Appalachians and Race: the Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation.

Edited by John C. Inscoe. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2000. Pp. [viii], 330. $34.95, ISBN 0-8131-2173-6.)

Once upon a time, historians viewed antebellum Appalachian southerners as naturally democratic Anglo-Saxon subsistence farmers isolated from the plantation South--and its slave economy. Oppressed politically and socially by the planters, they hated both slaveholders and slavery. (Whether or not they hated slaves was thought to be moot, as it was believed that very few African Americans lived in the mountains.) When the Civil War came, these mountaineers voted as their ancestors had shot at King's Mountain, supporting both Union and abolition. Now it turns out that the mountains contained a wide range of societies, that they were not very isolated, that slavery was as basic to antebellum modernization as black workers would be to postwar mining and railroading, and indeed, that wartime political loyalty was rooted largely in economic relations between local elites and the slave South. After the war, some Appalachian whites accepted blacks as political partners, and others practiced a virulent racism. Accordingly, African American Appalachians lived very diverse lives, some finding surprising opportunities in work and politics, while others were bitterly oppressed.

In Appalachians and Race John C. Inscoe has compiled essays--some new, many originally published elsewhere and revised--that clearly establish this diversity. In his introduction to this valuable collection, Inscoe maps the debate between the old views of Appalachian exceptionalism and recent reinterpretations that apply to slavery and race. He cites pioneer African American historian Carter G. Woodson's classic analysis of race and racial attitudes in the mountains as perhaps the most influential statement of the traditional view ("Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America," Journal of Negro History, 1 [April 1916], 132-50). Woodson emphasized how Appalachian topography physically limited the development of a plantation slave regime, while white religious dissenters shunned the institution on ideological and moral grounds. Although Woodson certainly knew of the antebellum black presence in the mountains, his essay tended to reinforce then-popular stereotypes of Appalachians as very unusual southerners.

Although limited space precludes discussion of all eighteen of the book's essays, I will mention some of those whose arguments most directly develop recent scholarship's main themes. The collection begins with a 1986 article by Richard B. Drake that began the process of revising and refuting Woodson's views. Drake shows that slavery was widespread in the mountains, that mountain elites often held slaves, and that these elites, like other southerners, used political clout to stifle abolitionist dissent. Kenneth W. Noe's work on the modernization of southwest Virginia establishes that the expansion of slavery was inseparable from the arrival of railroads, which linked the region to the plantation South while creating a local elite whose position was based in slaveholding. Conversely, the labor requirements of the iron industry in Rockbridge County, Virginia, permitted the subject of Charles B. Dew's essay, slave forgeman Sam Williams, to use his indispensable skills and a task-based labor system to leverage high levels of autonomy for himself and his family. Joe William Trotter Jr. demonstrates how a strong sense of racial identity--as expressed in churches, fraternal organizations, and block voting--could be used as avenues to power in southern West Virginia coal towns, thanks to the state's "northern" suffrage laws. Gordon B. McKinney finds that in the Appalachian South in general, as long as blacks had the vote, mountain Republicans would offer them just enough political reward to keep their support while emphasizing issues more attractive to white voters.

But where traditional southern enmity to black autonomy dominated, opportunity ended. Ronald L. Lewis's study of coal mining in mountain Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, focuses on the convict lease system, entrenched because of coal operator power and Redeemer commitment to cheap government, property rights, and black subservience. Eastern Kentucky racial barriers, as Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee describe, made it almost impossible for blacks to establish themselves on the land, to the point where they were economically unable to maintain local networks supporting their poor; the result was heavy out-migration. Newly arrived blacks in mine or railroad towns might face mobs: while W. Fitzhugh Brundage uncovers close parallels between lynchings in the mountains and the Deep South in cause and ritual, he also finds that the intent in the mountains was to erect barriers to African American migration into previously white industrializing towns.

In sum, the essays collected in this volume serve as ample demonstration that historians should be wary of oversimplifications and stereotypes when characterizing the complex relationship between Appalachians and race.

RALPH MANN
University of Colorado