Flowering of the Cumberland

3. The Most Important Crop

47 CHAPTER 3 The Most Important Crop The newly wed young couple usually moved at once into their own home, for the Southerner, like the Englishman behind him, insisted on one home for each family, no matter how poor. The new home might be one in a row of little cabins enclosed by fort pickets, and only a few steps from that of a parent as was the first home of Major Buchanan and Sally Ridley, but it gave what all wanted—at least some privacy. The custom of married children living with the parents, or several families of brothers and sisters sharing the same dwelling as was common among the peasantry on the Continent was not a British heritage. Sometimes the youngest child heired the home place and lived with or near the old people, but those old enough to break up housekeeping became appendages of the young instead of the other way around. Much has been written of Southern family life and the closeness of family ties. Still very much a part of the scene are the great reunions all up and down the Cumberland where the kinfolk flock from far places to meet again for one day, bringing their children and spouses to see the old people or the family burying ground. Such activities also bespeak a people who never let family ties interfere with their settling elsewhere, often taking mates with backgrounds different from their own. More than one historian and traveler commented that pioneering weakened the family as a unit and tended to strengthen the individual. This was undoubtedly true in many cases. Andrew Jackson, Daniel Smith, John Coffee , after the death of his mother, and many other men lived completely cut off from whatever family ties they may have had on the other side of the mountains. Some families such as the Bledsoes did come in groups of kin and in-laws, but on the whole, family ties were seldom as strong as they had been in Virginia, and certainly much less strong than in northern Scotland where the clan ruled. No family relationship in Scotland or America was as 48| Chapter 3 clannish as in many sections of Europe where the peasant stayed with the land until almost every one in a village was kin, but the young ones still feared to marry strangers from the next village. It is doubtful if at any time in the South family ties and loyalties were ever as close as in some ethnic groups in the United States today in which the immigrant, failing to find a completely un-Americanized wife, goes back to his original country, usually the home village, to get one, sometimes taking a distant cousin. Intermarriage was frowned upon, but relatives, sometimes first cousins, did marry. More common was the marrying of two or more members of one family into another; Daniel Smith’s son and daughter each married a Donelson. Still, the hard core of all life in the rural South and later the Cumberland was the single family—father, mother, children. Around this unit all kinds and conditions of people revolved, not as members of a class, each segregated with others of his own kind, but as part of or an appendage to a family, each feeling in varying degrees the influence of the others. The great plantation with many slave families, teachers and pupils, skilled workmen, visitors, maiden aunt, helpless grandsire, the whole complicated with a mill, stills, blacksmith shop, and often a store, had in colonial Virginia and the Carolinas been more in the nature of a small town. The pattern was repeated on the Cumberland with, in the early years, yet more complications—guards, visiting Indians, captive Indian children, orphaned white children, and around all these the customary ebb and flow of life—visiting preacher, surveyor, relatives, traveling tinker, peddler, horse trader, or in a home like that of Elmore Douglass or Frederick Stump, neighbors gathered to hear a preacher. Many homes of even well-to-do farmers, convenient to a main road, also took in travelers. Early schools were sometimes held in a home, and, as in any rural region, home was hospital, undertaking establishment, and usually, as times became more settled, there was nearby a family graveyard. Most important events in life took place in some kind of home and one of these was birth. The lying-in establishment, though common at this date in Europe, was unknown in the South. The young couple expected...