Flowering of the Cumberland

Author’s Introduction and Acknowledgments

xvii Author’s Introduction and Acknowledgments FLOWERING OF THE CUMBERLAND has in it even less of great events and famous men than had Seedtime on the Cumberland, published in 1960. The first was the story of how men, chiefly from the southern colonies, learned to live away from the sea and look to the woods if need be for most of their necessities from log house to lye. It told of how this long learning was then applied to exploring, hunting over, and at last settling the Valley of the Cumberland, or chiefly what is now Middle Tennessee. Attention was centered on the physical aspects of pioneering—food, clothing, shelter, and the struggle to hold the land against Indians and governments. This work is not a sequel to that struggle. Rather, it is a companion piece, covering much the same years—1780–1803; or from the time of first settlement to the Louisiana Purchase that sent the frontier west of the Mississippi . Many characters met in Seedtime reappear here, but no longer are they solitary individuals or families preoccupied with supplying their immediate needs. Flowering of the Cumberland is concerned with the pioneer as a member of society engaged in those activities which, different from hunting or house building, could not be performed by a lone man or family. The first and most important of these was marriage, and the creation of another family with its consequent need of the offerings of any civilized society—language, education, agriculture, industry, and trade; activities that demanded intercourse with other people and often an exchange of goods and services. During pioneer years none of these could be shaped to any pattern or hung on any frame of dates. All were more or less simultaneous. Education for the young never completely stopped, not even on the flotilla John Donelson led down the Tennessee. Still more trying for those of us who have some need of dividing and labeling, the pioneer period in the old Southwest was no age of specialization, either among individuals or their institutions. xviii| Author’s Introduction and Acknowledgments Most life revolved about the home. The farm wife churning butter, singing as she churned, now and then taking time out to help the nextto -the-least-one with its letters, is an example of the multiple problems in labeling and grading. Her churning might represent the preparation of family food, or it might be one link in the trade and industrial pattern that sent butter down the Cumberland to New Orleans where it was re-shipped to the Sugar Islands. Her singing was an amusement to be put into the chapter by that name, while the teaching of her child belongs with education. There are other problems of division. The singing woman we can imagine as the mistress of a pioneer household, far up a creek, shut off from the wider world. At first glance the pattern of life of our lone family would seem to be one the members had themselves made—log house, homegrown food, red cedar churn of local make, mother and children dressed in clothing of homemade cloth. Yet, the moment the woman begins to sing, or the child recites the alphabet, they become members of a society with an old, old culture, shaped largely in Europe. So it was with most aspects of the pioneer’s life as a member of society . First settlers on the Cumberland owed much to the generations behind them in America who had mastered the long learning needed to conquer the new environment. Yet, important as was this ability, it was the older learnings with their multiple rootings in Europe that made of the settling woodsman, his wife, and children civilized human beings, able to do their share of developing a society that would in time become an important part of the educational, political, and agricultural life of the nation. Thus, where Seedtime emphasized the borderer’s ability to conquer an environment unknown in the Old World, this work is concerned chiefly with his ability to transplant shoots of culture, rooted in the Old World. Seldom did the transplant grow exactly as had the parent plant, or one might better say ancestors, for by the time the Cumberland was settled, language, education, along with many other aspects of life, had been conditioned by plantings and transplantings on older borders to the east. Still, the shoots set on the Cumberland bloomed, and often well where, when one considers the hazards and hardships...