and orderly migration onto the shores of North America began, as every schoolboy knows, in the early 1600s and persisted thereafter at an ever-rising tempo for more than three hundred years. Europeans came to the New World for many reasons and under a great diversity of circumstances. In New England whole families came from England and settled small but entire villages. A shipload of settlers was likely to contain representatives from a dozen crafts. Thus a community life sprang up which was patterned closely after the social order from which the people had migrated. Some of the settlers came to avoid religious inhibitions, some were adventurers in quest of fame, and others were seeking political freedom and economic opportunity not to be found in Europe. But, for whatever reasons, they came freely and willingly. These essential premises are evidenced by the fact that, within thirty years after the first settlements, a considerable number of chartered towns had sprung up over a wide area in New England. More often than not the newcomer to these Northern shores brought his wife and a steadily augmenting number of children. Most of the settlers were from the middle class, and not a few were landed gentry, perhaps in most instances sons whose inheritance was insufficient to maintain them in the Island Kingdom. Even the similarity of climate contributed to perpetuation of a minuscule England along these rockbound coasts. Thus it turned out that the foundations were laid for a cohesive, well organized and disciplined society. This society, as it grew and strengthened, was able to clear the forests, sow the fields, build the towns and then the cities which were to become the powerhouses of American industry and civilization.

Essentially, this is the schoolboy conception of the origins of America, and when applied to New England it is doubtless true as a generalization.

New England was settled by farmers and villagers, but the climate and soil of the Southland did not entice such settlers. The economic value of the Southern region was discovered by planters, and there a plantation society was established and nurtured. As Europeans became habituated to nicotine, the demand for tobacco expanded at an astronomical rate. Tobacco was a cash crop and producers sought to manufacture it from the soil in the most efficient and least expensive way. Thus there grew up along the tobacco coasts a spangle of plantations, the majority originally quite small, embracing at most a few thousand acres. Slaves were imported from Africa to work the land, and then more slaves and still more. But so rapidly did the demand for the product grow that not even by the mightiest exertions could the slave traders keep up with the demand for black field hands. As the plantation economy strengthened and as the cotton plant appeared in the same regions, the labor shortage became acute and the planters turned to the teeming cities of England.

The cities and greater towns of Britain were not places of beauty or comfort for anyone in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—not even for the most favored classes. And for many—indeed, for most—they were nauseous hell holes of crime and venality. The streets were unlighted by night and swarmed with footpads, pickpockets, thieves, robbers and prostitutes at all hours. Hideous open sewers contaminated air and water and helped to make life both unpleasant and short. Constables were able to maintain only a semblance of order in such a setting, even though, with the help of the assize judges, gibbets and scaffolds were seldom bare of their grisly fruit. It was an age in which a child of seven could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread; an age in which the father of a large brood of children could be locked in a cell for life if he was so unfortunate as to incur debts which he could not pay. It was also an age in which many men were slain in perilous occupations, and in which many others went to the scaffold or died in military service or of recurring plagues. It was an age in which countless mothers died of “childbed fever” and other complications arising from pregnancy. These and many other factors resulted in great hordes of orphans, who roamed the streets of towns and cities and the countryside itself, and whose care and protection the Crown was wholly unprepared to assume.

It was to these orphans and to the debtors’ prisons which the labor hungry planters of the Southern coasts turned. Parliament wanted to get rid of these social outcasts, who so proliferated and burdened the respectable classes of England, and the agents of the plantation owners were able to paint glowing pictures of the wonderful new world waiting beyond the Atlantic, where the weather was sunny and where men might perform honest labor under wholesome conditions. The inevitable result was a series of Parliamentary acts making it possible to transport street orphans, debtors and criminals to the New World, their transportation costs to be paid by the planters. Of course, these wretched outcasts were obliged by law to repay the generous planter with the sole commodity they could produce—their labor. The period of indentureship was usually seven years, though sometimes it was much longer.

And so for many decades there flowed from Merry England to the piney coasts of Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas a raggle-taggle of humanity—penniless workmen fleeing from the ever-present threat of military conscription; honest men who could not pay their debts, pickpockets and thieves who were worth more to the Crown on a New World plantation than dangling from a rope, and children of all ages and both sexes, whose only offense was that they were orphans and without guardians capable of their care.

Not all persons who came to the New World under such circumstances were brought legally, even by the loose standards prevailing at the time. Not all children who found themselves in a ship’s hold outward bound for Charleston were orphans. Gangs of thieves prospered in the sordid business of stealing or “nabbing” children for the plantations. In the parlance of their day they were called “kidnabbers,” a term later converted by Cockney English to “kidnapers.”

But the peril of kidnaping was not restricted to hapless boys and girls. Judging from an ancient song, adults, too, were shanghaied, and sometimes under truly agonizing circumstances:

“The night I was a-married,

And on my marriage bed,

There come a fierce sea captain

And stood by my bed stead.

His men, they bound me tightly

With a rope so cruel and strong,

And carried me over the waters

To labor for seven years long.”

It is apparent that such human refuse, dumped on a strange shore in the keeping of a few hundred merciless planters, was incapable of developing the kind of stable society under construction in the Puritan North. Instead of the hymn-singing pilgrim to whom idleness was the badge of shame, we must start with the cynical, the penniless, the resentful and the angry. Many of them died on the plantations under the whips of taskmasters. Some ran away and became pirates whose Jolly Rogers terrorized the oceans. A few, perhaps, rose over the heads and shoulders of their suffering fellows to become planters themselves. Others—and it is these with whom we are concerned—ran away to the interior, to the rolling Piedmont, and thence to the dark foothills on the fringes of the Blue Ridge. These latter were joined by more who came when their bonds had expired. And here we have the people—few in number, but steadily gaining recruits, living under cliffs or in rude cabins—who were the first to earn for themselves the title of “Southern mountaineers.”

Slowly, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, these backwoodsmen increased in number. Steadily, newcomers pushed in from the coastal regions and the birth rate must have been, as it still is, prodigious. Thus by 1750 or 1775 there was thoroughly established in the fringes of the Southern Appalachian chain the seed stock of the “generations” {*} whose descendants have since spread throughout the entire mountain range, along every winding creek bed and up every hidden valley. The family names found in eastern Kentucky today are heard over the entire region of the Southern mountains. They bespeak a peasant and yeoman ancestry who, for the most part, came from England itself and from Scotland and Ireland: Adams, Allen, Anderson, Baker, Begley, Boatwright, Brown, Burke, Cable, Callihan, Campbell, Caudill{*}, Collier, Collins, Combs, Cook, Cooper, Cornett, Day, Fee, Fletcher, Frazier, Freeman, Gilley, Gilliam, Hale, Hall, Hampton, Hensley, Holbrook, Halcomb, Huff, Ison, Knuckles, Langley, Lewis, Little, Long, Martin, Mason, May, Morgan, McIntosh, Miller, Moore, Noble, Nolan, Perkins, Pigman, Potter, Reynolds, Rose, Scott, Sexton, Shell, Shepherd, Sizemore, Smith, Spencer, Spicer, Stamper, Sturgill, Sumpter, Taulbee, Thomas, True, Turner, Ward, Watts, Webb, Wells, White, Williams, Workman, Wright.

The Antebellum South was filled with romantic legends in which handsome young men left baronial halls and came to the New World to establish spacious manor houses of their own and to preserve the chivalry and gallantry of Sir Walter Scott’s fantastic novels. Coats of arms were duly supplied to bolster these outlandish claims, and they hang today on thousands of walls, attesting to the hereditary splendor of imaginary ancestors. But, alas, in contrast the Southern mountaineer is by his very name fenced off from such pretensions, for his cognomen has come down with him from his first outcast ancestors on these shores and marks him indelibly as the son of a penniless laborer whose forebears, in turn, had been, more often than not, simply serfs.

It is conventional history that after Dr. Thomas Walker and a number of other explorers had entered the Kentucky country, Daniel Boone and James Harrod led the first crop of permanent settlers to found a fortress village called Harrodstown. But a realistic appraisal of the character of the men and women then gathering in the valleys of the Blue Ridge make it most likely that at least a scattering of backwoodsmen had preceded them into the region. By the time of the Harrodstown (now Harrodsburg) settlement, much of the pioneer society in this mountainous region had resided in the wilderness for three or four generations. They had already become thoroughly adapted to their environment. They had acquired much of the stoicism of the Indians and inurement to primitive outdoor living had made them almost as wild as the red man and physically nearly as tough. The white backwoodsman had learned, perhaps from the Cherokees, how to build cabins,{*} and had improved the structure by the addition of a crude chimney. His “old woman” could endure hardships and privation as well as the Indian squaw, and was far more fruitful. Having never been exposed to the delights of civilization, she was willing to follow her husband wherever wanderlust and a passion for untrammeled freedom might take him. And the mountaineer needed few implements and skills to live by kingly standards (to him) anywhere in the Appalachians, or in the rolling meadowlands beyond. He had learned to clear the narrow bottoms for the cultivation of Indian corn, squash, potatoes, beans and tobacco, and from the sale of skins and other forest products he had acquired an ax and the Pennsylvania “Dutch” rifle and lead and powder. Salt could be obtained at natural licks, and all other things essential to his well-being could be acquired in the forest.

Recently discovered archives from the files of the Royal Government of Virginia disclose that more than a generation before Walker’s expedition an exploring party sent out by the governor stumbled upon a family living near the present town of Pound, Virginia, on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau—some two hundred miles in advance of the westernmost forts. The family had survived on friendly terms with occasional bands of prowling Indians, and it is hardly likely that this wild frontiersman and his wife and children were the only ones to penetrate so far into the vast wilderness.

Be that as it may, the Piedmonters and Blue Ridge mountaineers had attained considerable numbers by the onset of the Revolutionary War, and, inspired by a folk memory of ancient wrongs endured at the hands of British Royal authority, they threw themselves into the war against the Crown. At the Battle of Kings Mountain their sharpshooters decimated the royalists and their strutting officers, and won for themselves the gratitude of the Continental Congress. When the war ended, the new nation was unable to pay its heroes the wages they had earned, so, when the disorders of the Confederation were past, Congress promptly provided for the allotment of “western lands” to the unpaid veterans.

The lure of free land was certainly a powerful magnet which attracted many mountaineers deeper into the hinterland of the range, and a few of them farther westward into the “open country.” But it must not be supposed that the enticement of land ownership was the most important cause of the new westward migration. While the population was sparse, indeed, by modern standards, these wild woodsmen had begun to yearn for escape from a land so crowded that neighbors could be found within a few miles of the cabin door. They had “gone wild” in the still solitudes of their forests, and they hungered for new expanses of virgin wilderness where their lives might be unrestricted by even the frail inhibitions imposed by the meager society that had coalesced around them. It was largely for this reason that, in the years after the close of the Revolution, the mountaineers began to move westward in ever-increasing numbers.

Much of the western migration within the mountains was determined quite by accident. The few existing trails had been worn by wild animals and the occasional bands of wild men who hunted them. “Long hunters” had prowled through much of the western Appalachians before the general westward migration began. Nevertheless, it was essentially unexplored country, and the usual newcomer simply strapped his few possessions onto the back of a mule or horse and, with wife and children plodding behind, crossed the hills, creeks and valleys until he found an area which suited his fancy.

A number of factors may have influenced a newcomer’s decision to stop, but it is almost certain that the most important consideration was the availability of game and of soil that could be easily cleared for a corn patch. I remember talking to an aged mountaineer who explained how his ancestors had chanced to settle near the mouth of Turkey Creek in Letcher County. His grandfather as an old man had recounted the tale to him. After passing through the dense forests for many days, they came to a place “whar they had been a big forest fire. Hit had burnt down all the big timber trees. Hit was in the early spring of the year, and young cane sprouts was a-growin’ up everywhar wild amongst the stumps and dead trees. And Pap said, ‘We’ll stop here and dig up the cane and plant corn.’ And so that’s how we happened to be here instead of sommers else and our folks have ben here ever since. Besides, they was a-plenty of game, and while us young-’uns and the women put in the corn, Pap was able to hunt and kill a-plenty of fresh meat.”

This venerable mountaineer also explained one of the cogent reasons why his ancestors had moved into this new region two or three hundred miles from their starting place. His grandfather had told him “game was skase in North Kerliner, and so we just follered the game track into Kentucky.”

So it is clear that the people who settled the Kentucky mountains were not inspired Europeans determined to cross the dangerous oceans and found a citadel of religious and economic freedom in the New World. They were native North Americans with deeply engrained mores, habits and social outlook. The Kentucky mountaineer, as a type, was already thoroughly established. He had simply moved over a few hundred miles to find unplowed creek bottoms, a more plentiful supply of game, and to get away from his neighbors.

The migration into the virgin Kentucky mountain wilderness continued at a steady pace for about twenty-five years after 1787. Steadily, the fresh valleys filled with people until about 1812, when the flow of newcomers began to decline. At that time the country was by no means filled with people, in any modern sense of the word; but over most of the region the backwoodsman could find neighbors within five or ten miles of his cabin. Though the influx from the east diminished, it did not cease, but continued sporadically until about 1830. By that year all the parent stock of the basic population had arrived, and few settlers came into the region after that date.

CHAPTER TWO — A Harsh New Land Becomes Home Sweet Home

WITHIN the span of years mentioned in the last chapter, the Blue Ridge mountaineer had become a farmer, dependent upon crops and herded livestock rather than the forests for his livelihood, and willing, in some measure at least, to break with the old, unstable frontier tradition of hunting and Indian-style agriculture. Society in the Blue Ridge had undergone softening refinements, and there were few large tracts of new land to be found in the western moun...