mountain farmers and the market economy: ashe county during the 1850s

North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Mountain Farmers and the Market Economy: Ashe County during the 1850sAuthor(s): Martin CrawfordSource: The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1994), pp. 430-450Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521821 .

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Mountain Farmers and the Market Economy:

Ashe County during the 1850s

Martin Crawford

The opening up of huge tracts of preindustrial Appalachia for scholarly exploration

has substantially modified the traditional view of an isolated, static, largely undif

ferentiated society. What now impress historians are, first, the diversity of the early

Appalachian experience and, second, the extent to which commercial values and

market involvement had embraced many parts of the Mountain region, including western North Carolina, well before the penetration of industrial capital in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, revisionism has left much

of the basic structure of preindustrial Appalachian society relatively undisturbed.

Whatever the character and authority of Mountain elites or the extent of Mountain

farmers' integration with the wider regional and national economy, Appalachia re

mained an overwhelmingly small-farm, subsistence-oriented region where develop ment was inhibited by a variety of geographic and cultural factors, not the least of which

were poor communications.1

Isolated or not, Mountain farmers were not passive victims of economic circum

stances. Despite their comparative disadvantage, most upland households could survive

the periodic hardships that afflicted all rural communities in the mid-nineteenth

century and, in many cases, even contemplate significant advancement up the eco

nomic ladder. Descent into poverty and social dependency might be swift; progress, on

the other hand, was bound to be incremental, even with new opportunities that resulted

from the increased expansion and accessibility of regional markets. As the availability

1. Important contributions to the réévaluation of preindustrial southern Mountain society and economy include: Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Ronald D EUer, "Land and Family: An Historical View of Preindustrial Appalachia," Appalachian Journal 6 (winter 1979): 83-110; Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818-1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

Press, 1988); Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Altina C. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in

Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); John C. Inscoe, Mountain

Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Mary Beth Pudup, "The Boundaries of Class in Preindustrial Appalachia," Journal of Historical

Geography 15 (April 1989): 139-162; Pudup, "The Limits of Subsistence: Agriculture and Industry in Central

Appalachia," Agricultural History 64 (winter 1990): 61-89; Robert D. Mitchell, ed., Appalachian Frontiers:

Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991 );

Ralph Mann, "Mountains, Land, and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s," Journal of Southern History 58 (August 1992): 411-434; and Robert Tracy McKenzie, "Wealth and Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee in 1860," Appalachian Journal 21 (spring 1994): 260-279.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW



Ashe County during the 185 Os 431

of land succumbed to the pressures of a persistently high birthrate, the choices open to farm households in Mountain areas such as northwestern North Carolina were neces

sarily limited: stay put and adapt or abandon the local community and seek economic fortune elsewhere. This essay investigates the experience of one Appalachian commu

nity in the decade leading up to the Civil War, its purpose to show how Mountain farmers accommodated themselves to the changing pressures of mid-nineteenth-cen

tury development.

Ashe County lies in the extreme northwest corner of North Carolina at its junction with Virginia and Tennessee. Founded in 1799 to incorporate "all that part of the

county of Wilkes lying west of the extreme height of the Appalachian mountains," its location high up on the Blue Ridge plateau made external communication both slow and occasionally hazardous.2 Although the county's representative in the state legisla ture, Thomas N. Crumpler, did introduce a bill in J anuary 1861 to charter the S tatesville and Tennessee Railroad, interest in internal improvements generally during the late antebellum period appeared less marked than in other parts of western North Carolina, and it was not until well after the Civil War that proposals were advanced to construct

effective road and rail communications linking Ashe to the rest of the state.3 In the late

1850s the east-west mail route still took thirty-six hours to cover the modest ninety eight miles from Salem to the county seat, Jefferson.4 Travel was particularly enervating in winter but often perilous at other times of the year. In early 1857 the severe weather

caused one driver on the Salem-Jefferson route to become so "benumbed with cold" as

to be rendered almost helpless, and a few years later one of the county's leading citizens

was drowned while unsuccessfully negotiating the swollen waters of the Yadkin River

near Wilkesboro.5

Yet despite such impediments, it would be wrong to see Ashe County's geographic

position as isolating it from the rest of American society in any definitive sense. As

Ronald Eller has noted, few if any southern mountaineers were entirely cut off from

their surrounding environment, with even the remotest cove and hollow settlements

experiencing periodic contact with the outside world through the visits of itinerant

2. For the early history of Ashe County, see Arthur L. Fletcher, Ashe County: A History (Jefferson, N.C.:

Ashe County Research Association, 1963); John Preston Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History (from 1730 to 1913) (Raleigh: Edward Buncombe Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1914), 159-166 (quotation from p. 159); and Thomas J. Schoenbaum, The New River Controversy (Winston-Salem:

JohnF. Blair, 1979), 3-46.

3. Journal of the House of Commons of North Carolina, Session of 1860-'61,253 (January 7,1861). Crumpler's bill was undoubtedly connected to a larger proposal to create a rail link from Charlotte via Statesville to

the Tennessee line. See Raleigh North Carolina Standard, September 21,1859, which reports a meeting held

in Statesville two weeks earlier. The extent of Ashe and other northwestern counties' enthusiasm for such

an initiative is unclear. Arguments that the proposal would greatly benefit northwestern farmers, including those in Ashe, are expounded in the letter of "Citizen" in Statesville Iredell Express, October 14, 1859: "Is

not the proposed railroad from Charlotte to Statesville, the first section of a road that would supply to the

people of these counties the means of the most ready access to their best markets?" On the (mostly

unsuccessful) late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century attempts to link Ashe County to neighboring

areas, see Fletcher, Ashe County, 94-95, 99-100,125, 265-266.

4. AshevilleNews, January 20,1859. The mail route, via Yadkinville and Wilkesboro, ran three times a week

there and back.

5. Salem People's Press, January 23, 1857; North Carolina Standard, October 16, 1861. The victim was Col.

George Bower.

VOLUME LXXI • NUMBER 4 • OCTOBER 1994



432 Martin Crawford

peddlers and preachers, not to mention excursions to the county seat for court

appearances, payment of taxes, and participation in political and religious gatherings.

Although Ashe County boasted no newspaper of its own before the Civil War, information on external affairs seems to have circulated widely; few inhabitants were

perceptibly disadvantaged by the distance that separated them from the main channels

of economic and political activity. Moreover, as Eller notes, the structural isolation

experienced by communities such as Ashe was hardly unique to the southern Mountains

but affected much of rural America in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond.6

Nonetheless, Ashe County's location was hardly conducive to its rapid integration into an expanding market economy, as its modest wealth holdings in 1860 seemed all

too clearly to confirm. On the eve of secession the county's economic condition looked

far from promising, with a combined per capita real and personal property valuation of

only $218, identifying it as the second poorest in the state.7 As John C. Inscoe has

suggested, however, such statistics potentially obscure the distinctive features of Moun

tain farming, including the greater utilization of unimproved land, and therefore may

misrepresent the productive and progressive character of western North Carolina's

agricultural economy in the late antebellum period. As disunion loomed, the state's

Mountain region was anticipating a healthy economic future, founded principally upon the development of stronger trading links with the plantation South and other regional markets. The dominant agricultural product in western North Carolina was livestock, but the farm economy as a whole was remarkable for its lack of specialization, with, as

Inscoe concludes, the variety of crops grown in the Mountains being exceeded "only

by the variations with which they were combined from one farm to another."8

Ashe County's own agricultural potential had been highlighted in 1828 by the

eminent Chapel Hill geologist Elisha Mitchell, who wrote that it had "greater facilities

for maintaining its soil in a state of productiveness. . . than any other part of North

Carolina. . . ."9 Over thirty years later another visitor, Henry King Burgwyn Jr., on a

military recruiting mission to Ashe, appeared equally enthusiastic. In a letter to his mother in May 1861, the young easterner described the surrounding land as "in general

very good & very well adapted for grazing & pasturing cattle" and even contemplated

purchasing a farm in the area for that very purpose. Moreover, he noted that, unlike

the mountains in neighboring Virginia, which were "almost solid rock," those in North

6. Eller, "Land and Family," 84-85. All modern historians of preindustrial Appalachian development address the issue of Mountain isolation. For some specific discussions, see Gene W ilhelm Jr., "Appalachian Isolation: Fact or Fiction?" in An Appalachian Symposium: Essays Written in Honor of Cratis D. Williams, ed. J. W. Williamson (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian State University Press, 1977), 77-91; David C. Hsiung, "How Isolated Was Appalachia? Upper East Tennessee, 1780-1835," Appalachian Journal 19 (summer 1989): 336-349; and Hsiung, "Isolation and Integration in Upper East Tennessee, 1780-1860: The Historical

Origins of Appalachian Characterizations" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1991).

7. For a convenient representation of county per capita real and personal wealth in 1860, see Dwight B.

Billings Jr., Planters and the Making of a "New South": Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1979), 48. The impact of poor communications on the commercial development of an adjacent Mountain region is well delineated in Donald W.

Buckwalter, "Effects of Early Nineteenth Century Transportation Disadvantage on the Agriculture of East

Tennessee," Southeastern Geographer 27 (May 1987): 18-37.

8. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 11-58. The quotation is on p. 17.

9. Quoted in Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 20.




Ashe County during the 1850s 433

Carolina could be cultivated "all the way up to the very top."10 A similar point had been

made by Dr. Mitchell, who anticipated the Mountain forests' being cleared and

converted into extensive pastures for stock raising. Carried away by the ripe strawberries

he found thriving in Ashe's fertile Mountain soils, Mitchell's pastoral vision finally knew no bounds. Except for "the bleakness and cloudiness of the situation," he wrote

in his journal, "one does not see why there might not be a plantation on the very summit

of the mountain."11

Outside observers, undeniably seduced by its natural beauty, thus identified north

western North Carolina as an area of considerable economic potential. But what about

those who lived and worked in Ashe County? How did they perceive its prospects? In

the late 1840s and early 1850s an elderly Ashe County farmer, James Sluder, attempted to persuade his son, James Jr., who was living in Randolph County, to move to the

Mountains. Of German stock, Sluder had relocated with his family from Rowan County to Ashe by way of Randolph and Buncombe Counties sometime during the 1840s. He

had followed the lead of his eldest son, John, who had migrated in the previous decade, and he was desperately keen that his son and namesake should follow. In letters to his

son and daughter-in-law, James Sluder described the favorable agricultural conditions

in Ashe County and concluded by suggesting that "you could live better here than you can there."12 Similar information and advice were also provided by another son, Felix, who reported in February 1851 that, following a particularly mild winter, corn and rye were plentiful, while the hogs had "got very fat" in the woods. "I think you woul like it

beter than you expect," Felix told his brother. "It is very hilly but the hills is good

neighbers tha interrupt no body tha are richer than the level ground and clear of rocks.

The forest land that you can git in this country is strong and righ for oats."13

In the event, such advocacy failed to persuade James Sluder Jr. to leave Randolph

County, a decision possibly influenced by indications of the harsher realities of Moun

tain life contained in the family's letters. In February 1851, for example, the wife of

James and Felix's younger brother David died, leaving a two-week-old daughter.14 But

the decision doubtless also reflected a careful estimate of economic prospects. Signifi

cantly, while James's father wrote in September 1848 that he was "satisfide" with

conditions in Ashe, he also reported that one of his other sons, Isaac, together with

10. Henry King Burgwyn Jr. to his mother, May 21, 1861, Burgwyn Family Papers, Southern Historical

Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill. For the biographical context of Burgwyn's visit to Ashe County, see Archie K. Davis, Boy Colonel of the Confederacy: The Life and Times of Henry King

Burgwyn Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 71-74

11. Diary of a Geobgical Tour by Dr. Elisha Mitchell in 1827 and 1828, with Introduction and Notes by Dr.

Kemp P. Battle, LL.D. (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina, 1905), 26.

12. James Sluder Sr. to James (Jr.) and Mahala Sluder, September 10, 1848, Samuel Barker Papers, Special

Collections Department, Duke University Library, Durham. Church records relating to the birth of his eldest

son in 1811 indicate that the elder James Sluder's name was spelled "Schluchter." Information on the Sluder

family is gained from Ruth W. Shepherd, ed., The Heritage of Ashe County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem:

Ashe County Heritage Book Committee in cooperation with Hunter Publishing Co., 1984), 458-460.

13. Felix Sluder to James and Mahala Sluder, February 23, 1851, Barker Papers.

14. James Sluder Sr. to James and Mahala Sluder, May 11, 1851, Barker Papers. David Sluder had already

remarried by the time of this letter. His new wife, Elizabeth Clemmons, brought two young children into

the marriage.




434 Martin Crawford

As a major in the Confederate army, Henry King Burgwynjr. (1841-1863) visited Ashe County in 1861 on

a recruiting trip and described the mountains there as cultivable and the land as well suited to livestock

production. Burgwyn became colonel of the Twenty-sixth Regiment North Carolina Troops the next year and was killed in battle at Gettysburg. Portrait from Samuel A. Ashe, Stephen B. Weeks, and Charles L.

VanNoppen, eds., Biographical History ofNorthCarolina, vol. 8 (Greensboro: Charles L. VanNoppen, 1917),

facing 67; photograph of Ashe County farmland in the nineteenth century (opposite) from the State

Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh.

another close relative, Joseph, was not. Isaac and Joseph Sluder, in fact, soon returned

to Randolph County, evidently disillusioned with conditions in the Mountains.

But what could the Sluders realistically aspire to? As relative newcomers to Ashe

County, the family found opportunities limited by scarce or inferior land resources—

they had settled in the North Fork district, where land values were among the

poorest—and by the other economic constraints of subsistence farming. Predictably,

the most successful member of the family was the one who had arrived earliest. By 1860

John Sluder had accumulated real and personal property worth nine hundred dollars, a sum far exceeding that of all other Ashe County family members combined. For his

part, James Sluder Sr. increased his improved landholdings during the 1850s from ten

to twenty-five acres, but his advanced age (he was seventy-five in 1860) meant that his




Ashe County during the 185 os 43 5

W:

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I j




436 Martin Crawford

productive years were almost at an end.15 For the younger sons, on the other hand, all

of whom headed independent households, the decade may have been one of consider

able frustration.

Neither Felix Sluder, aged thirty-six in 1860, his brother David, who was five years

younger, nor his elder brother William made any measurable economic gains during the 1850s, a time when their domestic responsibilities patently increased. Felix's

circumstances arguably declined during the decade: according to the agricultural census, he owned three acres of improved land in 1850; ten years later he was recorded

as possessing none.16 David and William Sluder also failed to acquire any real property and, like Felix, ended the decade as tenant farmers, a condition that many young families were forced to adopt. Tenancy represented a hopeful yet all too often unfulfilled

step on the path toward independent proprietorship, one that in many instances marked

its practitioners' status as little more than that of farm laborer.17 In William's case, at

least, lack of economic progress may have resulted partly from deficiencies in character:

in the winter of 1850-1851, according to his brother's testimony, William Sluder

experienced "bad luck" when partaking of brandy during a visit to the salt lick. Accused

of supplying the spirit to local "negrose," he was arrested, fined thirty-six dollars, and, unable to pay, had his wagon and one of his horses confiscated. Those were subsequently redeemed, but only after William had been forced to "give his note and security."18

The main difficulty for the Sluder brothers was not bad luck but generational circumstance: as James Oakes has observed, the stability of up-country yeoman society

depended heavily upon the father's ability to control the disposition of family property even if that meant, as it usually did, that sons would be deprived of full economic

independence until after his death.19 The only other option for the Sluders was to abandon Ashe County altogether, a course likely to entail even greater economic and social insecurity and one that yeoman culture, with its strong family continuities, might traditionally be expected to discourage. An examination of decennial persistence rates,

derived from a one-third sample of family households in 1850, indicates that over 60

15. Information on the Sluder family holdings is derived from the Seventh and Eighth Censuses of the United States, 1850 and 1860: Ashe County, North Carolina, Population and Agriculture Schedules, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

16. The Seventh Census, 1850: Ashe County Population Schedule, however, records Felix Sluder as owning no real property.

17. Identifying farm tenancy remains a complex issue, best approached initially through Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Whereas Felix and William Sluder were included in both the Seventh Census, 1860: Ashe

County Population and Agriculture Schedules, their younger brother David appeared only in the former (albeit as a "farmer"), indicating more limited agricultural production and possibly even a different contractual obligation, more akin to that of farm laborer than tenant. The variety of tenancy arrangements in western North Carolina before the Civil War is identified in Joseph D. Reid Jr., "Antebellum Southern Rental Contracts," Explorations in Economic History 13 (January 1976): 69-83. For further insight into the social dynamics of Mountain tenancy and laboring, see Mann, "Mountains, Land, and Kin Networks"; and H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., "The Antebellum Economy of Southwestern North Carolina"

(paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Gettysburg, Pa., 1992).

18. Felix Sluder to James and Mahala Sluder, February 23, 1851, Barker Papers.

19. James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 114.




Ashe County during the 1850s 43 7

■¡■i

JÉI

.S'

Conditions in Ashe County's North Fork district proved unfavorable for most members of the Sluderfamily who migrated there; only James Sluder Sr. and his oldest son, John, appear to have made measurable

economic gains in the 1850s. Photograph of agricultural land along the North Fork of the New River from the State Archives.

percent of adult males aged between twenty and forty-nine remained in Ashe County

in the decade leading up to the Civil War, a figure that compares favorably with other settled American communities in the mid-nineteenth century.20 On the other hand,

the figures also confirm that nearly four out of ten young farmers did leave Ashe during

the 1850s, presumably because, like Joseph and Isaac Sluder, they believed that

domestic progress was more likely to be advanced elsewhere.

Domestic economic considerations seem particularly evident when we consider the

group most likely to be affected by generational pressures: adult male dependents still resident in the family household. Although the age differential between persisters and

nonpersisters in this group was small (less than six months), average household real

property values of the ones who remained in Ashe County in the decade following the 1850 census were more than twice those of the ones who left. (Among household heads

the difference was not so marked: male heads who stayed owned real property in 1850

20. The literature on persistence rates is extensive and growing, but see in particular Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 78-111, and the wide-ranging discussion of internal migration in Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian

Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 203-225.




438 Martin Crawford

worth on average nearly 12 percent more than those who left.) Also suggestive is the

far greater number of nonpersisting household members—over 40 percent—who were

not family dependents, at least as identified through common surnames, as compared with less than 7 percent of those who stayed. These figures confirm the importance of

the household in sustaining family continuity; once detached from it, young men were

much more likely to abandon the community altogether. Finally, the analysis reveals

an intriguing divergence in illiteracy rates. While the numbers involved are small, the

percentage of those males unable to read and write who had left Ashe County by 1860

was double that of those who stayed, indicative perhaps of the changing cultural

demands of Mountain economic relations (see table 1).

Table 1

1850-1860 Persistence

Average Age Illiteracy

Persisters 61.93% (257) 31.72 7.00% (18)

Nonpersisters 38.07% (158) 30.75 13.92% (22)

Total 100.00% (415)

Household Heads

Average Real

Average Age Property Illiteracy

Persisters 62.86% (198) 34.01 $485.63 8.59% (17)

Nonpersisters 37.14% (117) 32.99 $434-42 15.38% (18)

Total 100.00% (315)

Non-Household Heads (All)

Non-Family

Average Age Illiteracy Members

Persisters 59.00% ( 59) 24.07 1.69% (1) 6.78% (4)

Nonpersisters 41.00% ( 41) 24.34 9.76% (4) 41.46% (17)

Total 100.00% (100)

Non-Household Heads (Family)

Average Family Average Age Real Property

Persisters 69.62% (55) 24-18 $1,142.36

Nonpersisters 30.38% (24) 23.75 $ 540.00

Total 100.00% (79)

Note: The sample consists of all adult males aged between twenty and forty-nine in every third household in the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Ashe County, North Carolina, Population Schedule. Names were checked against the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Ashe and Alleghany County, North Carolina, Population Schedules (Alleghany separated from Ashe in 1859). No allowance has been made for mortality. Total sample: 415.

Such bare statistics on persistence conceal complex social and economic realities.

While for some individuals, particularly those severed from family kinship ties,





out-migration was part of the endemic transiency of nineteenth-century America, for many others it was a strategic response to the problems of generational provision. Among the

young men who left Ashe County during the 1850s, for example, was Amos Faw, the ninth

child of Jacob and Mary Faw, who farmed nearly a thousand acres at the mouth of Beaver

Creek on the South Fork of the New River. In 1857 Amos moved to Fulton County, Illinois, where he joined his elder brother Jacob Judson, who had migrated there a few years earlier.

If Amos's decision to leave Ashe County was partly dictated by the limited expectations of family landholding, the move also reflected a determination to sustain family continuity and indeed was probably facilitated by parental or sibling assistance.21 Like farm tenancy,

out-migration did not necessarily connote the failure of domestic ambition but often only its postponement; parental provision for offspring was implicit in the ideal of social

independence, and for all family households the question was not whether adult children

were to be separately established, but when and how.22

For the majority of small producers such as the Sluders who remained behind during the 1850s, the prospects of economic advancement appeared decidedly mixed. Data

derived from the agricultural censuses reveal significant changes in the patterns of

cultivated landholding in Ashe County during the 1850s, changes that reflect the

combined pressures of commercial agriculture, land availability, and rapid population

growth. In 1850, for example, nearly two-thirds of Ashe County farmers possessed between one and forty-nine acres of improved land; ten years later the proportion had

slipped dramatically to just over 38 percent. During the same period, the number of

farmers with no improved acreage leaped from 7.3 percent to nearly 29 percent. Further

up the economic scale, the percentage of larger landholders also increased, with those

farmers possessing over fifty improved acres rising to nearly a third, from just over 27

percent a decade earlier. The proportional increase was even greater among the Ashe

County farmers with the largest landholdings: between 1850 and 1860 the percentage with two hundred or more improved acres rose from 2.5 to 4-4. Overall, the figures indicate a visible stretching of Ashe County's economic order during the 1850s, with

greater numbers of both landless and wealthier farmers at the expense of those with

more moderate holdings (see table 2). Those overall changes in Ashe County's socioeconomic composition derived from

a number of contributory factors, the first and arguably the most crucial of which was

the demographic. For a variety of reasons, southern Appalachia failed to participate in

the "demographic transition" that substantially reduced the size of American families

in the nineteenth century.23 On his visit to Ashe County in 1828, Elisha Mitchell was

21. Amos's parents, Jacob and Mary Faw, had themselves migrated to Indiana in 1831 but returned to Ashe

County two years later. His brother Jacob Judson Faw was born in the Hoosier State in 1832. Shepherd,

Heritage of Ashe County, 235,240. See A. Gordon Darroch, "Migrants in the Nineteenth Century: Fugitives

or Families in Motion?" Journal of Family History 6 (fall 1981): 257-277, for a wide-ranging discussion of

family migration patterns.

22. See in particular James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-industrial America," William

and Mary Quarterly 35 (January 1978): 3-32.

23. The cause of the demographic transition is a matter for debate. For a summary, see Carl N. Degler, At

Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1980), 178-209. On Mountain fertility patterns, see Gordon F. Dejong, Appalachian Fertility Decline:

A Demographic and Sociological Analysis (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1968), 31-51.




440 Martin Crawford

Among the residents with kinship ties to landholding families who left Ashe County was Jacob Judson Faw

(1832-1909; left), son of Jacob Faw and his wife, Mary Calloway Faw (1803-1876; right). Photographs from

Ruth W. Shepherd, ed., The Heritage of Ashe County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem: Ashe County

Fferitage Book Committee in cooperation with Hunter Publishing Co., 1984), 241, 240.

struck by the "swarms" of children that he everywhere encountered, testimony to the

persistently high birthrate that prevailed throughout the Mountain region.24 Families

with ten or more offspring were not uncommon in this period, with at least one Ashe

County couple, Jacob and Emeline Walters, producing eighteen children, and another, Charles and Adaline Reeves, seventeen. One Ashe County matriarch, Jane Richard

son, was reported in 1855 as having no fewer than 174 living children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. That the net population increase was not considerably higher than it was can perhaps be explained by the fact that many offspring did not reach

adulthood; for example, only nine of the seventeen Reeves children survived to raise

families of their own.25 Ashe County's free population grew by approximately a third during the 1850s,

considerably increasing the pressure on available agricultural land.26 As the history of

the Sluder family reveals, one likely consequence of that demographic pressure was a

sharp increase in farm tenancy, as yeoman parents proved increasingly unable to provide

land for their adult sons. At the same time, some families clearly made substantial

economic gains in the late antebellum decade, their enhanced prosperity most probably

resulting from the improved marketability of local agricultural produce. Despite its

unpropitious location, Ashe County undoubtedly benefited from the expansion of

regional trade attendant upon improved communications and upon the increased

24. Diary of a Geological Tour, 25.

25. Shepherd, Heritage of Ashe County, 490,423; Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, April 4,1855.

26. This estimation includes Alleghany County, which separated from Ashe in 1859. The precise increase

is 33.8 percent.





penetration of merchant capital into the Mountains. Already by 1850 the county ranked as the leading western North Carolina producer of buckwheat, rye, and molasses;

by the end of the decade, it had also achieved regional dominance in the production of cheese.27

Table 2

Distribution of Farm Size

Improved Acres 1850 1860

0 7.34% ( 73) 28.80% ( 341)

1-49 65.43% (651) 38.60% ( 457)

50-199 24.72% (246) 28.21% ( 334)

200+ 2.51% ( 25) 4.39% ( 52)

Totals 100.00% (995) 100.00% (1,184)

NOTE: The 1850 sample includes all farmers from the Seventh Census, 1850: Ashe County Agriculture Schedule, excluding those districts that would later form Alleghany County. (While care has been taken

to match the area involved, a limited margin of error exists. However, there is no evidence that that distorts

the above results to any significant degree.) The 1860 sample includes all those farmers in the Eighth Census, 1860: Ashe County Agriculture Schedule who were also found in the Population Schedule.

Obviously, there were also a considerable number of so-called "farmers without farms" in Ashe County

(140 in 1860), who were not recorded in the agricultural census. This essay will not confront the

increasingly complex debate over the precise definition of farm tenancy in the antebellum period. "Tenants" generally refers in this essay to those farmers who reported no improved acreage in the

agricultural census. Slightly narrower criteria were used for the samples in table 3, however (see note to

table 3).

Best placed to take advantage of improved commercial opportunities were the

county's large landholders, the increasing numbers of whom have already been noted.

On the eve of the Civil War approximately one in twenty-three Ashe County farmers

possessed two hundred or more acres of improved land. The majority of these (57.7

percent) were also slave owners with holdings that ranged from one to thirty-four.

Although black slavery did not play as decisive a role as in other southern regions, for

those Mountain farmers with sufficient land to cultivate and sufficient capital to invest,

it undoubtedly proved worthwhile.28 Ashe County's slaveholders, who comprised a

mere 6.6 percent of farmers as enumerated in the 1860 agricultural census, owned nearly

50 percent of the total real and personal property. While slave numbers in the county remained static during the 1850s, the system itself showed few signs of abandonment, as surviving bills of sale confirm.29

Improved Acres 1850 1860

0 7.34% ( 73) 28.80% ( 341)

1-49 65.43% (651) 38.60% ( 457)

50-199 24.72% (246) 28.21% ( 334)

200+ 2.51% ( 25) 4.39% ( 52)

Totals 100.00% (995) 100.00% (1,184)

27. See the table in Inscoe, MountainMasters, 15. As Inscoe points out, this ranking also includes Alleghany

County.

28. Ashe County slaveholding is discussed in Martin Crawford, "Political Society in a Southern Mountain

Community: Ashe County, North Carolina, 1850-1861," Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1989):

378-381, and in its wider regional context in Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 59-114.

29. In two separate transactions in early 1858, wealthy Town district farmer Allen Perkins sold three female

slaves—Mary, aged eighteen, her eighteen-month-old daughter, Martha, and six-year-old Elmira—for a

total of $1,800. Bills of sale (copies), February 23, 25, 1858, Ashe County Public Library, West Jefferson.

John Inscoe has estimated the average price of slaves at the end of the 1850s to be $835. Inscoe, Mountain

Masters, 82.




442 Martin Crawford

Although western North Carolina's slaves, as John Inscoe has described, were used in a variety of occupational capacities—as indeed they were in the non-Mountain

South—the utilization of slave labor confirms the commercial viability of Mountain

agriculture among Ashe County's larger landholders. In particular, slave ownership could compensate for a shortage of adult dependents able to assist with farm labor. It is

perhaps no coincidence that Colonel George Bower, with thirty-four slaves and 1,000 acres of improved land, had no children of his own. However, such a consideration may have been stronger among those slave-owning families with more moderate landhold

ings, where commercial imperatives were less clearly defined. Examination of those

Ashe County farm households that cultivated between 100 and 199 improved acres in

1860 reveals that the average number of adult male dependents (fifteen and older) in

nonslaveholding households (.96) was double that of their slaveholding counterparts (.48). No such correlation was discovered for those with over 200 improved acres, however, suggesting that for wealthier farmers the commitment to slave labor was more

strongly dictated by commercial than familial motives.30

The social and economic authority achieved by Ashe County's large landowners, which was broadly analogous to that of their planter counterparts in the lowland South,

originated in early family exploitation of the fertile bottomlands of the New River valley and its tributaries.31 Preeminent among them in the late antebellum period was Colonel

Bower, whose family had granted the land upon which the county seat was established in 1799. Bower's wealth, however, estimated at over $ 122,000 in 1860, derived not only from agriculture but also from his various commercial endeavors, including hotel

keeping and merchandising. Although the R. G. Dun credit ledgers indicate that in

January 1852 Bower had ceased all business activities in order to turn his attention back to farming, they also confirm how much his wealth owed to the "intelligent and

energetic course of trading in m[erchan]dise & produce" that he had engaged in

throughout the previous decade and earlier.32

Several other members of Ashe County's landholding elite were also active in

merchandising during the late antebellum period. However, as the Dun reports indicate, such activity does not appear to have been conducted on a large scale, nor, with one or

two exceptions, was it particularly successful. Both John H. Martin and Johnson Perkins, who farmed extensive tracts of land in the Laurel Springs and Helton districts

respectively, abandoned merchandising at the end of the 1850s in order to concentrate on farming and stock raising, just as George Bower had done a few years earlier. Another

prominent landowner, John F. Greer, whose combined real and personal wealth in 1860 was second only to that of Colonel Bower, sustained a small but profitable retailing business on Grassy Creek, as well as a share in another store on Horse Creek. According to a credit report of January 1859, however, Greer's "chief investment" continued to

30. For households with 200 or more improved acres, the figures were: 1.1 (slaveholding) and .77

(nonslaveholding). Similar results obtain for the number of households with adult male dependents. Total households involved: 200 or more acres, 22; 100-199 acres, 93. Eighth Census, 1860: Ashe County Population and Slave Schedules.

31. For more detailed discussion, see Crawford, "Political Society," 375-378.

32. R. G. Dun and Co. Credit Reporting Ledgers, North Carolina, vol. 2, p. 25, Baker Library, Harvard

University, Cambridge, Mass.





Professor Elisha Mitchell of the University of North Carolina visited Ashe County on a geological trip in

1828 and commented on the natural features, agricultural prospects, and inhahitants of the area. Photograph of portrait owned by the Philanthropic Society from the North Carolina Collection, University of North

Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.

be in farming, and it was not until after the Civil War that he achieved his position as one of the leading general merchandisers in the county. Among the very large

landowners, in fact, only Greer and David Worth, who together with his father-in-law,

Stephen Thomas, ran a successful tanning and merchandising business on the North

Fork of the New, appear to have sustained any significant business operations during the late 1850s.33

Despite the attractions of retailing and other sources of revenue, therefore, for Ashe

County's large landowners agricultural production remained the most profitable as well

as the most secure form of economic activity. By the 1850s farmers who sought to

diversify into merchandising faced strong competition from the county's growing number of retail merchants, as well as from outside traders such as Calvin J. Cowles,

whose commercial and industrial operations extended throughout northwestern North

33. Dun Credit Ledgers, vol. 2, pp. 27 (Martin, Perkins), 25 (Greer, Worth). Greer's later prominence is

outlined in A. B. Cox, Footprints on the Sands of Time: A History of South-Western Virginia and North-Western North Carolina (Sparta, N.C.: Star Publishing Co., 1900), 117.




Martin Crawford

fc'V t ■

Prominent citizen Stephen Thomas, whose daughter Elizabeth married David Worth, farmed, operated several businesses, and served as the North Fork's first postmaster, 1830-1835. Photograph of Thomas from

Shepherd, Heritage of Ashe County, 473.

Carolina.34 Ashe County's small mercantile community was concentrated in the county

seat, Jefferson, confirming that town's growing importance as a local commercial and

service center, and most of its members were relative newcomers to the area. Among

the most active on the eve of the Civil War were the three Waugh brothers, who had moved from Monroe County, Tennessee, in the mid-1840s. (The youngest brother,

Nathan Waugh, had married the daughter of Richard Gentry, thus linking his fortunes to those of one of the most influential landowning families in the region.)35 Ashe

County's merchants were also closely associated with its nascent professional commu

nity. Its most dynamic members on the eve of the Civil War were undoubtedly two

lawyers, Quincy F. Neal and Thomas N. Crumpler, both of whom were recent im

migrants to northwest North Carolina. Neal's elder brother Benjamin was a Jefferson merchant, while the precocious Crumpler, who was elected as the county's legislative

34. See Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 67.

35. Aside from the census, information on the Waugh brothers is derived from Shepherd, Heritage of Ashe

County, 492-493; Mrs. C. D. Neal, Miss Chessie's Memories: Interesting People, Places, and Stories in Ashe

County History Recounted (n.p.: privately printed, 1982), 45. For the Waughs' various mercantile interests

before the Civil War, see Dun Credit Ledgers, vol. 2, pp. 26, 30.





representative in 1860 and was himself the son of a Surry County trader, had formed a retail business partnership with James M. Gentry, the Jefferson merchant and hotelier with whom he also boarded.36

The emergence during the 1850s of a small but influential merchant-lawyer group points to the increasing market orientation of Ashe County's agricultural economy. Historians now recognize that preindustrial Mountain communities were extensively involved in local and regional trading networks, and they have begun to probe deeply into the socioeconomic, political, and cultural implications of that involvement for

Appalachian development.37 For Mountain farmers, as for most other small agricultural

producers in nineteenth-century America, the first priority was household self-suffi

ciency. In practice, however, that could only be achieved through the production of

agricultural surpluses that could be sold or bartered at local markets in return for goods and services not otherwise available.38 Subsistence and market production were not

contradictory activities but mutually sustainable ones, the balance of which might vary from area to area, from farm to farm, and from season to season. For the more affluent

and ambitious farmers, including those with slaves, market involvement was extensive; but even for those with more moderate landholdings, some degree of commercial

production was essential if household self-sufficiency, with all its implications for

yeoman independence, was to be maintained. Indeed, for farmers to eschew the market

would, in Lacy Ford's apt phrase, have been an "unnecessarily radical" step, resulting in the very condition they sought so hard to avoid. In this respect, the behavior of

yeoman farmers in the North Carolina uplands was barely distinguishable from that of

their Piedmont counterparts, as recently studied by Paul D. Escott, notwithstanding the latter population's more direct engagement with the market afforded by closer

proximity to the railroad.39

By the late 1850s, therefore, the vast majority of Ashe County farmers were involved

at some level in commercial production. Inevitably, a higher proportion of marketable

products was discovered among those farmers with the largest landholdings, but the

differences were primarily of degree, not of kind. The exception, perhaps, was in cheese

production, which was overwhelmingly the preserve of the larger landholders (although

36. See Dun Credit Ledgers, vol. 2, pp. 31 (B. H. Neal), 26, 31 (Gentry, Crumpler). On the Neal family, see Shepherd, Heritage of A she County, 380-381. Quincy F. Neal became one of Ashe County's most

prominent public figures after the Civil War and was the first master of its Masonic lodge, which was

permanently organized in 1866. See Fletcher, Ashe County, 302-304- Maj. Thomas Crumpler was killed in

Virginia in 1862. His family origins have been traced in the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850:

Surry County, North Carolina, Population Schedule. Both Neal and Crumpler were students at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

37. See in particular the recent collection edited by Robert D. Mitchell, Appalachian Frontiers, especially the essays by Mary Beth Pudup and Paul Salstrom. See Gail Williams O'Brien, The Legal Fraternity and the

MakingofaNewSouthCommunity, 1848-1882 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), for a suggestive discussion of the emerging influence of lawyer-businessmen in mid-nineteenth-century North Carolina.

38. See the family memoir of Jacob Faw, which describes the annual market visits to Statesville, a journey that took ten days, where livestock and other agricultural produce—including apple brandy—were traded

in return for supplies and cash. Faw died in January 1859. Shepherd, Heritage of Ashe County, 240.

39. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1988), 56; Paul D. Escott, "Yeoman Independence and the Market: Social Status

and Economic Development in Antebellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 66 (July

1989): 275-300.




446 Martin Crawford

one North Fork tenant farmer, forty-year-old Harison McCoy, produced a remarkable

four hundred pounds of cheese in 1860). If there was a commercial crop more clearly identified with poorer farmers, it was tobacco, which was grown by nearly 30 percent of tenants and landholders with less than fifty acres, as compared to only 13.5 percent of those owning two hundred acres or more. T obacco production increased significantly

during the 1850s; even more dramatic was the emergence of wheat as a leading market

crop.40 At the beginning of the decade, the ratio of wheat to corn in northwestern North

Carolina was approximately one to thirty-four; ten years later, it had narrowed to just over one to five. Wheat production embraced all sections of Ashe County's agricultural

community, moreover, including over 40 percent of the tenant farmers, who, whether

by choice or landlord entreaty, were doubtless attracted to the relatively high prices for

wheat and flour that prevailed in the second half of the 1850s (see table 3).41

Table 3 1860 Crop Production (Percentages of Farmers Producing Crops)

Improved Acres Wheat Rye Corn Oats Tobacco Wool Cheese

0 41.3 26.7 81.9 32.4 29.5 39.4 4.1

1-49 51.4 41.4 77.9 50.6 29.8 58.4 4.2

50-199 74.9 62.0 92.5 79.3 25.2 86.5 15.0

200+ 86.5 75.0 92.3 84.6 13.5 98.1 32.7

Note: The production sample for zero improved acres excludes a small number of farmers with unimproved acreage and reported real property in the Eighth Census, 1860: Ashe County Population Schedule.

Otherwise, it includes all Ashe County farmers found in both the Agriculture and Population Schedules. Total sample: 0 acres, 315; 1-49 acres, 457; 50-199 acres, 334; 200+ acres, 52.

The quest for self-sufficiency, therefore, was leading Ashe County's farmers into an

increasing reliance upon market production, with all its attendant risks and rewards.

As the experience of John Sluder indicates, in most cases this involved a moderate

reordering of productive priorities. By 1860 the Sluder household on the North Fork consisted of forty-eight-year-old John; his wife, Ann; and their six children, three male and three female, whose ages ranged from eight to twenty-five. Unwilling or unable to

acquire any new land in the decade leading up to the Civil War, John Sluder had chosen to confront his larger consumption needs by doubling his acreage under cultivation and

by producing for the first time such potentially profitable market commodities as wheat

Improved Acres Wheat Rye Com Oats Tobacco Wool Cheese

0 41.3 26.7 81.9 32.4 29.5 39.4 4.1

1-49 51.4 41.4 77.9 50.6 29.8 58.4 4.2

50-199 74.9 62.0 92.5 79.3 25.2 86.5 15.0

200+ 86.5 75.0 92.3 84.6 13.5 98.1 32.7

40. Tobacco production increased in Ashe County from 4,904 pounds in 1850 to 14,336 pounds in 1860

(Ashe and Alleghany). Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, Printer, 1853), 318-324; Agriculture of the United States in I860 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), 104-107. Tobacco played an even more strategic role in the Connecticut Valley, where, according to

Christopher Clarke, it became during the 1850s the region's first proper cash crop, "raised solely and

specifically for market sale." Discussing farm strategies, Clarke also notes that larger landholders were

initially more hesitant than their poorer neighbors in adopting tobacco cultivation. Clarke, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1990), 294-303. The

quotation is on p. 298.

41. Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 ( 1933 ; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 2:817-818,1039.





and tobacco, as well as substantially increasing production of existing crops such as

maple sugar. Crucially, despite the apparent reduction in grazing land, the family was

also able to improve the value of its livestock production, aided by the growth to

maturity of the three Sluder daughters, whose labor was most likely employed in that

area. That compromises had to be made is suggested by a decline in wool production, the output of which was recorded as nearly 60 percent lower in 1860 than ten years earlier (see table 4).

Table 4 John Sluder Farm Production

Value of

Maple Animals

Improved Unimproved Wheat Tobacco Wool Sugar Slaughtered Acres Acres (bushels) (pounds) (pounds) (pounds) (dollars)

1850 18 42 0 0 24 25 30

1860 40 20 40 10 10 50 75

Value of

Maple Animals

Improved Unimproved Wheat Tobacco Wool Sugar Slaughtered Acres Acres (bushels) (pounds) (pounds) (pounds) (dollars)

1850 18 42 0 0 24 25 30

1860 40 20 40 10 10 50 75

The strategy adopted by John Sluder and his neighbors was straightforward: bring more land into productive use, concentrate on those crops most attractive to local and

regional markets, and sustain the vital contribution of stock raising to the farm

economy. Overall in Ashe County during the 1850s the ratio of improved to unim

proved land narrowed from 1 to 4.67 at the start of the decade to 1 to 3.20 ten years later. Although diversity remained the hallmark of Mountain agriculture, with more

land in cultivation there was greater opportunity for crop specialization, albeit of a

continuing limited nature. However, unlike farm communities in many northern and

western areas, increased output in northwestern North Carolina seems to have been

achieved with only limited technological improvement. While the value of Ashe

County land more than doubled during the late antebellum decade, that of farm

machinery increased by less than 14 percent, testimony to the persistent traditionalism

of upland farming methods.42 As late as 1914 government observers could lament the

undermechanization of Ashe County agriculture, a consequence, they inferred, of the

irregularity of the Mountain landscape combined with the high cost of transportation into the region.43

How self-sufficient was Ashe County by the time of the Civil War? The question is

difficult to answer with any precision. Because of its physical location, the county was

unusually dependent upon its local skills and resources, as its household manufacturing

figures testify.44 On the other hand, if self-sufficiency was to be maintained, demographic

42. Calculations include both Ashe and Alleghany Counties in 1860. The precise increase in land values

was 126.37 percent; in farm machinery 13.39 percent. Seventh Census, 1850,318-324; Agriculture in 1860,

104-107. On northern farm technological improvement, see Clarence H. Danhoff, Change in Agriculture:

The Northern United States, 1820-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 181-250.

43. R. B. Hardison and S. O. Perkins, Soil Survey of Ashe County,North Carolina (Washington: United States

Department of Agriculture, 1914), 11-12.

44. The per capita value of household manufacturing in Ashe County in 1860 was $5.00, as compared to

$2.06 for North Carolina as a whole. See Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufacturing in the United States,

1640-1860 (1917; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 374-375.




448 Martin Crawford

..

Although

the

amount

of land

used

for

agriculture

increased

during

the

1850s,

traditional

methods

of farming

persisted

even

into

the

twentieth

century.

Photograph

of farm

near

Phoenix

Mountain

in Ashe

County,

1890,

from

the

State

Archives.




Ashe County during the 185 Os 449

pressure clearly demanded a continuing improvement in agricultural performance. While per capita food production throughout the Appalachian region, including northwestern North Carolina, declined during the late antebellum decades, as Paul

Salstrom has recently pointed out, the continuing expansion of the livestock trade,

together with the greater emphasis upon such diverse marketable products as wheat,

tobacco, and cheese, suggests that the area's farmers were already confronting the

problems arising from rapid population growth.45 In fact, calculations based on methods

now widely employed by agricultural historians indicate that Ashe County was still

broadly successful in achieving self-sufficiency on the eve of the Civil War, with even

tenant farmers producing a small marketable grain, food crop, and meat surplus—and that despite a severe frost that destroyed the "greater portion" of the June crop the

previous year.46

Yet, as the mixed fortunes of the various Sluder households confirm, the margin between success and failure in what was still a largely subsistence-oriented society was

a narrow one. While it is wrong to talk of an agricultural crisis in Ashe County by 1860, the long-term relationship between the land and its people in this Blue Ridge Mountain

community was undoubtedly changing. For the vast majority of yeoman households, a

decisive shift from subsistence to commercial farming was neither feasible nor desirable, with the result that there was no fundamental economic restructuring during the 1850s

nor any abrupt departure from the pioneer habits and values that had sustained

Mountain agriculture throughout the early nineteenth century. But the sharp increase

in landlessness—embracing well over one-third of households in 1860 as compared to

just over a quarter a decade earlier—and the rise to prominence of merchant-lawyers such as Quincy Neal and Thomas Crumpler, whose growing authority potentially derived from outside established landholding sources, were important pointers to the

changes that would overtake the Mountain region in the postwar period and that, by the end of the century, would see it transformed from a predominantly self-sufficient

to a predominantly dependent economy.47

45. Paul Salstrom, "The Agricultural Origins of Economic Dependency, 1840-1880," in Appalachian

Frontiers, 269-272. In northwestern North Carolina (Ashe and Alleghany Counties), per capita grain

production fell from 45.4 to 32.1 bushels during the 1850s. Seventh and Eighth Censuses, 1850 and 1860:

Ashe and Alleghany County Agriculture Schedules.

46. Average per capita (adult male equivalent) surpluses in grain, food crops (peas, beans, and potatoes), and meat in 1860 in corn bushel equivalents: tenants, 27.3; 1-49 improved acres, 78.2; 50-199 improved

acres, 201.4. These calculations are based on methods outlined in Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman,

"Self-Sufficiency and the Marketable Surplus in the Rural North, 1860," Agricultural History 58 (July 1984):

296-313, and Pudup, "Limits of Subsistence." Meat estimates are based on an average selling price of four

cents per pound for beef and pork, although market reports in regional newspapers indicate occasional

fluctuation upward. Calculations for tenants include a deduction for rent of one-third of wheat and corn

output; see Donald F. Weiman, "Farmers and the Market in Antebellum America: A View from the Georgia

Upcountry," Journal of Economic History 47 (September 1987): 627-647. The samples used are the same as

those in table 2. The destruction wrought in Ashe County by frost damage is estimated in the Eighth Census,

1860: Ashe County Social Statistics Schedule, and more immediately in the People's Press, June 17,1859,

which reported that corn had been '"bit off to the ground and wheat greatly injured—not more than one

third of a crop, it is feared, would be harvested."

47. Considered here were households in Ashe and Alleghany Counties in 1860 (Ashe County in 1850).

Precise figures for no reported real property are: 1850, 26.51 percent; 1860, 34-94 percent. Seventh and

Eighth Censuses, 1850 and 1860: Ashe and Alleghany County Population Schedules.




450 Martin Crawford

Whether modern Appalachian dependency can be directly traced to changes in the

antebellum period, however, remains unclear: only by a thorough examination of the

Civil War's impact on Mountain society and economy can that issue be satisfactorily confronted. The war proved an unusually severe experience for the southern uplands,

splitting local communities and crucially testing, if not in many cases fracturing, its

familiar socioeconomic, religious, and kinship bonds. After 1861 countless young men

left Appalachia for the first time to enlist in the Union and Confederate armed forces,

many of them not to return. The overall effects of the social crisis generated by the war can only be guessed at; but in a region where the primary resource was one's own labor,

they were bound to be considerable. Moreover, as the experience of Ashe County's farmers during the 1850s demonstrates, the war occurred when the Mountain region's capacity for self-sufficiency was already being tested. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that less than a generation after Appomattox, the southern mountaineers

were to capitulate so tamely to a second foreign invasion, this time under the banner of industrial capitalism, which, although less deadly in its immediate results, was more

far-reaching in its long-term consequences for the region's socioeconomic and cultural

identity.48

Dr. Crawford is head of the Department of American Studies at the University ofKeele, Staffordshire,

England. He wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of an Archie K. Davis Felbwship from the North Caroliniana Society in the preparation of this article.

48. For pioneering attempts to examine the Civil War's impact, see Dunn, Cades Cove; and Gordon B.

McKinney, "Subsistence Economy and Community in Western North Carolina, 1860-1865" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Reno, Nev., 1988). On Mountain industrialization, see Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the

Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982).




mountain farmers and the market economy: ashe county during the 1850s

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