In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Civil War History 47.4 (2001) 358-359



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Appalachians and Race:
The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation


Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. By John C. Inscoe. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Pp. 344. $34.95.)

Significant research has been done on the African American presence in Appalachia since 1985, when William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell published their groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia, which stripped away the veil of "black invisibility." John Inscoe, well known for his own contributions to the field, has collected eighteen essays that admirably represent that new research. Although all but four of them have been published previously, it is a convenience to the reader to have them available in one volume. In addition to expanding our knowledge of black mountaineers, these essays address a major issue in Appalachian studies--"Appalachian exceptionalism," the degree to which the region is distinct. While that argument is not settled in these pages, the essays reinforce a growing awareness of the region's complexity and diversity.

Several themes run through this volume. One is the contribution made by African American labor to the industrialization of Appalachia. Essays by David Williams, John Stealey, Charles Dew, Jennifer Smith, Ron Lewis, and Joe Trotter describe its importance in gold, salt, and coal mines, while Ken Noe discusses the irony that slave labor, heavily used to build the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, increased the importance of slavery to the consequent railroad-based commercialism. Lewis's description of how the needs of government, nascent industrial capitalism, and white-imposed racial hierarchies converged to create the horrors of black convict leasing in Appalachian coal mines is especially revealing.

Several of the essays challenge the stereotype of African American powerlessness. Williams, Stealey, Dew, Smith, and Marie Tedesco demonstrate how those blacks, even slaves, who possessed technical knowledge, skills, or an understanding of the mental world of white patriarchy could manipulate them to negotiate favorable working or social concessions from whites, both for themselves and for their communities. Dew's description of how the slave forgeman Sam Williams claimed a month-long "vacation" (which his master referred to as "loafing" in his journal) and Tedesco's account of the antebellum free black smallholder Adam Waterford's long drawn-out legal battles with whites reveal the inability of whites always to impose their will on blacks.

Appalachian racial attitudes are also examined. Contrary to the common stereotype of Appalachia as a land of racial innocence and tolerance, which Nina Silber debunks so effectively, John Inscoe and Fitzhugh Brundage demonstrate that white Appalachians were every bit as contemptuous of blacks and as racist as their lower South neighbors. Inscoe's discussion of the racist remarks of mountain whites as recorded by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted during his 1854 tour through Appalachia and Brundage's examining of the grisly details of Appalachian lynchings underline the point that, paraphrasing Brundage, Appalachian racial attitudes and relations were "simply and fundamentally, in a word, Southern" (302). [End Page 358]

Inscoe acknowledges that the collection will leave readers with regrets. Reflecting the uneven research coverage of the African American experience in Appalachia, the book says little about important aspects of the black experience such as the lives of women, the urban experience, and the Civil War. The essays also present primarily a white perspective, which Inscoe rightly attributes mainly to white domination of both Appalachian society and the recording of its history (due to black illiteracy in particular). The inability of Appalachian studies to attract adequate interest from black scholars, however, has meant that the writing of its black history has also been dominated by whites. Finally, given the overall quality of the essays, one wishes that Inscoe had chosen to continue past World War I, a period that has not been served well. These regrets, though, are far outweighed by the collection's strengths; it is a major contribution to our understanding of the African American experience in Appalachia.

 

H. Tyler Blethen
Western Carolina University

...

pdf

Share