"WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES"
The southern mountaineers are pre-eminently a rural folk. When the
twentieth century opened, only four per cent. of them dwelt in cities of
8,000 inhabitants and upwards. There were but seven such cities in all
Appalachia--a region larger than England and Scotland combined--and
these owed their development to outside influences. Only 77 out of 186
mountain counties had towns of 1,000 and upwards.
Our highlanders are the most homogeneous people in the United States. In
1900, out of a total population of 3,039,835, there were only 18,617 of
foreign birth. This includes the cities and industrial camps. Back in
the mountains, a man using any other tongue than English, or speaking
broken English, was regarded as a freak. Nine mountain counties of
Virginia, four of West Virginia, fifteen of Kentucky, ten of Tennessee,
nine of North Carolina, eight of Georgia, two of Alabama, and one of
South Carolina had less than ten foreign-born residents each. Three of
them had none at all.
Compare the North Atlantic states. In this same census year, 57 per
cent. of their people lived in cities of 8,000 and upwards. As for
foreigners--the one city of Fall River, Mass., with 104,863 inhabitants,
had 50,042 of foreign birth.
The mountains proper are free not only from foreigners but from negroes
as well. There are many blacks in the larger valleys and towns, but
throughout most of Appalachia the population is almost exclusively
white. In 1900, Jackson County, Ky. (the same that sent every one of its
sons into the Union army who could bear arms), had only nineteen negroes
among 10,542 whites; Johnson County, Ky., only one black resident among
13,729 whites; Dickenson County, Va., not a single negro within its
borders.
In many mountain settlements negroes are not allowed to tarry. It has
been assumed that this prejudice against colored folk had its origin far
back in the time when "poor whites" found themselves thrust aside by
competition with slave labor. This is an error. Our mountaineers never
had to compete with slavery. Few of them knew anything about it except
from hearsay. Their dislike of negroes is simply an instinctive racial
antipathy, plus a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions.
A neighbor in the Smokies said to me: "I b'lieve in treatin' niggers
squar. The Bible says they're human--leastways some says it does--and so
there'd orter be a place for them. But it's _some place else_--not
around me!" That is the whole thing in a nutshell.
Here, then, is Appalachia: one of the great land-locked areas of the
globe, more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by
blood than any other part of America, encompassed by a high-tensioned
civilization, yet less affected to-day by modern ideas, less cognizant
of modern progress, than any other part of the English-speaking world.
Of course, such an anomaly cannot continue. Commercialism has discovered
the mountains at last, and no sentiment, however honest, however
hallowed, can keep it out. The transformation is swift. Suddenly the
mountaineer is awakened from his eighteenth-century bed by the blare of
steam whistles and the boom of dynamite. He sees his forests leveled and
whisked away; his rivers dammed by concrete walls and shot into turbines
that outpower all the horses in Appalachia. He is dazed by electric
lights, nonplussed by speaking wires, awed by vast transfers of
property, incensed by rude demands. Aroused, now, and wide-eyed, he
realizes with sinking heart that here is a sudden end of that Old
Dispensation under which he and his ancestors were born, the beginning
of a New Order that heeds him and his neighbors not a whit.
All this insults his conservatism. The old way was the established order
of the universe: to change it is fairly impious. What is the good of all
this fuss and fury? That fifty-story building they tell about, in their
big city--what is it but another Tower of Babel? And these silly,
stuck-up strangers who brag and brag about "modern improvements"--what
are they, under their fine manners and fine clothes? Hirelings all.
Shrewdly he observes them in their relations to each other.--
"Each man is some man's servant; every soul
Is by some other's presence quite discrowned."
Proudly he contrasts his ragged self: he who never has acknowledged a
superior, never has taken an order from living man, save as a patriot in
time of war. And he turns upon his heel.
Yet, before he can fairly credit it as a reality, the lands around his
own home are bought up by corporations. All about him, slash, crash, go
the devastating forces. His old neighbors vanish. New and unwelcome ones
swarm in. He is crowded, but ignored. His hard-earned patrimony is
robbed of all that made it precious: its home-like seclusion,
independence, dignity. He sells out, and moves away to some uninvaded
place where he "will not be bothered."
"I don't like these improve_ments_," said an old mountaineer to me.
"Some calls them 'progress,' and says they put money to circulatin'. So
they do; but _who gits it_?"
There is a class of highlanders more sanguine, more adaptable, that
welcomes all outsiders who come with skill and capital to develop their
country. Many of these are shrewd traders in merchandise or in real
estate, or they are capable foremen who can handle native labor much
better than any strangers could. Such men naturally profit by the
change.
Others, deluded by what seems easy money, sell their little homesteads
for just enough cash to set them up as laborers in town or camp. Being
untrained to any trade, they can get only the lowest wages, which are
quickly dissipated in rent and in foods that formerly they raised for
themselves. Unused to continuous labor, they irk under its discipline,
drop out, and fall into desultory habits. Meantime false ambitions
arise, especially among the womenfolk. Store credit soon runs such a
family in debt.
"When I was a young man," said one of my neighbors, "the traders never
thought of bringin' meal in here. If a man run out of meal, why, he was
_out_, and he had to live on 'taters or somethin' else. Nowadays we
dress better, and live better, but some other feller allers has his
hands in our pockets."
Then it is "good-by" to the old independence that made such characters
manly. Enmeshed in obligations that they cannot meet, they struggle
vainly, brood hopelessly, and lose that dearest of all possessions,
their self-respect. Servility is literal hell to a mountaineer, and when
it is forced upon him he turns into a mean, underhanded, slinking
fellow, easily tempted into crime.
The curse of our invading civilization is that its vanguard is composed
of men who care nothing for the welfare of the people they dispossess. A
northern lumberman admitted to me, with frankness unusual in his class,
that "All we want here is to get the most we can out of this country, as
quick as we can, and then get out." This is all we can expect of those
who exploit raw materials, or of manufactures that employ only cheap
labor. Until we have industries that demand skilled workmen, and until
manual training schools are established in the mountains, we may look
for deterioration, rather than betterment, of those highlanders who
leave their farms.
All who know the mountaineers intimately have observed that the sudden
inroad of commercialism has a bad effect upon them. As President Frost
says, "Ruthless change is knocking at the door of every mountain cabin.
The jackals of civilization have already abused the confidence of many a
highland home. The lumber, coal, and mineral wealth of the mountains is
to be possessed, and the unprincipled vanguard of commercialism can
easily debauch a simple people. The question is whether the mountain
people can be enlightened and guided so that they can have a part in the
development of their own country, or whether they must give place to
foreigners and melt away like so many Indians."
It is easy to say that the fittest will survive. But the fittest for
what? Miss Miles answers: "I have heard it said that civilization, when
it touches the people of the backwoods, acts as a useful precipitant in
thus sending the dregs to the bottom. As a matter of fact, it is only
the shrewder and more determined, not the truly fit, that survive the
struggle. Among these very submerged ones, reduced to dependence on an
alien people, there are thousands who inherit the skill of their
forefathers who fashioned their own locks, musical instruments, and
guns. And these very women who are breaking their health and spirit over
a thankless tub of suds ought surely to turn their talents to better
account, ought to be designing and weaving coverlets and Roman-striped
rugs, or 'piecing' the quilt patterns now so popular. Need these razors
be used to cut grindstones? Must this free folk who are in many ways the
truest Americans of America be brought under the yoke of caste division,
to the degradation of all their finer qualities, merely for lack of the
right work to do?"
There are some who would have it so; who would calmly write for these
our own kindred, as for the Indians, _fuerunt_--their day is past. In a
History of Southern Literature, written not long ago by a professor in
the University of Virginia, a sketch of Miss Murfree's work closes with
these words: "There [at Beersheba Springs, Tenn.] it was that she first
studied the curious type of humanity, the Tennessee mountaineer, a
people so ignorant, so superstitious, so far behind the world of to-day
as to excite wonder and even pity in all who see them.... [She] is
telling the story of a people who, in these opening years of the 20th
century, wander on through their limited range of life much as their
ancestors for generations have wandered. They, too, will some time
vanish--the sooner the better."
One cannot read such a sentiment without wonder and even pity for the
ignorance of history and of human nature that it discloses. Is the case
of our mountaineers so much worse than that of the Scotch highlanders of
two centuries ago? We know that those Scotchmen did not "vanish--the
quicker the better." What were they before civilization reached them?
Let us open the ready pages of Macaulay.--
"It is not easy for a modern Englishman ... to believe that, in the
time of his great-grandfathers, Saint James's Street had as little
connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In
the south of our island scarcely anything was known about the
Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but
contempt and loathing....
"It is not strange that the Wild Scotch, as they were sometimes
called, should, in the 17th century, have been considered by the
Saxons as mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered
as savages, they should not have been objects of interest and
curiosity. The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the
manners of rude nations separated from our island by great
continents and oceans. Numerous books were printed describing the
laws, the superstitions, the cabins, the repasts, the dresses, the
marriages, the funerals of Laplanders and Hottentots, Mohawks and
Malays. The plays and poems of that age are full of allusions to
the usages of the black men of Africa and the red men of America.
The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to have any
information was the Highlander....
"While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigor, no account
of them was given by any observer qualified to judge of them
fairly. Had such an observer studied the character of the
Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely
intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilised
nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their
country or for their king, that they had no attachment to any
commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to
the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of
morality and honor widely different from that which is established
in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a
stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were
approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have
heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wracked
on hereditary enemies in a neighboring valley such vengeance as
would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder.
"He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling not
merely innocent but honorable. He would have seen, wherever he
turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to
throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labor, which
are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the
spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon,
or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant
wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of
oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it
was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic
title of Duinhe Wassel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's
feather, should take his ease, except when he was fighting,
hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in
connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult.
Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was
much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than
in tilling his own.
"The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude
mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was
associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptised men
poured libations of ale on one Daemon, and set out drink offerings
of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides,
and awaited, in that vesture, the inspiration which was to reveal
the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose
hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events, an
enquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth, he
might easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a
page of Gaelic printed or written.
"The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the
country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure
hardships as great as if he had sojourned among the Esquimaux or
the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle of some great
lord who had a seat in the Parliament and Privy Council, and who
was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of
the South, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate
and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines.
But, in general, the traveler would have been forced to content
himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the
furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of
his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging
would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have
swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with
peat smoke, and foul with a hundred exhalations. At supper grain
fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied
with a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company
with whom he would have feasted would have been covered with
cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar
like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as
the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen half
poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half
mad with the itch.
"This is not an attractive picture. And yet an enlightened and
dispassionate observer would have found in the character and
manners of this rude people something which might well excite
admiration and a good hope. Their courage was what great exploits
achieved in all the four quarters of the globe have since proved it
to be. Their intense attachment to their own tribe and to their own
patriarch, though politically a great evil, partook of the nature
of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated; but
still it was heroic. There must be some elevation of soul in a man
who loves the society of which he is a member and the leader whom
he follows with a love stronger than the love of life. It was true
that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an
enemy; but it was not less true that he had high notions of the
duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was
true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the
commonwealth. Yet those erred greatly who imagined that he bore any
resemblance to villains who, in rich and well governed communities,
live by stealing. When he drove before him the herds of Lowland
farmers up the pass which led to his native glen, he no more
considered himself as a thief than the Raleighs and Drakes
considered themselves as thieves when they divided the cargoes of
Spanish galleons. He was a warrior seizing lawful prize of war, of
war never once intermitted during the thirty-five generations which
had passed away since the Teutonic invaders had driven the children
of the soil to the mountains....
"His inordinate pride of birth and his contempt for labor and trade
were indeed great weaknesses, and had done far more than the
inclemency of the air and the sterility of the soil to keep his
country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation.
It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues were
not less widely diffused among the population of the Highlands than
the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the island where
men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves to such
a degree in the idle, sauntering habits of an aristocracy, so
there was no other part of the island where such men had in such a
degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity of
manner, self-respect, and that noble sensibility which makes
dishonor more terrible than death. A gentleman of Skye or Lochaber,
whose clothes were begrimed with the accumulated filth of years,
and whose hovel smelt worse than an English hogstye, would often do
the honors of that hovel with a lofty courtesy worthy of the
splendid circle of Versailles. Though he had as little
book-learning as the most stupid ploughboys of England, it would
have been a great error to put him in the same intellectual rank
with such ploughboys. It is indeed only by reading that men can
become profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of
poetry and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and
may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind, in an age in
which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown."
So, too, in the rudest communities of Appalachia, among the most
trifling and unmoral natives of this region, among the illiterate and
hide-bound, there still is much to excite admiration and good hope. I
have not shrunk from telling the truth about these people, even when it
was far from pleasant; but I would have preserved strict silence had I
not seen in the most backward of them certain sterling qualities of
manliness that our nation can ill afford to waste. It is a truth as old
as the human race that savageries may co-exist with admirable qualities
of head and heart. The only people who can consistently despair of the
future for even the lowest of our mountaineers are those who deny
evolution and who believe, with Archbishop Usher, that man was created
_perfect_ at 9 A. M. on the 21st of October, in the year B. C. 4004.
Let us remember, Sir and Madam, that we ourselves are descended from
white barbarians. From William the Conqueror, you? Very well; how many
other ancestors of yours were walking about England and elsewhere at the
time of William? Untold thousands of them were just such people as you
can find to-day brawling in some mountain still-house (unless there has
been a deal of incest somewhere along your line), and you have
infinitely more of their blood in your veins than you have of the
Conqueror's--who, by the way, could he be re-incarnated, would not be
tolerated in your drawing-room for half an hour. I may have made the
point too brutally plain; but if it sinks through the smug
self-complacency of those who "do not belong to the masses," who act as
though civilization and morals and good manners were entailed to them
through a mere dozen or so of selected ancestors, I remain unrepentant
and unashamed. Let us thank whatever gods there be that it is not
merely thou and I, our few friends and next of kin, but all humanity,
that scientific faith embraces and will sustain.
"People who have been among the southern mountaineers testify," says Mr.
Fox, "that, as a race, they are proud, sensitive, hospitable, kindly,
obliging in an unreckoning way that is almost pathetic, honest, loyal,
in spite of their common ignorance, poverty, and isolation; that they
are naturally capable, eager to learn, easy to uplift. Americans to the
core, they make the southern mountains a storehouse of patriotism; in
themselves they are an important offset to the Old World outcasts whom
we have welcomed to our shores; and they surely deserve as much
consideration from the nation as the negroes, or as the heathen, to whom
we give millions."
President Frost, of Berea College, who has worked among these people for
nearly a lifetime, and has helped to educate their young folks by
thousands, says: "It does one's heart good to help a young Lincoln who
comes walking in perhaps a three-days' journey on foot, with a few
hard-earned dollars in his pocket and a great eagerness for the
education he can so faintly comprehend. (Scores of our young people see
their first railroad train at Berea.) And it is a joy to welcome the
mountain girl who comes back after having taught her first school,
bringing the money to pay her debts and buy her first comfortable
outfit--including rubbers and suitable underclothing--and perhaps
bringing with her a younger sister. Such a girl exerts a great influence
in her school and mountain home. An enthusiastic mountaineer described
an example in this wise: 'I tell yeou hit teks a moughty resol_ute_ gal
ter do what that thar gal has done. She got, I reckon, about the
toughest deestric' in the ceounty, which is sayin' a good deal. An' then
fer boardin'-place--well, there warn't much choice. There was one house,
with one room. But she kep right on, an' yeou would hev thought she was
havin' the finest kind of a time, ter look at her. An' then the last
day, when they was sayin' their pieces and sich, some sorry fellers come
in thar full o' moonshine an' shot their revolvers. I'm a-tellin' ye hit
takes a moughty resol_ute_ gal."
The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their
own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute
native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such
leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn
duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and
debauches quickly. But the schools needed here are not ordinary graded
schools. They should be vocational schools that will turn out good
farmers, good mechanics, good housewives. Meantime let a model farm be
established in every mountain county showing how to get the most out of
mountain land. Such object lessons would speedily work an economic
revolution. It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the
mountaineer has to face.
THE END
Footnotes:
[1] A friend of mine on the U. S. Geological Survey tested with his
clinometer a mountain cornfield that sloped at an angle of fifty
degrees.
[2] Average annual rainfall of New York City, 44 inches; of Glencoe, in
the Scotch Highlands, nearly 130 inches.
[3] _Gant-lot_: a fenced enclosure into which cattle are driven after
cutting them out from those of other owners. So called because the
mountain cattle run wild, feeding only on grass and browse, and "they
couldn't travel well to market when filled up on green stuff: so they're
penned up to git _gant_ and nimble."
[4] Pure bluff of mine, at that time; but it was good policy to assume
perfect confidence.
[5] This was in 1904. There are no dispensaries in North Carolina now.
[6] It is a curious fact that most horses despise the stuff. A
celebrated revenue officer told me that for several years he rode a
horse which was in the habit of drinking a mouthful from every stream
that he forded; but if there was the least taint of still-slop in the
water, he would whisk his nose about and refuse to drink. The officer
then had only to follow up the stream, and he would infallibly find a
still.
[7] Ellwood Wilson, Sr., in the _Sewanee Review_.
[8] In mountain dialect such words as settlement, government, studyment
(reverie) are accented on the last syllable, or drawled with equal
stress throughout.
[9] So also in the lowland South. An extraordinary affectation of
propriety appeared in a dispatch to the _Atlanta Constitution_ of
October 29, 1912, which reported that an exhibitor of cattle at the
State fair had been seriously horned by a _male cow_.
[10] Pronounced Chee-_o_-ah, Chil-_how_-ee, Cow-_ee_, Cul-lo-_whee_,
High-_wah_-see, Nan-tah-_hay_-lah, O-_ko_-na, _Luf_-ty, San-_teet_-lah,
_Tel_-li-co, Tuck-a-_lee_-chee, Tuck-a-_see_-gee, Tuh-_loo_-lah,
Tus-_quit_-ee, Wah-_yah_ (explosively on last syllable), _Wau_-ke-chah,
Yah-_lah_-kah (commonly Ah-lar-ka or _'Lar_-ky by the settlers),
You-_nay_-kah.
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
letters have been replaced with +transliterations+.
Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
presented in the original text.
The following misprints have been corrected:
"Hiddden" corrected to "Hidden" (Table of Contents)
"sing" corrected to "sting" (page 70)
"hav-" corrected to "having" (page 134)
"and and" corrected to "and" (page 148)
"could could" corrected to "could" (page 172)
"haled" corrected to "hauled" (page 174)
"Some the expedients" corrected to "Some of the expedients" (page 238)
"hoplessly" corrected to "hopelessly" (page 275)
"civlization" corrected to "civilization" (page 384)
Printer's inconsistencies in hyphenation usage have been retained.
End of Project Gutenberg's Our Southern Highlanders, by Horace Kephart