Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

2. Between Bondage and Freedom: Confronting the Variables of Appalachian Slavery and Slaveholding

Between Bondage and Freedom 46 The historical scholarship on race relations in Southern Appalachia has expanded dramatically over the past couple of decades, and yet we still lack a comprehensive treatment of the subject. What has emerged instead, particularly in regard to the antebellum era, is a vast mosaic of stories that tell us a great many different things about slavery and slaveholders throughout the region. That case can be made by simply recounting some of those stories—in some cases, mere snippets of stories—of slaves and other African Americans at various times and locales in colonial and antebellum Appalachia. In the early 1750s, a freed slave from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settled along the western slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Augusta County, Virginia and established himself as the only blacksmith to serve that rapidly populating frontier region. A Moravian missionary moving through the area was duly impressed by his encounter with this man in 1753, and in a diary entry, revealed much about him— that he was married to a Scottish woman, that his Pennsylvania background included familiarity with both the Quaker and Moravian faiths, and that he spoke as well as read both German and English. Only from other sources do we know that his name was Edward Tarr. Tarr’s blacksmith shop was well situated, right along the Great Wagon Road that carried so much traffic south. It soon became a local gathering spot, attracting regular convergences of other free blacks, of slaves, and even of whites of the “middlin’ sort.” But this 2 Confronting the Variables of Appalachian Slavery and Slaveholding 47 Between Bondage and Freedom success story proved relatively short-lived; by the following decade, the boisterous interracial gatherings led to complaints from certain white citizens that Tarr was a nuisance and his forge a disruption to the public order. The community demonstrated its disapproval in an odd way, though. In 1763, a court ordered the severed head of a slave executed for murder to be placed on a pike on the road just in front of Tarr’s shop, even though it was fifty-some miles from where that slave’s crime and execution had occurred. Soon thereafter, Tarr’s wife Ann was brought before the county court on morals charges—the final straw that led Tarr to sell his land and his business at a loss and move to nearby Staunton, enough of an urban environment for him to assume a more low-key, perhaps anonymous, lifestyle.1 Farther west and several decades later, a young slave woman was punished when caught reading a book. In 1813, on a farm on the Kentucky side of the Tug River Valley (in present-day Lawrence County ), an overseer came upon this slave, named D’lea, reading a religious tract and whipped her for it. Curiously, D’lea’s literacy was shared by many of her fellow slaves, and both her owner and the overseer who punished her were fully aware of her skills. She spent most of her time at the plantation on the Virginia side of the Tug River, where her owner, Wilson Cary Nicholas, a former governor of the state, not only tolerated literate slaves, but in D’lea’s case, seems to have capitalized on her so-called occupational literacy, which included some basic mathematical skills, in the management of his operation, specifically in the tallying of his hemp crop as it was bundled and shipped downriver . If D’lea had been on her home farm, she would likely have been spared any whipping. But Nicholas had sent her and about twenty other slaves to his second large holding across the river and the state line in order to hide them from a tax assessor making the rounds. With only this less tolerant overseer in authority at Nicholas’s Kentucky farm, D’lea found herself the victim of either his resentment of her ability to read or some offense taken by the religious material he found her reading.2 1843. Newport, Tennessee. Abolitionist Ezekiel Birdseye, then based in this highland community on the state’s eastern edge, attended the 48 Race, War, and Remembrance trial of a young slave man, Hannibal, accused of murdering his master . According to Birdseye, Hannibal had “been so frequently and cruelly scourged” at the hands of his owner that he was contemplating suicide. When his owner attacked him with a club as...