USA > West Virginia > Pendleton County > A history of Pendleton County, West Virginia > Part 40
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This region was occupied by a people that yields in impor- tance to no other element of the American nation. But to account for the American Highlander we must as usual glance across the Atlantic.
As the settlement of the Thirteen Colonies was taking its rise, the British government was confiscating the lands of the north of Ireland and repeopling them with Scottish im- migrants. In blood these people were a blending of Celt and Saxon with a dash of the Huguenot. They sprang from the yeomanry of the north of England as well as Scotland. The nobility was not represented in their ranks. Scotland has always been more democratic* than England, and the ten- dency of their Presbyterian faith was to raise an antagonism to monarchy and privilege. In the new home there was no mixing with the native population. Between the Presbyte- rian Scotch and the Catholic Irish lay an antagonism too deep even for friendship. The settlers prospered and their thrift brought them persecution. Since they were not of the communion of the Church of England, the British gov- ernment saw fit to burden their growing industries with op- pressive laws. To the number of 200,000 these Scotch-Irish fled across the sea to America. This host was ten times as large as the Puritan migration to New England, which took place a century before.
The older elements of the American population had been in no hurry to push into the mountains. New England was remote and had lands of its own to settle. The Dutch of New York were not numerous, and they were not greatly in- clined to rush away from their good farms along the Hudson and the Mohawk. The Quakers and certain of the German sects were opposed to war, yet certain to find it if they went far within the mountains. The Lowland South was inter- ested in the production of staples which they could not grow so readily in the mountian region nor so easily send them to
* See note on page 17.
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market. As for the poor whites of the Blue Ridge and the sandhills, these shiftless descendants of the convict element were as ill-fitted for rearing an empire on the Western fron- tier as would be a tribe of gypsies.
The Scotch-Irish landed chiefly at Philadelphia, a few ar- riving by way of Charleston. The coast lands were already occupied and the people of this belt were not especially cor- dial to what seemed to them a deluge of strangers. So the newcomers pushed inland to the frontier and spread upward and downward along the Alleghany valleys. They were by nature well suited to a pioneer life. The highlands were in some degree like the home they had come from, and they were withal hardy and resolute. It was quite as a matter of course that they should now take the forefront of the ad- vance of the American people toward the West. In this movement they were joined by some of the more venture- some spirits of the Cavaliers, the Puritans, the Germans, and the Dutch. They assimilated all who joined them, yet not without receiving an influence in return.
From this general blending issued the American High- lander. He was plain and undemonstrative, cool and calcu- lating, clear-eyed and level-headed, not outwardly affec- tionate, and not given to displays of emotion. He was much inclined to practical jokes, and his vein of humor was coarse in its makeup and rough on the edges. He was neighborly, yet would quarrel with his neighbor over mere trifles and be at outs with him for years. He would treat an enemy well, provided the enemy would give up. He was lacking in the graces of culture, and his cabins and towns in the wilderness were often untidy. The solitude of the wilderness also caused him to fall behind in the matter of education. Yet he was an overcomer by nature, and he proceeded to subdue the forest, the Indian, the Frenchman, and the Briton. The English government had to pay a good round price for its persecution of the Scotch-Irish. They were its hottest foes in the war of the Revolution, and they stood by the cause of independence almost to a man. They were the men Wash- ington knew would stand by him in case he were pushed to the wall.
Thus a new type of American was fashioned in the wilder- ness; a type more peculiar to the soil than any other. His struggle with wild men and wild nature rendered the man of the highlands quick to think and strong to act. He had to be practical, because almost his every need had to be supplied through his own resources. He leaned upon himself for counsel and his own experience was substituted for tradition. His positive traits made him not the most easy person to get
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along with, and as he acquired a scorn of older society, he became more or less at outs with the dwellers in the "back country" as he called the Atlantic lowland. This trait has proved very persistent. In the Revolution he was a patriot when the lowlander was often a tory. In the war of 1861 a very large share of the highlanders were stiffly opposed to secession, and in consequence the Appalachian region was a source of weakness to the Confederacy. This antagonism had much to do with the disruption of Virginia.
By dwelling on the threshold of the West, the American Highlander became the leading pioneer in the West, and the type of Americanism he did so much to fashion came to dominate all America from the Appalachians to the Pacific. The influence of this Americanism was speedily infusing a more democratic spirit into the institutions and usages of the Atlantic states. A good example of this reflex action is found in the history of the Virginia constitutions of 1829 and 1850.
It is significant that the six presidents that guided the American republic from 1789 to 1829 came all of them from the aristocracy of the old America, and that with the excep- tion of the two Adamses they were conspicuous among the "plutocrats" of their day. It is no less significant that the growth of the new Americanism was so rapid as to elect its first president after a lapse of only forty years, and much to the dismay of those Easterners who very nearly thought they were to behold in the person of the first chief magis- trate from the West a man in a coonskin cap and a hunting shirt. Andrew Jackson was followed by seven other execu- tives of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and every president of log cabin rearing has hailed from the West.
Geographic conditions have caused Appalachian America to lag behind in the march of what is commonly termed progress. Yet no other equal part of the Union is inhabited by a more purely American stock, or is characterized in a higher degree by a survival of the freedom and spontaneity of the old-time country life. Not without good reason has a Southern writer declared that "the ark of the covenant of American ideals rests on the Southern Appalachians."
A Landmark Year-1848
In 1848 the American people were in a very true sense still living the life of 1788. Their manners and customs, their modes of thought, and their methods of labor were as yet very much the same as when the Federal government began. For a long while indeed the spirit of a new era had been
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working as a leaven, here and there giving unmistakable evidence of its nature and its power. When in the middle of the last century our modern age fairly began it did not move forward with even pace at all points of the line. The com- mercial cities and the industrial regions were the first to feel the new impulse. The more remote of the strictly agricul- tural districts were the slowest. Even yet the footprints of the colonial era are by no means blotted out. The inertia of the human race is such that the majority of people never really live in their own age but in the age preceding.
Nevertheless, the recent president of Harvard University, a man of world-wide repute, declared in the opening year of this twentieth century that "nothing is done now as it was done twenty-five years ago." This sounds very sweeping, yet in the main it is not far out of the way. There has come upon us a profound revolution in thought, custom, and in- dustry.
The dawn of our modern age found the American people almost wholly of colonial descent. From 4,000,000 souls in 1790 they had increased in 1848 to 20,000,000. The rill of European immigration was only on the point of assuming the proportions of a flood. The American traveled but little and his thoughts were local. The life of the farm was every- where supreme. Cities and towns were few and small be- cause it took a decided majority of the people to provide the food that fed the nation. The reign of labor-saving machin- ery was only in its morning dawn. The great factory had not reduced handicraft in the farmhouse and the village workshop to a matter of little else than repair service. The railway locomotive was not yet the king of trans- portation. The 6,000 miles of track lay wholly east of the Alleghanies. The yield of the precious metals was only a half million dollars a year. The volume of imports had merely doubled in fifty years. So far from having yet be- come the granary of Europe, America was importing food- stuffs from that continent in 1838. America was growing only five bushels of wheat to each person instead of twice that quantity as at present.
In the life of the world as in the life of a person certain points of time are exceedingly prominent and exert a far- reaching influence. One of these points of time is 1848. Clustering around this date are epoch-making events which crowd upon one another with startling swiftness.
Gold was found in California in 1848. The American peo- ple were soon rich instead of poor by coming into possession of the capital needed for an industrial career. Inventive talent, hitherto moving at a snail's pace, at once began a
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double-quick march. Mechanical appliances of which people had hardly more than dreamed now took practical form with amazing rapidity. The mower and reaper, the sewing ma- chine, the telegraph, and the photographic camera were all appearing about this time, and these were only a few of the devices with which men proceeded to turn the world upside down. The farmer was at length enabled to produce seven bushels of corn or eighteen bushels of wheat with no greater effort than he had hitherto been giving to the production of a single bushel of either crop. To a vast number of people it became needless to remain on the farm. These persons, generally young and ambitious, flocked into the towns, there to find employment in the rapidly increasing commerce and manufacture. On every hand there was hurry, novelty and excitement. The goose that laid the golden egg was very much in evidence, and she was hatching a numerous brood of her own kind. Luxury took the place of simplicity. Country life came to be considered too slow. The farmer grew more than half inclined to apologize for being a farmer. The city was made to appear very attractive, and it took the place of the farm as the dominating influence in American life.
Political events were likewise taking place in every direc- tion, both at home and abroad. The war with Mexico, closing in 1848, added greatly to the size and resources of the United States. Three years later the discovery of gold in Australia aided very materially to the commercial activity of the world. China had just been forcibly opened to foreign commerce. Japan was soon to follow. Russia was begin- ning to lay hands upon Manchuria. The huge Pacific, al- most stagnant with respect to commerce, speedily developed into a great maritime highway. Nearly all Western Europe was convulsed with civil disturbance. Italy and Hungary were fiercely fighting against despotic oppression. France was trying to free itself entirely from monarchy. The Ger- man people were trying to liberalize their own despot-ridden land. Green Erin was in the throes of a terrible famine. Tyranny and hunger drove thousands of the Irish and Ger- mans to the American shore.
A rising spirit of liberty was assuming the proportions of a whirlwind. It was everywhere zealous and sometimes fanatical. It questioned every institution of man, whether social, political, religious, or educational. In all these lines it set on foot numerous experiments, some of them sound and some of them fantastic, and the sifting of the wheat from the chaff is still under way.
For every event there is a cause. Accidents do not occur
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in nature. This rather sudden and very energetic display of human activity was not at all because the natural abilities of people were any greater than they had been. For instance, a sort of reaping machine was used in the south of France nearly 2000 years ago. It was not perfected or even retained, because the world was under the rule of privilege. Special privileges has ever regarded trade, invention, and manual labor as things unworthy of itself and therefore to be laid on the shoulders of others. Industry being under a social ban, there was no encouragement to inventive skill. Popular rights were regarded by the privileged few as a monstrous heresey, to be kept down by withholding from the many a free access to education or wealth-getting, and by teaching them they had no business to think for themselves.
The cause of the landmark year 1848 is not hard to find. Until this date nearly every country of Continental Europe was an absolutism. England herself had but very recently made it possible for the many to vote rather than the few. Even our own America had not been nearly so democratic as we commonly suppose. Two of the original states, one Northern and one Southern, were republics only in name, and one of these had lately undergone a miniature civil war in the attempt to modernize its institutions.
Nevertheless, in the Protestant lands of Europe and in France there had for a few centuries been a slow, steady, and resistless trend toward social democracy. By the middle of the last century the foundation of special privilege had been so far undermined as to impel this rising spirit to assert itself with tremendous vigor. It brought forward labor- saving machines and shortened the hours of toil. It pro- ceeded to make general the enjoyment of comfort, education, and political rights. Hence the doing away with slavery, the broadening of suffrage, and the election to office of repre- sentative men, instead of only those persons claiming an ex- clusive right to the name "gentleman." Hence our free schools, our renovated prisons, our charitable institutions, our time-saving mechanical devices. As a particular and striking illustration the presidential elector is now a mere figurehead having no power of independent action. The aristocratic framers of the Constitution intended that he should act for himself. They did not consider the people in general wise enough to choose their chief magistrate. The same opinion placed the choice of the United senator with the state legislature, whereas we are now in the midst of an effort to place the choice with the people, where it properly belongs.
The independent individualism which ruled America until
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about 1850 kept the forces of society from pulling well in harness. Cooperation now took its place. People began to act in mass instead of acting singly. The period of settling gave place to a period of settling down.
Some one has defined our present age as the Age of Hu- manity. It is more accurate to call it the Age of Social Democracy, using that term to express a brotherhood of man that ignores the artificial distinction set up by special privi- lege, or caste.
The new era has brought all the nations of the world into close neighborhood. Within the individual nations it has overthrown the preeminence of a merely local or provincial feeling. In revolutionizing industry and transportation, it has diffused luxury and given society an urban rather than a rural color. It has also led to the doing of things with little regard to custom or precedent, and has provided a freer at- mosphere for the enjoyment of natural rights. In effecting these changes the methods employed do not always appear to have been for the best. However, men learn wisdom through their very mistakes and failures.
American Slavery
Slavery seems to have had an existence in every land. It has helped the human race to acquire civilization. So long as man remains a savage he will not learn the lesson of steady labor. But there comes forward a chieftain with great force of will and a far-seeing purpose. This domineer- ing despot puts his indolent subjects to work. The practice brings results and the policy is continued. In the course of many generations, the people have become used to system- atic and continued labor. At length they become fully aware of their own efficiency and reach the point where they are ready and willing to work on their own account. A degree of civilization has now been achieved and the slave class is in a position to demand and secure its freedom. Yet the ranks of those who work under compulsion are still recruited by debtors and other unfortunate persons, by the captives taken in war, and by the men kidnapped from tribes still in barbarism.
Such in a nutshell has been the history of involuntary ser- vitude among white nations. The institution was once gen- eral in Europe, even among the freedom-loving nations of the German stock. It was not entirely abolished in the British Isles until 1772, in Prussia not until 1807, and in Rus- sia not until 1861. The indentured servants sent to Amer- ica during the colonial period were slaves to every intent and purpose. The binding of a boy to an apprenticeship was but
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another disguised form of servitude. Significant examples of something very like the nature of slavery may still be found in industrial regions and in the colonies of Europe.
Thus we see that the progress of civilization tends to do away with slavery. With white people its last foothold is among apprentices, paupers, and convicts. Yet it may still be kept alive by taking captives from barbarous tribes that have not yet outgrown the practice. African slavery has thus been a substitute for white slavery.
Because negroes were never so numerous in the north as in the South, it has been assumed that American slavery has been governed by latitude. But if this were true, why did Pennsylvania in 1790 have fewer slaves than all New Eng- land ? Why did New York with a smaller population than Pennsylvania have four times as many ? Why did Virginia, in proportion to the number of her white inhabitants, have twice as many as North Carolina ? The true explanation is found in caste and not in climate. Caste is the very essence of privilege, and a privileged class cannot maintain itself without an under-stratum of peasants or slaves. Where so- ciety is shaped in a democratic mould it has no use for slav- ery, simply because it finds its own free labor more efficient. But where it is shaped in an aristocratic mould, it insists on having a menial class to do the menial labor, quite regardless of the quality of that labor.
The Quakers of Pennsylvania and a few other sects were opposed to slavery on principle, and they were the only Americans who were not above making money by trading in slaves. The Puritans of New England, the Germans of Pennsylvania, and the Scotch-Irish of upper North Carolina and the Alleghany frontier had no particular quarrel with slavery, yet made little use of it, because on their small farms it was more a disadvantage than a help. New York had an aristocratic element, and slavery had there a firmer foothold.
South of the Susquehanna were grown the only crops of which a large surplus was sent to Europe. The lowlands of this region were colonized by Englishmen of the country squire type. The country being new, there was no tenant class to which they could look for farm labor. The indentured riffraff sent over from Europe was an unsatisfactory de- pendence. So with a start of "twenty negars" in 1619, the number grew to 300 in thirty years, while by 1776, 300,000 Africans had been brought to America. People of the British stock had not been used to having negroes about them, and the new type of servitude was not at first welcome. Yet it must be conceded that all these slaves would not have been
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brought here unless there were men who stood ready to buy them.
Nevertheless, the presence of two of the inferior race to every three of the white was by 1750 giving the Virginians a good deal of concern. The British government was peti- tioned twenty-three times to prohibit further importations of negroes. But the king himself had a pecuniary interest in the traffic. Commercial greed was a power then as well as now and the business went on. In 1784 Congress came within a single vote of declaring there should be no slavery after 1800 west of the states then existing. Among the framers of the Federal Constitution were Southern members as hot as any of the Northern in their denunciation of slavery. George Mason of Virginia spoke of it as "infernal." But the Southern leaders were in advance of the Southern people. All classes felt that while they were supporting a load bur- densome to carry, it was dangerous to let it suddenly fall.
In 1827 there were 106 anti-slavery societies in the South against 29 in the North. In the one state of Tennessee were 25 of these, and in that commonwealth appeared the following year the first American anti-slavery paper. Under the con- stitution of 1796 free negroes voted in Tennessee, and in 1801, a law was passed favoring voluntary emancipation. North Carolina also permitted free negroes to vote, and it had at this time a strong leaning toward putting aside the institution. An emancipating measure came very near being put into the Virginia constitution of 1829. Three years later a bill to free the slaves came within one vote of passing the Assembly. It failed only because of the difficulty of knowing what best to do with the large freed population. Had the bill become law the example of Virginia would have been followed by the neighboring slave states. Slavery would have retreated to the cotton belt, and its eventual disappearance would have taken place in a natural manner. Furthermore, this dislike to slavery was in spite of more than forty years of the cotton gin; an invention that trebled the value of land in the cotton belt, made it possible to grow two hundred times as much of the staple as before, and gave the northward states an in- ducement to sell slaves to the cotton planters.
But there now came a period of reaction. The Abolition party appeared on the scene. As it grew noisy in the North, the anti-slavery societies went down in the South. There sprang up a disposition to defend slavery rather than apolo- gize for it.
The negro had been a slave, even in Africa. He could neither understand nor appreciate the freedom the white man had won for himself through centuries of effort. He was
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thievish, untidy, and bestial, and his way of performing a task was thoughtless and slovenly. His presence was a dis- advantage with respect to industry as well as morals. He was suited only to agriculture, and yet Madison, himself a large slaveholder, said that slavery and agriculture were not fit companions and declared that slave labor did not return above two per cent on the investment.
Yet American servitude had done much for the negro. He had learned the English language, acquired a veneer of civil- ization, and accepted the Christian religion. Robert E. Lee voiced the best thought of the South when he pronounced slavery a worse evil to the whites than to the blacks. He said freedom would come to the negro when he was fitted for it. Jefferson had favored giving the black man an industrial education and then sending him out of the country, not be- lieving the American white could live on comfortable terms with the freed negro.
In 1847, Dr. Ruffner, a Virginian and a slaveholder, de- clared that the institution was keeping out immigration and white labor, crippling agriculture, commerce, and industry, imposing hurtful social ideals on the white people, and proving a hindrance to common schools and popular educa- tion. Like Jefferson he stood for gradual emancipation and for colonizing the negro in some other land. His plan em- braced the following features :
1. No further importation of slaves into Virginia west of the Blue Ridge. Exportation to be permitted, except as to those children over five years of age and born after a certain date, but not excepting younger children in case the parents were also exported. 2. Those who were now slaves to re- main as such, but the children of these slaves to be free if born after a certain date and not over twenty-five years of age. 3. The heirs to freedom to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. 4. The churches to teach religion to the ne- gro. 5. The freedmen to be colonized after laboring in advance of their emancipation to provide the necessary funds. 6. Individual counties to be authorized, by virtue of a decisive vote of such counties or by consent of a majority of the slaveholders therein, to decree local removal or else emancipation within a certain term of years, the length of such term to depend on the number of slaves.
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