The Diffusion of Upland South Folk Culture 1790-1840

Abstract

To explain why the Backcountrymen, and not the Low Country inhabitants, led the westward migration across the Southern frontier, Newton has hypothesized that the Backcountry inhabitants were culturally preadapted to frontier life. Their Upland South culture, evolved in the Backcountry between 1725 and 1775 in the Lancaster to Augusta hearth (Fig. 1), later permitted them to preempt a million square miles of frontier in only a few decades. Upland South culture included such preadaptive traits as a diffuse settlement pattern offarmsteads and rural neighborhoods which allowed fewer persons to claim more territory; commonly-shared techniques of horizontal log construction permitted rapid assembly ofhouses, churches, and county courthouses; easily replicated economic, religious, and political infrastructure of crossroad hamlets, independent churches, and county seat towns; and a generalized stockman-farmer-hunter with a productive and food-and-feed complex and an extreme adaptability with regard to their commercial crop. (1 ) Although the Upland South model accurately depicts the dispersal of these cultural traits across space and through time, this useful model does not fully explain why the Upland Southerners, dubbed the by historian Frank Owsley, (2) dispersed so rapidly across the South, or why so few people claimed so much territory, or why families moved so frequently, or why the Backcountry agriculture and economy proved so adaptable to the Southern frontier. The Southern frontier contained extensive grassy areas, but much of the region was covered with hardwood and pine forests that posed a physical barrier to agriculture (Fig. 1). By superimposing Newton's boundaries of Upland South culture upon a map of natural vegetation in the eastern United States, one finds that the culture of the plain folk was largely confined to the Southern hardwood forests and Southern pine forests. (3) The dispersal of the Upland South plain folk followed