Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Chapter 1: Violence, Statecraft, and Statehood in the Early Republic

In December 1784, a small contingent of upper Tennessee Valley political leaders met in Washington County, North Carolina’s, rustic courthouse to discuss the uncertain postrevolutionary political climate that they believed threatened their regional political hegemony, prosperity, and families. The Jonesboro delegates fatefully decided that their backcountry communities could no longer remain part of their parent state and that North Carolina’s westernmost counties (at the time Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties ) must unite and form America’s fourteenth state.1 From 1785 through 1788, the leaders of the Franklin separatist movement struggled to secure support for their state from the U.S. Confederation Congress, the North Carolina General Assembly, high-profile national political figures, and their bitterly divided neighbors. Throughout the three-year effort to win Franklin’s admission into the union, violence and the threat of violence plagued the political movement. Despite involving a relatively small number of western residents and the state of Franklin’s brief existence, Amerindian clashes, internal political factionalism, and divisive western political policies resulted in a high level of backcountry bloodshed in the upper Tennessee Valley. From supposed violent tendencies culturally engrained in the region’s Scotch-Irish residents to the anarchic impulses unleashed by mountain isolation, there is no shortage of explanations for Appalachian frontier violence. When the rise and fall of the state of Franklin and the corresponding level of regional hostilities are briefly examined, many of these earlier raisons d’être regarding postrevolutionary Appalachian violence are replaced with more compelling explanations grounded in specific historical circumstances and a complex collision of political and economic forces. The violence surrounding the Violence, Statecraft, and Statehood in the Early Republic Chapter 1 The State of Franklin, 1784–1788 25 Kevin T. Barksdale 26 Kevin T. Barksdale state of Franklin resulted from the intersection of three primary causes: national and regional postrevolutionary political instability, fierce regional and state economic and political competition, and finally skillful and determined Amerindian diplomatic and martial resistance to western encroachment . In the end, culture and physiography proved much less important factors than the struggle for regional economic and political hegemony in the chaos surrounding the state of Franklin. Since the “discovery” and “invention” of Appalachia in the last decades of the nineteenth century, local color writers, missionaries, reformers, and scholars have offered their own ideas regarding the root causes of Appalachian violence. Two of the earliest and most persistently reoccurring arguments offered to explain the perception of a hyperviolent mountain culture by relying upon ethnic and cultural generalizations and a fundamental misunderstanding of Appalachia’s past, both of which are challenged by the socioeconomic conditions surrounding the state of Franklin. Beginning in the 1880s, the outbreak of feuds and labor militancy associated with the trauma accompanying rural industrialization resulted in the application of the principles of social Darwinism to Appalachia in order to decipher the underlying factors behind mountain violence.2 The fallacious notion that nearly all southern Appalachians descended from Scotch-Irish immigrants gave birth to the idea of the “Appalachian Highlander,” who carried a cultural and historical propensity to act “clannish”; live outside of the law; and, most important, repeatedly and unabashedly engage in acts of violence.3 In his 1989 work Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer updates the cultural comparison of southern Appalachia to the Scottish Highlands. Fischer argues that in what he labels as “border culture,” Highlands Scots, driven from their homes during the eighteenth-century clearances, carried their culture to Ireland (Ulster) and eventually on to the Appalachian Mountains. Fischer contends that several of the defining characteristics of this “border culture,” including individualism , “autarchy,” and “retributive justice,” created a “climate of violence in the American backcountry.”4 Out of the search for an explanation for the perceived persistence of this violent and clannish “border culture” in the southern mountains emerged the theory of Appalachian isolation and the resulting cultural stagnation. In short, the absence of trade and transportation connections, geographic distances, and geological obstacles retarded cultural, political, and economic growth in the region. According to scholars, educators, and Violence, Statecraft, and Statehood in the Early Republic 27 reformers, Appalachian isolation preserved both positive and negative aspects of Scotch-Irish culture and prevented the “modernization” and “Americanization” of the southern mountains. When married to the “border culture,” in theory, Appalachian isolation perpetuated generational and trans-Atlantic mountain violence and offered a clear explanation for the brutal...