The Black South and White Appalachia

Abstract

Observers seemed to be depicting slave conditions in antebellum South. One minister found people the worst housed, worst fed, most ignorant, most immoral of any he had encountered. Others stressed presence of homes that were mere hovels, of windowless log cabins with only one or two rooms. They told of a religious people, but one who believed in spells and witchcraft. Some writers termed food deplorable and speech patterns difficult to understand. Lazy, shiftless men and hard-working women inhabited this world. Their melancholy folk songs with origins across ocean helped to lighten burdens of everyday life and served as an emotional outlet. It was a closed, peculiar society.' Yet these words were not written about blacks in slavery. Instead, these observers were describing Appalachian whites in half-century following end of Reconstruction. The fact that an important segment of population viewed two societies in a similar manner would have wideranging effects on both southern blacks and mountain whites. It would eventually result in formation of an image that allowed many latenineteenth-century reformers to turn their backs on ex-slaves, as they told themselves that Appalachia needed aid as well. To them, mountain society differed from black society in only one important respect -it was white. That, however, was crucial difference. From 1870 to 1905 feuds stimulated interest in Appalachian area. Family-oriented violence focused attention on complex interplay of law and lawlessness, romance and sordidness, honor and deceit, and became eagerly read front-page copy. The region was discovered for outside world by literary figures; then sociologists, folklorists, geographers, historians,