Despite such long-running ethnic animosities, there was enormous pressure on
Euroamerican emigrants to assimilate. Newcomers were expected to acculturate to the
politically and culturally dominant ethnic group, the English, and variations from their
norms were not well-tolerated. According to the advice of one early nineteenth century
immigrant handbook:
The people of the United States, considered as a whole, are composed of immigrants
and their descendants from almost every country. . . . The English language is almost
wholly used; the English manners modified to be sure, predominate, and the spirit of
English liberty and enterprise animates the energies of the whole people. English laws and
institutions, adapted to the circumstances of the country, have been adopted here. . . .
The tendency of things is to mould the whole into one people, whose leading
characteristics are English, formed on American soil. (1)
Being different set a family apart from neighbors, making them culturally and
politically suspect.
Bound by language, culture, territorial association, and historical derivation,
ethnicity's purpose is to dissociate rather than associate, to engage in reductionist
enterprise as opposed to aggregation. Implicit in the concept of ethnicity is the
determination of that which is unique about a group of people; it is an attempt to
understand the essence of what distinguishes various collections of individuals.
Because of the daily-lived pressures that resulted from their ethnic marginalization,
members clung to their past heritage with differing degrees of passion. In the face of the
need to survive, group solidarity around a sense of ethnic difference often declined.
According to Simon James:
Many, sometimes the majority, may feel weakly attached to a nominal identity.
Ethnicity may be regarded as less important than the other major dimensions of identity
within their social world. . . . It may be that a strong sense of group identity is
confined to certain parts of society which consider it important. . . . Many changes in a
group's internal circumstances may lead to dissipation, fission, or fusion with neighbors,
as the appearance of new, more alien 'Others' prompts them to find common cause expressed
in a new sense of inclusive identity.
One West Virginia cleric expressed the intensity with which Americans reacted to those
who clung openly to their Europeans pasts. "We have yet some districts of the
country," Joseph Doddrige wrote, "where the costume, cabins, and in some measure
the household furniture of their ancestors, are still in use. The people of these
districts are far behind their neighbors in every valuable endowment of human
nature." East Kentuckian Marvin Gullett described the ethnic realities of
"fighting back foreign intrusion" in some Appalachian communities. "When I
was young sometimes they'd kill a foreigner. Most of the time the court stood for the
Englishman more than they would for somebody else because the judge was usually
Anglo-Saxon." (2)
Pressures to
Speak English
Since linguistic difference stimulated bigotry, there was great pressure to speak
English. Because of their Scots-Gaelic dialect [also termed Hiberno-English], the
Scotch-Irish could be easily identified as "so linguistically alien. . . as to
provoke suspicion and contempt." Even after the Revolutionary War, second-generation
offspring and new emigrants were stigmatized as speakers of the "less-civilized
Ulster Scots" of Irish and Scottish commoners that "Yankees found almost
unintelligible." When visiting present-day counties of southwestern Virginia and West
Virginia in the 1820s, British elite Anne Royall ridiculed linguistic remnants of
Hiberno-English. "Their dialect sets orthography at defiance," she wrote,
"and is with difficulty understood." Ethnocentrically, she added that
"nearly the whole of the English language is so mangled and mutilated by them, that
it is hardly known to be such." In similar fashion in the 1840s, a visiting
Episcopalian Bishop documented the persistence of Scots-Gaelic in northern Georgia, and he
employed an old-country ethnic allusion to make clear his distaste for this cultural
remnant. "Many of these up country crackers," he observed, "talk almost as
bad a dialect as your genuine Cockney Yorkshireman." William Pierce wrote home that
there were "many Welshmen" in the area of Charlottesville in the 1850s, but
there were still no Congregational churches, and they "had not heard a sermon in
Welsh in ten years." Another emigrant complained that "the Welsh language has no
prospect of success in this country." Germans were not only alienated by language
from English-speaking ethnic groups, but they were also separated by dialects from each
other. In order to communicate across ethnic lines, the Germans of the Shenandoah Valley
developed a trade jargon called "Valley Dutch," while retaining their individual
dialects in their homes, churches, and small neighborhoods. According to one German
emigrant, speaking English "grieved the old people, who cannot give up the energetic
language of their sires. . . nor the plain homespun dress of old times, nor see their
children give them up without sorrowing for the degeneracy of their race." (3)
Linguistic difference was viewed by acculturated Americans as a "defect" that
could limit the individual's progress. From the vantage point of English settlers,
emigrants "speaking the same language with [them], and having no irreconcilable
peculiarities in manner or modes of living [we]re more assimilated to the natives."
Because dialect retention restricted emigrants to their own small ethnic in-group,
linguistic assimilation was rapid. Evan Davis wrote to his European family that he
"ha[d] great respect for" his indigenous language," but he had "not
written or spoken it in twenty years." In similar fashion, Henry Davies communicated
to his family in Wales:
It is a sad fact that hundreds of our countrymen, after emigrating from the land of
their fathers, not only lose the love of their country but also their religiousness. The
chief reasons for this is that many emigrate without knowing very much English. They go to
live among the Americans where they do not hear a word of their mother tongue. They soon
have enough English for general conversation and trade, but everyone knows that one must
have a good knowledge of the language before one can understand the sermons.
Germans fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War in the Kanawha Valley. One
soldier observed in his diary: "Ofttimes one of our German soldiers could be seen
leaning on his rifle, listening to the sounds of his mother tongue as they were wafted
over from the enemy's camp." (4)
Migration and
Relocation
Another significant process which speeded assimilation was frequent demographic
shifting which prevented geographical concentration of ethnic groups. Because of the
migration of younger members, a group might not retain a large enough intergenerational
population for its collective memory to persist. Since most relocated to an area that did
not have a critical mass of their "own kind," such mobility required them to
adjust to the dominant cultural patterns of their new spaces. On the one hand, a majority
of emigrants to Appalachian frontiers had been in the U.S. longer than a decade, and there
were few foreign-born males by 1820. On the other hand, isolation or community stasis were
far less characteristic of antebellum white Appalachians than frequent mobilization across
county and state boundaries. There were two causes for such demographic shifts: (a) the
desire of the poor to acquire land and employment and (b) the search by more prosperous
settlers for new investments. For this reason, about 15 percent of wealthier and
middle-class farm owners migrated southward and westward out of Appalachia. However, the
most mobile Appalachians were the landless poor and working-class households who
represented three-fifths to two-thirds of the whites on the Appalachian frontier. These
households frequently moved in search of annual tenancy or sharecropping arrangements or
in hopes of locating affordable land. (5)
Given the frequent relocations of white Appalachians and the repeated cycles of
in-migration and out-migration during the antebellum period, it is historically impossible
that a homogeneous white ethnic group could have been "frozen in time" in the
"Rip Van Winkle sleep" that Berea College's President Frost postulated in 1899.
Moreover, there simply was too much in-migration and out-migration for ethnic homogeneity
or cultural stasis to have occurred. For example, the centers of Scotch-Irish settlement
shifted further and further west in successive eras. Thus, the Scotch-Irish presence
diminished over time due to the group's out-migration and due to the in-migration of other
ethnic groups. By 1860, a sizeable proportion of each of the white ethnic groups had
emigrated from Southern Appalachia to populate Midwestern and southwestern areas. Even if
an Appalachian folk culture grounded in "traditions, values and attitudes that
existed when the area was first settled" were somehow miraculously preserved into the
twentieth century, that new cultural hybrid would necessarily have been
syncretized from several white and nonwhite ethnic groups. (6)
Economic
Pressures toward Assimilation
There were also significant economic pressures toward assimilation, for ethnoreligious
conflicts could disrupt capitalist institutions and make business and trade less
profitable. In order to generate their survival needs, ethnic group members quite often
had to cooperate with outsiders about whom they held prejudices. Indeed, economic arenas
threaten actors with sanctions, with exclusion, and with loss of profits if they do not
prioritize business affairs over personal ethnic identity. The need to make a living by
holding jobs or by engaging in trade pushed groups to acculturate toward British customs.
Even though the eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish Opequon settlement was "strongly
ethnocentric, preferring to marry, convey land and worship within their own
community," these Presbyterians routinely engaged in trade and financial dealings
with German and English neighbors. Even after he had acquired considerable wealth, James
Patton remained sensitive to prejudices toward Scotch-Irish immigrants, and he tried not
to "incite resentment" from other ethnic groups who might damage his business.
Several years after he had established his North Carolina home and enterprises in Wilkes
and Buncombe Counties, Patton advised his new wife:
it would be imprudent for myself and her to appear at Church and other public
places in superfluous dress, or to appear at any time above our neighbors. . . . [M]y
principal reason was, that as we were just starting in the world, and were dependent on
the public for our success, it might have an improper influence on their minds, and excite
prejudices very much against our own interests.
Even though frontier Scotch-Irish and Germans "maintained strict separation in the
institutions of family, marriage, land and religion, local trade was common, providing the
single greatest vehicle for exchange between the ethnic groups." Similarly, first and
second-generation western Maryland Germans adhered to their ethnic customs only "when
such behavior was economically viable." In ethnically-mixed work crews, there was
often substantial "working-class unity" against wage and employment inequities. (7)
Improved living conditions and liberation from the kinds of economic oppression that
characterized their European past also encouraged assimilation. After emigrating to the
U.S. in 1801 and experiencing better living conditions than he had ever known in Europe,
Samuel Jenkins bragged to his European kin: "I am a citizen of the most wonderful
country in the world." Joshua Jones had successfully established himself as a
blacksmith, so he wrote home to Europe "a great number of our fellow countrymen are
suffering in poverty while we. . . are well off." Richard Pugh informed his family
that he "would not for a considerable sum return" to Europe. "The
tax-gatherer only calls once a year in this country," he commented, "and then it
is only a trifle." After two decades in the U.S., a son wrote to his parents in Wales
a letter which encapsulated the new patriotism of many immigrants:
You urge me to come back to the Old Country but there is no likelihood of my doing
that very soon for my adopted country is better than the land of my birth and if only you
had the heart to come here twenty years ago you would have seen and proved the excellence
of the country and we would have been parents and children together. I prefer to say like
the Yankees and in their language too: Come from every nation and come from every way.
In short, ethnically-diverse Appalachians shared in common the local and world
capitalist economy and its constraints. Congregationalist minister D.S. Davies described
the fast pace at which immigrants assimilated in the face of economic benefits.
As Welsh settlements in this strange land are weaker than the English they give
their wealth, support, and intelligence to further English causes. . . . In addition the
English have the extra strength of the children of Welsh emigrants. The greater part of
the first generation and all of the second generation are American-born and lost to Wales.
There are some. . . who are ashamed to acknowledge that they are Welsh. . . . The people
run after English things although, while doing it [English-Americans] read the Welsh
people and Welsh culture lower and lower. (8)
Pressures
toward Religious Assimilation
Given the intensity of ethnoreligious conflict, how did the diverse denominations
assimilate so fully that a majority of Appalachian church adherents- like all U.S.
Caucasians- were Methodists and Baptists by 1850? The first explanation is that, like the
entire United States, a majority of Appalachians were unchurched. In the 1770s,
only about 10 percent of the population of the Southern colonies were church members,
reflecting the lack of European denominational affiliation of a majority of these
settlers. Once they were in the U.S., other factors operated to keep emigrants unchurched.
Because of various church fees in the eighteenth century, poor emigrants were "quite
indifferent" to church enrollment. Lack of education, class biases, and historical
animosities toward European sects also deterred new ties to Appalachian denominations. In
1790, only 5 percent of the U.S. population were church members, denominational adherence
rising to only one-third of citizens by 1850. (9)
Many whites remained unaffiliated because churches could generate counter-productive
schisms in small communities. In their attempts to regulate the morality of residents in
their vicinity-- in other words, their tendencies to infringe upon the religious liberty
of neighbors-- sects created the basis for deep community divides. In the records of one
"church court," punishments were meted out to citizens for swearing, breach of
Sabbath, and adultery. Persons living in an Anglican parish were required to seek
permission to travel out of the province, and they were assigned to work on roads or river
maintenance. Some churches went so far as to bind-out the children of parents who were
assessed "not Christian-like enough." Anglican clerics often tried to legislate
the activities of the unchurched and of other sects. For instance, Charles Woodmason
sought unsuccessfully to have local Scotch-Irish magistrates bring charges against
settlers who continued their routine labors and social activities and, thereby, expressed
"open profanation of the Lords Day." To complicate matters, some churches fined
service attendees for inappropriate dress, such as the homespun cotton, flax, and
linsey-woolsey typical of the attire of the working classes. Even moral regulation of
church adherents could lead to hostilities among neighbors. Frontier Baptist churches set
strict standards about "female decency," and women could be expelled for
improper attire. In 1808, a Scott County, Virginia, congregation "tried a woman who
had come to church while pregnant," and she was "excluded from their
fellowship" and stigmatized in the community. The methods of east Tennessee's Cades
Cove Baptists provide a sense of the degree to which acting as moral regulators in a
community might lead to permanent rifts that could be dysfunctional for a community's
political decision-making and its economic growth.
Meeting only once a month, usually on the fourth Saturday and following Sunday, the
congregation collectively assumed responsibility for church discipline. . . . In the
Baptist church every member assumed these duties and did not rely on church officials to
keep an eye on the flock, as did the Methodists. . . . Any member of the church might
bring a particular charge against another member, or charges might be introduced against a
member whose offense was exposed through "public clamor." The church then,
according to scriptural injunctions, voted to send an elder or deacon to confront the
offending member and request him [or her] to answer the charges before the entire
congregation. (10)
It was not just lack of past denominational ties or local antagonisms which deterred
church affiliations, for there were several factors which caused a lack of religious
diversity in many communities. Even though the Second Great Awakening between 1800 and
1830 coincided with rapid resettlement of Southern Appalachia, there was a severe shortage
of churches and ministers throughout the region. In 1793, east Kentucky churches required
member subscriptions, causing all but a few emigrees to be excluded. There was neither an
Episcopal nor a Presbyterian minister, only two Baptist churches, and the few Methodists
"worship[ped] in private homes." Church buildings and clergy salaries were
expensive, but most of the arriving settlers to Southern Appalachia were impoverished. The
Anglicans subsidized public tax entitlements for the established church with member
charges, such as pew purchases and fees for weddings, baptizing, communions, and funerals.
It was not unusual for congregations to draw much of their fiscal security from
slaveholders. In southwestern Virginia, one Presbyterian minister reported that several of
his members "owned a number of slaves, who were hired out annually, and the proceeds
applied to pay the salary of the pastor." The other sects, however, could not derive
their local financial support from such sources. In 1840 (two years after settlers poured
into lands from which the Cherokees had been forcibly removed), a traveling cleric found
the northern Georgia church "in horrid bad order," with "35 panes of glass
out of the lower windows." One local female resident observed that northern Georgia
churches were "few and far between," so people could "not hear preaching
without traveling twenty, thirty or forty miles" to attend service at any
denomination that was available. (11)
In the context of such scarcities, assimilation began almost immediately, as
denominations merged services and shared buildings. Hardships demanded accommodation, and
compromise about cultural markers of ethnicity were adjusted to the circumstances, even
put aside when it became impossible to sustain them.
Ethnic identities are only expressed in contexts and at times when contact with
others is an issue. . . . it only 'appears' when individuals and groups need to be
conscious of their ethnicity and to manifest it in action. . . . [E]thnic identity is
constantly generated and regenerated at the points of contact between more than one
society. . . [B]ecause the societies involved, and the patterns of their interaction, are
constantly changing through time, then the manifestations of ethnicity are constantly
shifting. . . . [T][here is often a considerable gap between the ways such identities
portray themselves in terms of boundaries and membership, and the actual experiences of
people involved.
As one Anglican clergyman traveled in the western Carolinas in the late eighteenth
century, he typically preached to religiously diverse groups of "Baptists, Quakers,
and a mix'd Multitude" or to ethnically and racially-mixed audiences that were of
"various degrees [classes], Countries, Complexions, and Denominations." In 1803,
an itinerant Lutheran missionary preached "to large and attentive congregations"
of non-Lutherans in Appalachian counties of east Tennessee and South Carolina. In 1809, a
western North Carolina minister reported that the shortage of educated clergy was leading
to assimilation, for "vacant" Presbyterian congregations: "employ[ed]
preachers of other denominations." By the late 1830s in southwestern North Carolina,
the absence of qualified Presbyterian clergy caused so many Scotch-Irish families to join
Baptist and Methodist congregations that there remained only seven Presbyterian churches
serving fewer than 300 members. Like the Presbyterians, Episcopalians shifted to Baptist
churches when they moved to areas where their denomination was not established. After the
Revolutionary War, one clergyman complained that wealthier migrants to Kentucky and
Tennessee were "lost forever" because they "never heard the voice of a
clergyman of their own [Episcopal] Church, but they heard those of every other
denomination." (12)
Ethnoreligious assimilation was also speeded by the presence of Northern missionaries.
One minister claimed that twenty "Stragling Preachers" had been sent to western
North Carolina "from Pennsylvania and New England" to proselytize for the
Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers. Moreover, there were greater numbers of Baptists and
Methodists on the Appalachian frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee because greater numbers
of them had migrated to escape the taxation and religious restrictions of Virginia's
established Anglican church. Because religious marginalization was costly to members of
sects which were persecuted, many adherents abandoned their traditional faiths. Because of
their small numbers, Shenandoah Valley Brethren and Mennonites coalesced with Methodists
to hold camp meetings and interdenominational revivals, like a Berkeley County, West
Virginia gathering which attracted more than 4,000. In similar fashion, the few Welsh
Congregationalists and Dunkers merged with Baptist congregations. In addition, one-third
to one-half of arriving Irish Catholics either became unchurched or joined Protestant
churches. Following the national trend, intermarriage across Appalachian
denominational lines further widened the ranks of the Baptists and Methodists. The journal
of western Maryland's Ferry Hill Plantation provides a glimpse at the degree to which
inter-ethnic biases had relaxed by the 1830s. The Episcopalian owner married a
Presbyterian woman, and his children selected spouses who were Catholic, Methodist,
Lutheran, German Reformed and Dunker. The family routinely contributed funds toward the
construction of all local churches, attended all nearby revivals, and traveled to
interdenominational camp meetings. They entertained the ministers of nine different
denominations in one year. In sharp contrast to nativist rhetoric of his times, the owner never
recorded in his journal demeaning religious slurs toward any of the German sects,
Presbyterians, Catholics, or Baptists represented among his ethnically-mixed free
laborers. (13)
The class composition of Appalachian communities was also a central factor in the
breakdown of intensive ethnoreligious conflict. Throughout the antebellum period, half or
more of the region's whites were landless and poor, the vast majority of them illiterate.
An Anglican minister complained that "the lower Class chuse to resort to"
Baptists and Methodists "rather than hear a Well connected Discourse." As Finke
and Stark have observed, "neither the Baptists nor the Methodists set forth their
confessions in complex theological writing that required extensive instruction or
teaching." According to Woodard:
the fact that Presbyterians considered it a mark of vulgarity not to be able to
read or repeat the Shorter catechism in a time when half the people. . . were illiterate
was sufficient to set them apart from the adherents of other denominations. The gentry and
middle-class dominated the membership at a time when other denominations. . . were making
great numerical gains. (14)
There was an economic chasm separating working-class sects from denominations that
appealed primarily to educated elite and middle-class families who could afford pew
payments and annual subscription fees. One antebellum commentator captured the
significance of class differences to the rapid post-Revolutionary expansion of the
Baptists and Methodists when he wrote:
There is somewhat of a connection between a 'free gospel' and 'free seats.' The
system of renting pews in the house of God, or of selling them, is very deleterious to the
spread of the Gospel.
In addition, denominations were sharply differentiated by the degree they were willing
to engage in strategies meant "to push out into destitute regions, to break new
ground, to urge upon the masses." Reliance on lay teachers, preachers, and
missionaries, circuit riding ministers, revivals, and camp meetings allowed the Baptists
and Methodists to capture great numbers of the illiterate, the unchurched, the poor, and
those adherents to competing sects who had no church or minister in the geographical area.
In sharp contrast, Anglicans and Presbyterians pushed for local laws to prohibit camp
meetings and to fine or jail the leaders. After Presbyterian ministers organized a large
interdenominational revival in Kentucky, church leaders expelled them and established a
policy against camp meetings. By 1850, such charismatic methods had helped the Methodists
and Baptists grow into the two largest denominations in the United States and in Southern
Appalachia. Appalachian trends toward ethnoreligious assimilation directly paralleled the
changes happening nationally. Between 1800 and 1840, the Baptists and Methodists
transformed their denominations from "loosely fellowshipping zealous
Separatists" into "politically active, nationally visible and tightly
articulated denominations." (15)
Assimilation
toward Racial Solidarity
Because the evolution of the U.S. national identity was fueled by distinctions of color
and race, European ethnic identities became far less central to white Appalachian women,
as they were juxtaposed against the subordination of peoples of color. Toward the
beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged "a marked tendency to promote a
pride of race among the members of every class of white people; to be white and also to be
free, combined the distinction of liberty." The political, economic and cultural
privileges associated with white skin and the need for solidarity against nonwhite races
spurred emigrants to categorize themselves first in terms of race and secondarily in terms
of their European ethnic heritage. On the Carolina frontier, an Anglican cleric pinpointed
the need for white racial solidarity. "We have an Internal Enemy," he
warned, "Not less than 100M [100,000] Africans below us (and more are daily
importing). Over these We ought to keep a very watchful Eye, lest they surprise us in an
Hour when We are not aware." The passage of a 1790 federal law cemented the
unification of the new white American race by closing citizenship to all who were not
Caucasian. Free white identity distanced emigrants from the low status of
African-Americans and Native Americans, and "race became the primary badge of
status." The privilege of U.S. citizenship:
carried with it a status entirely new to the newcomers; the moment they set foot on
U.S. soil, however lowly their social status might otherwise be, they were endowed with
all the immunities, rights and privileges of "American whites." By the same
token they were explicitly enrolled in the system of racial oppression of all
African-Americans. (16)
In his abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, Frederick Douglass commented at
length upon the inability of white Americans from oppressed Irish heritage to align
themselves with the plight of African-American slaves. "Passage to the United
States," he wrote:
seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the
forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning, they were pure, loving, and
innocent; in the evening guilty. . . . The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with
the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and
despise the Negro.
Emigrants who did not quickly assimilate were excluded from membership in the white
American race. While ethnic differentiation caused friction, to be a "white
American" brought with it political, economic and cultural privileges for all
Caucasian women, including the right to be a citizen, the right to own property, and the
capacity to derive benefits from the social and economic status of one's husband or
father. Moreover, white Appalachian women enjoyed Constitutional protection of their
religious liberty, a freedom that was denied to indigenous and enslaved Appalachians.
Culturally, the white mother's role was idealized as the appropriate sphere for women, but
the same paternalistic system structurally assaulted the reproductive practices of
Cherokee women who were viewed as immoral practitioners of gender freedoms that were
denied to white women. Except for destitute females in county poor houses, white women
retained the unquestioned right to be the legal parents of their offspring without forced
removal of those children. In sharp contrast, the role of mother was neither idealized nor
left unchallenged for enslaved Appalachian women. It was against this backdrop of white
racial solidarity that Appalachians formulated their racism toward regional peoples of
color.
As religious assimilation occurred over the early decades of the nineteenth century,
attendance at mainstream Protestant churches would have diminished the ethnic divides
among white Appalachian women. However, that majority of white females who acculturated
toward English customs and took the dominant pro-slavery position would certainly not have
shared sisterhood with members of persecuted ethnic minorities or with those women who
engaged in abolitionist activism. (17) While all Southern
Appalachian women were disadvantaged by the same paternalistic system, their degrees of
privilege and of oppression within that system varied dramatically. By the time of the
Civil War, a majority of white Appalachians had moved toward the national religious
mainstream, but a minority of females would have been singled out by:
- Marginalization and persecution of those ethnic minorities which adhered to pacifist,
abolitionist, or pro-Indian stands,
- Stigmatization of any Protestant sect which differentiated itself from the dominant
congregations in its religious views and practices, especially when they departed from
cultural ideals with respect to the public roles of women, and
- Bigotry and discrimination toward Catholics and Jews.
An especially despised ethnic minority, such as Irish Catholics" were demeaned as
"white negroes" as "culturally only a trifle ahead of Negroes." Takaki
explains how Scotch-Irish and Irish emigrants evolved from stigmatized outsiders to become
part of the white American race. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
the Irish were imaged as apelike and "a race of savages," at the same
level of intelligence of blacks. . . . Stereotyped as ignorant and inferior, they were
forced to occupy the bottom rungs of employment. In the South, they were even made to do
the dirty and hazardous work that masters did not want to assign to their slaves. . . .
Targets of nativist hatred toward them as outsiders, or foreigners, they sought to become
insiders, or Americans, by claiming their membership as whites. A powerful way to
transform their own identity from"Irish" to "American" was to attack
blacks. Thus, blacks as the "other" served to facilitate the assimilation of
Irish foreigners. (18)
On the one hand, class differences were probably far more significant than
religious conflict in the daily lives of most white Appalachian women. Far more than
religious status, class position determined a woman's life chances, living conditions, and
degree to which her work would have been criminalized by court systems. Had women been
enfranchised, for example, more than half of all white Appalachian females would still
have been denied the vote and the right to hold public office (as were their husbands)
because they were poor and landless. Consequently, all Protestant women or all women
sharing the same ethnic heritage were not "sisters under the skin" who
confronted the paternalistic system at the same junctures or who were repressed in the
same ways or to the same degree. On the other hand, Euroamerican women shared a
structurally privileged racial position, despite their religious diversity. They were all
"white"Americans, and that racial membership provided them privileges denied to
women of color. Racial inequalities quickly emerged as far more significant
divisions among Southern Appalachians than the religious differences which separated
whites.
Notes
1. 1818 emigrant handbook cited in Chickering, Immigration,
p. 56.
2. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, p. 6. James, Atlantic
Celts, p. 74. Doddridge, Notes, p. 294. Gullett Transcript, p. 17, ALC.
3. Irish Immigrants, p. 450. Drake, History, p.
36, inaccurately assumes that "the Scotch-Irish provided the language norm for the
backcountry dialect." That notion is simply not supported by the frequent evidence of
ethnic animosity toward Hiberno-English. Drake, History, p. 37, also incorrectly
states that Germans who emigrated into the Valley of Virginia fairly quickly lost their
indigenous dialects. Royall, Sketches, p. 123. Shippee, Bishop Whipple's
Diary, p. 31. Conway, Welsh in America, pp. 306, 323. Wust, Virginia
Germans, pp. 187-88. Rippley, German-Americans, 100-101. Howe,
Historical Collections, p. 451.
4. Tucker, Valley of Shenandoah, p. 58. Conway, Welsh
in America, pp. 87, 138. Rippley, German-Americans, p. 67.
5. Soltow, Men and Wealth, p. 13. Regarding land exhaustion
and migration, see Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 1, pp. 137-54. Regarding
southern demographic shifts, see McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions,
pp. 6-7 and Barnhart, "Sources," pp. 55-60. Dunaway, First American Frontier,
pp. 87-122. Regarding the frequent movement of Appalachian settlers, see Hsiung, Two
Worlds, pp. 103-26. Regarding high population mobility of the poor in the rest of the
U.S., see Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, p. 5.
6. Regarding folk society notions, see Frost, "Our Contemporary
Ancestors," p. 311 and Wilhelm, "Appalachian Isolation," p. 88. Blethen and
Wood, "Scotch-Irish Heritage," pp. 213-26. Gerlach, "Scotch-Irish
Landscapes," pp. 146-51.
7. For an overview of assimilation theories, see Gordon, Assimilation,
pp. 115-59; for an extensive discussion of pressures toward Anglo-conformity in the U.S.,
see pp. 84-114. Blethen and Wood, Ulster and North America, p. 18. Irish
Immigrants, pp. 345-46. Hofstra, "Land, Ethnicity," p. 183. Mitchell, Appalachian
Frontiers, pp. 96, 84.
8. Conway, Welsh in America, pp. 72, 109-10, 102, 111-12,
323.
9. Hill, Religion, p. 103. Regarding unchurched emigrants,
see Irish Immigrants, p. 383, Finke and Stark, Churching of America, pp. 12, 27,
29, and Atkenson, "Why Accepted Estimates," p. 117. Atkenson, Church of
Ireland, p. 164, argues convincingly that only one-quarter to one-third of Ulster
citizens were Presbyterians while the majority were unchurched.
10. Chalkey, Chronicles, vol. 1, pp. 17-20. Hooker, Carolina
Backcountry, pp. 43, 47, 49, 61, 88. Gaustad, Documentary History, p. 181.
Dunn, Cades Cove, pp. 109-110.
11. Toulmin, Western Country, p. 70. Dunaway, First
American Frontier, pp. 70, 75, 288-95. Thompson, Presbyterians, vol. 2, p.
337. Shippee, Bishop Whipple's Diary, p. 31. Burke, Reminiscences, p.
25.
12. James, Atlantic Celts, pp. 72-73. Hooker, Carolina
Backcountry, pp. 22-24, 112-13. Wayland, Twenty-Five Chapters, pp. 386-87.
Blethen and Wood, From Ulster, pp. 56-58. Doddridge, Notes, p. 116.
13. Hooker, Carolina Backcountry, p. 225. Perhaps
interregional migration and the outreach of missionaries explains why Baptists had grown
enough by the time of the Revolutionary War to be just about as large in numbers as the
Presbyterians and the Anglicans; see Finke and Stark, Churching of America, pp.
7-12. Surprisingly, Quakers accounted for almost one of every ten Southern church
adherents, but the Methodists were not much more visible than the Moravians. Hill, Religion,
p. 102. Wayland, Twenty-Five Chapters, pp. 201-208. Armstrong and Armstrong, Baptists,
pp. 83-85. Wust, Virginia Germans, p. 150. For a description of the assimilation
of Dunkers, see Bowman, Brethren Society, pp. 53-56, 63-64, 84-85, 114, 342.
Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant, p. 233. Ferry Hill Plantation Journal,
pp. xviii-xx, 8-10, 16-19, 24, 36, 38, 44, 47, 52-55, 58, 62, 131.
14. Dunaway, First American Frontier, pp. 288-95. Hooker, Carolina
Backcountry, p. 20. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 85. Woodard,
"North Carolina," p. 226.
15. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 79-83,
98-105. Goss, Statistical History, pp. 17, 31. Revivalism and camp meetings did
NOT originate in Southern Appalachia, as some scholars have inaccurately claimed. In
states where Appalachian counties are situated, the first great revivals and camp meetings
were organized by Presbyterians in Logan and Bourbon Counties in Kentucky and in Tidewater
counties of Virginia, spreading outward and southward from there. See Hood,
"Kentucky," pp. 101-22. Nor were revivals and camp meetings peculiar to
Appalachia, as some have claimed. As an indicator of the degree of nationwide religious
assimilation, such outreach strategies were popular throughout the country, often
occurring first in parts of New England; see McLoughlin, "Massive Civil
Disobedience," pp 710-27. For explanations of the decline of Presbyterian adherence
among the Scotch-Irish, see Irish Immigrants, pp. 303-305, 400-403, 413-14, 450.
Sovine, "Traditionalism," p. 365.
16. Bruce, Social Life, p. 137-38. Hooker, Carolina
Backcountry, p. 94. Ignatiev, How the Irish, p. 40. Nash, "Colonial
Development," pp. 244-45. Allen, Invention of the White Race, p. 185.
17. For example, Laura Clay, daughter of east Kentucky slaveholder
Cassius Clay was an anti-slavery and women's rights advocate; see Fuller, Laura Clay.
An east Tennessee abolition activist before the Civil War, Elizabeth Meriwether became a
feminist advocate in the late nineteenth century; see Berkeley, "Elizabeth Avery
Meriwether," pp. 390-407.
18. The Liberator, 10 May 1853, 11 August 1854.
McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 52-53. Washington, Journals, p. 45.
Wust, Virginia Germans, p. 95. Takaki, History of Multicultural America,
pp. 149-51.
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