The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832

NINE: The Creation of a Southern Identity

From his vantage point in western North Carolina more than three decades ago, Wilbur J. Cash wrote about the transmission of the cavalier culture of traditional Virginia society to the frontier. He noted that there "was indeed a genuine, if small aristocracy in colonial Virginia . . . but this Virginia was not the great South. By paradox, it was not even all of Virginia. . . . All the rest, at the close of the Revolution, was still in the frontier or semi­frontier stage." With that combination of acuteness and overstatement that has made his work such an enduring one, Cash further argued that to ignore the frontier and the [dimension of] time in setting up a concep­ tion of the social state of the Old South is to abandon reality. For the history of this South throughout a very great part of the period from the opening of the nineteenth century to the Civil War . . . is mainly the history of the roll of frontier upon frontier—and on to the frontier be­ yond. ' Cash went on to invent a parable to illustrate the process by which backcountry Southwestern frontiersmen and women were transformed into antebellum Southern aristocrats. That parable featured "a stout young Irishman [who] brought his bride into the N I N E The Creation ofa Southern Identity The Creation of a Southern Identity 213 Carolina upcountry about 1800. He cleared a bit of land, built a log cabin of two rooms, and sat down to the pioneer life." The combination of cheap land, slave labor, and a newly profitable staple crop—cotton—would transform the lives of that Irishman and his family. Through the steady acquisition of more land, and most important, more slaves, he would produce ever more cotton, and from the returns of that crop his two­room log cabin would grow to six rooms and eventually be replaced altogether by a "big house." It was not, to be truthful, a very grand house really. Built of lumber sawed on the place, it was a little crude and had not cost above a thousand dollars, even when the marble mantel was counted in. ... But it was a house, it had great columns in front, and it was eventually painted white, and so, in this land of wide fields and pinewoods it seemed very imposing. With the Irishman's growing wealth came enhanced personal au­ thority. At the end of his life he served in the legislature, "grew extremely mellow in age and liked to pass his time in company arguing about Predestination and infant damnation, proving con­ clusively that cotton was king and that the damnyankee didn't dare do anything about it."2 There were significant differences between Cash's young Irish­ man and the hundreds of English and Irish men and women, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists who settled in eighteenth­ and early­nineteenth­century Lunenburg. Cash's archetype landed in the Carolina upcountry, thus sharing in the phenomenal pros­ perity brought by the cotton boom, a prosperity that was duplicated by others not only in South Carolina but also on other parts of the southwestern frontier as those settlers expanded westward in suc­ cessive waves into Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. In that sense the experience of Cash's agricultural entrepreneur was typical of many of those eighteenth­ and early­nineteenth­ century pioneers who left Lunenburg for parts farther south and westward. The most famous name connected with the history of Lunenburg is probably that of South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, grandson of John Caldwell, one of the first justices of the Lunen­ burg court and the leader of the group of Presbyterians who settled 214 The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry on Cub Creek in 1739. The Caldwells, along with many of the Presbyterians who formed the Cub Creek community, left the county for South Carolina in the late 1750s, where they appear to have settled once again as a group.3 Most of the men and women who chose to settle in Lunenburg were committing themselves to an agricultural economy that was not so specialized or expansive as the cotton monoculture of other parts of the South, yet whatever the differences between cotton and tobacco in terms of profitability or the precise rhythms of agricul­ tural labor associated with each crop, it is plain that both Lunen­ burg tobacco growers and Carolina cotton planters came to share a common commitment to agrarianism...