Chapter 6: Slavery in the Mountains — The Hidden History of Black Appalachia

There was no slavery in Appalachia.

That is the myth. It is one of the most persistent, most widely believed, and most damaging myths in the historiography of the American South, and it has done more to distort the history of the Appalachian region — and to erase the lives of the people who lived it — than almost any other single falsehood.

The myth goes like this: the Appalachian Mountains were settled by poor white farmers who had no use for slavery and no connection to the plantation system. They were too poor to own slaves. The terrain was too rough for the kind of large-scale agriculture that required enslaved labor. The mountain people were independent, egalitarian, and fundamentally different from the slaveholding planter class of the Tidewater and the Deep South. When the Civil War came, the mountain people sided with the Union precisely because they had no stake in slavery. Appalachia was white territory — always had been, always would be.

Every element of this myth is either false or so misleading as to be functionally false.

Slavery existed throughout Appalachia. It existed in every county where census data was collected. It existed in the Shenandoah Valley and the New River Valley, in the Kanawha Valley and the Greenbrier Valley, in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee and eastern Kentucky. Enslaved people worked on farms, in homes, at salt works, at iron furnaces, in the nascent extractive industries that would later define the region's economy. The slaveholding rates in Appalachia were lower than in the plantation South, but "lower" does not mean "zero," and the difference in rates has been used, deliberately and systematically, to construct a narrative of absence where the historical record shows presence.

This chapter recovers that history. It is, in many ways, the most important chapter in this book, because the erasure of Black Appalachian history is not a passive oversight. It is an active process that has served specific interests — the interest of constructing a white regional identity, the interest of minimizing the moral burden of slaveholding, the interest of imagining Appalachia as a place apart from the racial history of America. To understand Appalachia honestly, you must understand that Black people have been part of these mountains from the beginning, that their labor helped build the communities and economies described throughout this book, and that the systematic denial of their presence is itself a historical event that demands explanation.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Demonstrate that slavery existed throughout Appalachia, contradicting the "no slavery in the mountains" myth
2. Describe the specific forms slavery took in the mountains — salt works, iron furnaces, small farms, and the slave hiring system
3. Identify the demographic patterns of enslaved populations across Appalachian subregions
4. Explain why the erasure of Black Appalachian history has been so thorough and whose interests it has served

The Numbers: What the Census Actually Shows

Let us start with the data, because the data is unambiguous.

The 1860 census — the last census before emancipation — recorded enslaved people in every Appalachian state and in the vast majority of Appalachian counties. The numbers varied enormously by subregion, but the pattern of presence was consistent.

In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, enslaved people constituted 20 to 30 percent of the population in most counties. Augusta County, which includes present-day Staunton, had over 5,800 enslaved people in 1860 — roughly 22 percent of its total population. Rockingham County had over 3,500. Frederick County, at the northern end of the valley, had over 3,000. These were not plantation districts in the Deep South sense — there were no thousand-acre cotton plantations worked by hundreds of enslaved people — but they were communities where one in five people was held in bondage.

In southwestern Virginia — the New River Valley and surrounding counties — the enslaved population was smaller but still significant. Montgomery County had roughly 1,600 enslaved people in 1860, approximately 15 percent of the population. Wythe County had over 2,200. Smyth County had over 1,700. Washington County, at the Tennessee border, had nearly 3,000. These are not negligible numbers. These are communities where slavery was woven into the fabric of daily life.

In western North Carolina, the pattern was similar. Buncombe County (which includes Asheville) had over 1,900 enslaved people — roughly 14 percent of the population. Henderson County had over 1,500. Burke County had over 2,500. Madison County, often cited as an example of the "free white mountains," still had over 300 enslaved people.

In eastern Tennessee, the numbers were lower in some mountain counties but still present. Knox County (Knoxville) had over 2,700 enslaved people. Sullivan County had over 1,300. Even the most mountainous counties of eastern Tennessee — Carter, Johnson, Unicoi — had enslaved populations, though they were small.

In eastern Kentucky, the enslaved population was concentrated in the foothills and valleys rather than the most rugged mountain terrain, but it was present. Madison County, at the western edge of the Appalachian region, had over 5,000 enslaved people.

And in western Virginia — the counties that would become West Virginia in 1863 — the picture was more varied. The Kanawha Valley, where the salt industry depended heavily on enslaved labor, had significant enslaved populations. Kanawha County itself had over 3,100 enslaved people in 1860. The more mountainous counties further from the valley had smaller enslaved populations, but even the most remote counties — Calhoun, Clay, Webster — had at least some enslaved people listed in the census.

Primary Source Excerpt — United States Census, 1860: Selected Appalachian Counties

County	State	Total Pop.	Enslaved	% Enslaved
Augusta	VA	27,749	5,816	21.0%
Montgomery	VA	10,857	1,621	14.9%
Buncombe	NC	13,425	1,933	14.4%
Kanawha	VA (WV)	16,349	3,140	19.2%
Knox	TN	20,020	2,740	13.7%
Harlan	KY	4,668	258	5.5%
McDowell	VA (WV)	1,535	163	10.6%

Source: United States Census Bureau, Eighth Census of the United States (1860). Note that percentages do not include free Black residents.

The conclusion from the census data is simple and undeniable: slavery was present throughout Appalachia. It was present in every subregion, in counties of every size, in communities of every character. The question is not whether slavery existed in the mountains. The question is what form it took, how it shaped the communities where it existed, and why its existence has been so thoroughly denied.

Mountain Slavery Was Different — But It Was Still Slavery

The defenders of the "no slavery in Appalachia" myth have one piece of legitimate evidence: mountain slavery looked different from plantation slavery. This difference has been used — dishonestly, but effectively — to argue that what happened in the mountains was not really slavery, or was a milder form of slavery, or was so marginal as to be historically insignificant.

Let us examine the differences honestly, and then let us examine what they do and do not prove.

The scale was different. In the plantation South — the cotton belt of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and lowland Georgia — the average slaveholder owned twenty or more enslaved people, and the largest plantations held hundreds. In Appalachia, the average slaveholder owned fewer than five. The majority of Appalachian slaveholders owned one, two, or three enslaved people. Large slaveholding operations of twenty or more were rare in the mountains, though they existed — particularly in the broader valleys like the Shenandoah.

The crops were different. The plantation South was organized around cash crops — cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar — that required intensive, regimented labor performed by large gangs under constant supervision. Appalachian agriculture was more diversified — mixed farming that combined grain, livestock, garden crops, and orchard products. The labor was varied rather than repetitive, and the work rhythms were different from the plantation.

The living arrangements were different. On large plantations, enslaved people typically lived in separate quarters — the slave quarters — at some distance from the main house. On small Appalachian farms, enslaved people often lived in closer proximity to the slaveholding family, sometimes in the same building. This proximity has been used to argue that mountain slavery was more "familial" and less brutal than plantation slavery.

These differences were real. But they do not prove what the myth-makers want them to prove.

A person who is owned by another person is enslaved. The number of enslaved people on the property does not change this. The crop they are forced to grow does not change this. The proximity of their sleeping quarters to the slaveholder's bedroom does not change this. An enslaved person on a five-person farm in the New River Valley was as legally unfree as an enslaved person on a five-hundred-person plantation in Mississippi. They could be sold. Their families could be separated. They could be beaten. They could not leave. They could not testify in court. They could not learn to read where the law forbade it. They had no legal claim to the products of their own labor, their own bodies, or their own children.

The historian Wilma Dunaway, whose research on Appalachian slavery has been foundational, has documented this with devastating precision. Dunaway's analysis of estate records, court documents, and census data across the Appalachian region reveals that enslaved people in the mountains experienced the same range of violence, family separation, and exploitation as enslaved people elsewhere — and that the small scale of mountain slaveholding actually made some aspects of slavery worse, not better.

Family separation was particularly devastating in a small-slaveholding context. When a slaveholder owned two or three people, the death of the slaveholder or the settlement of an estate almost invariably meant that the enslaved people would be sold separately. There was no large enslaved community to absorb the loss. The small scale meant that every sale, every death, every inheritance was a crisis for the enslaved people involved. Dunaway's research on estate sales in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina documents the routine separation of mothers from children, husbands from wives, in transactions that were treated as unremarkable by the legal system.

The proximity of living arrangements could be a source of greater surveillance and control, not greater kindness. An enslaved person living in the same cabin as the slaveholding family had less privacy, less autonomy, and less ability to maintain a separate social and spiritual life than an enslaved person living in quarters with other enslaved people. The "familial" character of small-scale slavery has been romanticized by apologists; the reality was often closer to total control.

Primary Source Excerpt — WPA Slave Narrative: Eliza Sparks, Mathews County, Virginia (recorded 1937)

"Some folks say slavery wasn't so bad for the house servants. I tell you, honey, you don't know nothing about it. In the house, the mistress see everything you do. She see if you slow, she see if you rest, she see if you eat. In the field, at least you got the sky over you and the others around you. In the house, you ain't got nothing but her eyes."

While this narrative is from a lowland Virginia county, it captures the dynamic of close-quarters slavery that was common in Appalachian small-farm settings.

The Salt Works: Industrial Slavery in the Kanawha Valley

If the myth of "no slavery in Appalachia" has its weakest point, it is the Kanawha Valley of present-day West Virginia.

The Kanawha Valley, centered on the city of Charleston, was the site of one of the most important industrial operations in antebellum Appalachia: the salt industry. Natural brine springs in the valley had been known and used for centuries — Indigenous peoples had visited the springs long before European settlement, and early settlers quickly recognized their commercial potential. By the 1810s, the Kanawha salt industry was one of the largest industrial enterprises in the trans-Appalachian West, producing millions of bushels of salt annually for markets throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.

The salt works required enormous amounts of labor. Brine had to be pumped from wells drilled into the earth. It had to be transported to evaporation furnaces. The furnaces had to be fired continuously — a process that consumed staggering quantities of wood (and later coal). The salt had to be packed, stored, and shipped. The wells had to be maintained. The furnaces had to be rebuilt. The work was dangerous, exhausting, and unrelenting.

The labor force was enslaved.

By the 1830s, the Kanawha salt industry employed an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved workers — one of the largest concentrations of enslaved industrial labor in the United States. These were not farm workers. They were industrial workers, performing tasks that were physically demanding, technically skilled, and often dangerous. They operated pumps, managed furnaces, loaded and unloaded salt barrels, cut timber for fuel, and performed the thousand tasks required to keep an industrial operation running.

The salt producers acquired their labor force through two mechanisms. Some owned enslaved people outright. Others used the slave hiring system — a practice that was widespread in Appalachia and that has received less scholarly attention than it deserves.

Slave hiring was an arrangement in which a slaveholder rented the labor of enslaved people to another party for a specified period — typically a year, though shorter terms were also common. The hirer paid an annual fee to the slaveholder, provided food, clothing, and shelter to the enslaved person, and directed their labor. The enslaved person had no say in the arrangement. They might be hired out to a salt works, an iron furnace, a farm, or a domestic household, depending on where the demand for labor was greatest.

Slave hiring was economically significant in Appalachia because it allowed slaveholders who did not have enough work for their enslaved people year-round — the common situation on small mountain farms — to profit from their "property" by renting them to industrial operations that needed labor in bulk. It also allowed industrial enterprises to scale their labor force up and down without the capital investment of purchasing enslaved people outright. And it created a secondary market in human beings that was separate from, but connected to, the primary market of slave sales.

For the enslaved people themselves, the hiring system was a particular kind of horror. A hired worker was separated from whatever community they had — from the family, the cabin, the small familiarity of the farm where they lived — and sent to an industrial workplace where the hirer had less personal interest in their wellbeing than an owner might (since the hirer was renting, not investing). Injuries were common at the salt works. Deaths occurred. The incentive structure of the hiring system — where the hirer bore the short-term costs of feeding and housing but not the long-term cost of replacing a worn-out worker — created conditions ripe for exploitation.

The Kanawha salt works are discussed in detail in Case Study 6.1. But their significance for this chapter is straightforward: the largest industrial enterprise in antebellum Appalachia ran on enslaved labor. This fact alone demolishes the "no slavery in the mountains" myth. The mountains were not a refuge from the slave economy. They were part of it.

The Iron Furnaces: Another Site of Enslaved Labor

Salt was not the only Appalachian industry that depended on enslaved labor. The iron industry — one of the earliest industrial activities in the mountains — was another.

Charcoal iron production was a significant enterprise in the Shenandoah Valley, in southwestern Virginia, and in parts of western North Carolina from the late colonial period through the Civil War. The process involved mining iron ore, producing charcoal from massive quantities of wood, and smelting the ore in blast furnaces that required continuous operation — typically running day and night for months at a time during the "blast season."

The labor demands of an iron furnace were brutal. Workers mined ore, cut timber, converted timber to charcoal in carefully managed kilns, hauled ore and charcoal to the furnace, operated the furnace and its bellows, cast the molten iron, and maintained the infrastructure of the entire operation. The work was hot, dangerous, and physically exhausting. It required skilled workers — men who understood the chemistry of the blast, who could judge the temperature of the furnace by the color of the flame, who knew when the iron was ready to pour.

Many of these workers were enslaved.

Iron furnace operators in the Shenandoah Valley and southwestern Virginia routinely used enslaved labor, both owned and hired. Estate inventories from the region list enslaved people alongside furnace equipment, recorded as assets of the iron-making operation. Buffalo Forge, an iron-making complex in Rockbridge County, Virginia, owned by the Weaver family, operated with enslaved labor for decades, and the detailed records of the forge — studied by the historian Charles Dew in his landmark work Bond of Iron — reveal the daily reality of enslaved industrial labor in the mountains.

Dew's research showed that the enslaved ironworkers at Buffalo Forge were highly skilled. Some were master refiners, responsible for the critical process of converting pig iron into wrought iron — a task that required judgment, experience, and technical knowledge. They were paid small bonuses for overwork — production above a daily quota — and some used these payments to purchase personal goods, maintain small gardens, or save toward other purposes. This system, which historians call the overwork system, gave enslaved workers a marginal economic space within the institution of slavery.

But the overwork system did not change the fundamental reality. The ironworkers at Buffalo Forge were enslaved. They could not leave. They could not refuse work. They could be sold. Their families could be separated. The small autonomy of the overwork system existed within, and at the pleasure of, the slaveholding family. It could be — and sometimes was — revoked at any time.

The iron furnaces of Appalachia, like the salt works, demonstrate that mountain slavery was not limited to agriculture. It was an industrial system as well as an agricultural one, integrated into the broader economy of the region in ways that the "no slavery" myth cannot account for.

Slaveholding on the Small Farm

The salt works and iron furnaces were the most visible sites of enslaved labor in the mountains, but they were not the most common. The most common site was the small farm.

The typical Appalachian slaveholder was not an industrialist. He was a farmer — a man (and occasionally a woman) who owned a few hundred acres, grew mixed crops, raised livestock, and held one, two, or three enslaved people. Sometimes five. Rarely more than ten. These small slaveholders constituted the majority of the slaveholding class in the mountains, and their farms were the most common setting in which slavery was practiced.

What did enslaved people do on small mountain farms? Everything.

They cleared land, the backbreaking work of felling timber and pulling stumps that was the first task of any new settlement. They plowed fields, planted crops, tended livestock, repaired fences, built outbuildings, cut firewood, and performed the endless labor of maintaining a farm in rugged terrain. They worked in the house — cooking, cleaning, washing, spinning, weaving, preserving food, caring for children. They worked in the garden, in the orchard, in the dairy. On a small farm, the distinction between "field work" and "house work" that characterized the plantation system was largely meaningless. Everyone did everything, and the enslaved people did the hardest and most unpleasant parts of it.

The intimacy of small-farm slavery created psychological dynamics that were distinct from the plantation. The enslaved person and the slaveholder worked alongside each other, ate food from the same kitchen, shared the same small cabin or separate quarters a few yards away. Some slaveholders used this intimacy to construct a mythology of mutual affection — the "faithful servant" narrative that Southern apologists employed for generations. But the intimacy was structured by absolute power. The slaveholder could sell the enslaved person. The enslaved person could not leave. Whatever kindness existed — and genuine personal bonds did sometimes form across the line of enslavement — it existed within a system of total domination that the slaveholder controlled.

The small scale of mountain slaveholding also meant that enslaved people were more socially isolated than their counterparts on large plantations. On a plantation with fifty or a hundred enslaved people, there was a community — a social world within slavery, with its own hierarchies, its own relationships, its own cultural practices, its own forms of resistance. On a farm with two enslaved people, there was isolation. The opportunity to form romantic partnerships, to build a family, to participate in collective worship, to share the burden of bondage with others who understood it — all of these were more limited on the small mountain farm.

Whose Story Is Missing?

The interior lives of enslaved people on small Appalachian farms are among the most thoroughly lost stories in the region's history. On large plantations, the sheer number of enslaved people created a collective memory that could be preserved — through oral tradition, through the WPA narratives of the 1930s, through the records of plantation operations. On small mountain farms, the individual enslaved person left almost no trace in the record. They appear in census tallies, in estate inventories, in occasional court cases. They almost never speak in their own voices. This chapter, and this book, can document that they existed and describe the conditions of their existence. It cannot fully recover their experience, because the system that enslaved them also silenced them.

The Demographic Geography of Mountain Slavery

Slavery in Appalachia was not uniformly distributed. It concentrated in specific types of places, and the pattern of concentration reveals a great deal about how slavery functioned in the mountain economy.

The valleys had more enslaved people than the ridges. This is the single most important geographic pattern. The broad, fertile valleys of Appalachia — the Shenandoah, the New River, the Greenbrier, the Kanawha, the French Broad — had higher proportions of enslaved people than the narrow hollows and steep ridges. The reason was economic: valley land supported larger farms, more intensive agriculture, and industrial operations (salt, iron) that required labor. Ridge and hollow communities, where farms were smaller and the terrain was harder, had lower proportions — but not zero.

The southern and central Appalachian regions had more enslaved people than the northern. Western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia generally had higher enslaved populations than the mountains of Pennsylvania or northern West Virginia. This reflected the influence of the plantation South: the closer a mountain county was to the cotton and tobacco economy of the lowland South, the more likely it was to have significant slaveholding.

Counties with industrial operations — salt, iron, gold — had disproportionately high enslaved populations. Kanawha County's enslaved population reflected the salt industry. The iron-producing counties of the Shenandoah Valley reflected the iron furnaces. The gold-mining counties of western North Carolina — Burke, Rutherford, McDowell — had enslaved populations inflated by the use of enslaved labor in mining operations.

Within individual counties, slaveholding was concentrated among the wealthiest families. This is true throughout the South, but it is particularly important in Appalachia, where the myth of universal white egalitarianism obscures the reality of class stratification. In a typical mountain county, the majority of white families owned no enslaved people. But the families that did own them tended to be the wealthiest, the most politically powerful, and the most socially prominent in the community. Slaveholding was a marker of status, a source of economic power, and a foundation of political influence — in the mountains just as it was in the plantation South.

This last point is critical. The fact that most white Appalachian families did not own enslaved people does not mean that slavery was economically or socially marginal. The slaveholding families were the elite — the families that held the best land, occupied the political offices, controlled the courts, and set the social norms. The non-slaveholding majority lived in a society shaped by the institution of slavery, even if they did not personally participate in it. They aspired to slaveholding as a marker of success. They depended on slaveholders for credit, employment, and political patronage. And they participated in the racial ideology that justified slavery — the belief in white supremacy that undergirded the entire system.

Free Black Communities in the Mountains

Not all Black people in antebellum Appalachia were enslaved.

Free Black communities existed throughout the region, though they were small, precarious, and subject to legal restrictions that made their freedom incomplete and insecure. The 1860 census recorded free Black residents in numerous Appalachian counties — typically numbering in the dozens or low hundreds, but present.

How did free Black communities form in the mountains?

Manumission was one path. Some slaveholders freed their enslaved people by will — upon the slaveholder's death, the enslaved people were released from bondage. Others freed enslaved people during their lifetimes, sometimes motivated by religious conviction (Quaker and Methodist antislavery sentiment was real, even in the South), sometimes by personal attachment, sometimes by the recognition that the enslaved person had earned their freedom through years of loyal service. Virginia law required newly manumitted people to leave the state within twelve months unless they obtained a special exemption from the legislature, and this law, though inconsistently enforced, created constant insecurity for free Black families.

Self-purchase was another path. Under the overwork system at iron furnaces and salt works, some enslaved workers accumulated enough money over years of bonuses and side work to purchase their own freedom — or, in some cases, to purchase the freedom of family members. This was an extraordinary feat, requiring years of discipline, savings, and negotiation with slaveholders who had every economic incentive to refuse. The fact that some enslaved people accomplished it is a testament to human will under conditions designed to crush it.

Birth to a free mother was a third path. Under Virginia law (and the laws of most Southern states), the legal status of a child followed the status of the mother. A child born to a free Black woman was free, regardless of the father's status. Free Black communities grew, slowly, as free families had children who were themselves born free.

Free Black families in Appalachia occupied a precarious legal and social position. They could own property — and some did, building modest holdings of land and livestock. They could not vote. They could not testify against white people in court. They were required to carry freedom papers documenting their legal status, and the loss or destruction of these papers could be catastrophic — a free Black person without papers was vulnerable to kidnapping and sale into slavery, a crime that was far more common than most histories acknowledge. They were subject to curfews, travel restrictions, and the constant surveillance of white neighbors who might challenge their freedom at any time.

Despite these pressures, free Black communities persisted. In the Shenandoah Valley, free Black families formed clusters around churches and schools that served as community institutions. In parts of western North Carolina, free Black families held land and maintained multigenerational communities that survived through the antebellum period and beyond. These communities were small, but they were real, and their existence contradicts the narrative of an all-white Appalachia with a thoroughness that no amount of myth-making can erase.

The Underground Railroad in the Mountains

The Appalachian Mountains played a complex and underappreciated role in the Underground Railroad — the network of routes, safe houses, and allies through which enslaved people escaped to freedom in the Northern states and Canada.

The geography of the mountains cut both ways for fugitives. On one hand, the rugged terrain provided cover. The dense forests, the remote hollows, the caves and rock shelters of the Appalachian landscape offered hiding places that were difficult for pursuers to search. A fugitive who knew the terrain — or who was guided by someone who did — could move through the mountains with a degree of concealment that was impossible in the open agricultural landscape of the lowland South.

On the other hand, the same geography that provided cover also created isolation. The narrow valleys and steep ridges of Appalachia meant that roads were few and controlled. A Black person moving through the mountains — whether free or fugitive — was conspicuous in communities that were overwhelmingly white. And the legal penalties for aiding a fugitive were severe, creating a powerful disincentive for potential allies.

Despite these obstacles, evidence of Underground Railroad activity in Appalachia is substantial. Quaker communities in the Shenandoah Valley and in eastern Tennessee — including the famous Quaker settlement at New Garden, North Carolina — provided aid to fugitives. Sympathetic families along the mountain ridges offered food and shelter. In some cases, free Black communities served as waypoints, providing fugitives with information, supplies, and guidance.

The routes through Appalachia generally ran north and west — from the slaveholding regions of western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee through the mountains toward the free states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Appalachian ridges that ran northeast to southwest provided natural corridors for north-south movement, and fugitives who reached the mountain crest could follow the ridgeline toward freedom.

The number of enslaved people who escaped through the Appalachian Underground Railroad is impossible to determine with precision. The network operated in secrecy, and its participants had every reason to leave no records. But the evidence that does exist — in abolitionist writings, in the memoirs of formerly enslaved people, in local traditions, and in the records of communities that provided aid — makes clear that the mountains were not simply a slaveholding region. They were also a landscape of escape, resistance, and solidarity.

Why the Erasure? The Psychological Function of the "No Slavery" Myth

If slavery existed in Appalachia — and it did — why has its existence been so thoroughly denied? Who benefits from the myth of a white, slavery-free mountain homeland?

This is not an innocent question. The erasure of Black Appalachian history is not a passive failure of memory. It is an active construction — a story told and retold for specific purposes by specific people, and understanding those purposes is essential to understanding the region.

The "no slavery" myth serves the construction of white Appalachian identity. If Appalachia was always white, then whiteness is the region's natural condition — not a historical product of enslavement, displacement, and exclusion. The myth allows white Appalachians to claim a regional identity that is separate from, and morally superior to, the slaveholding South. "We didn't have slavery" becomes a badge of honor, a way of distancing mountain communities from the moral burden of the plantation system. This distancing is emotionally appealing, but it is historically false.

The myth supports the "culture of poverty" explanation for Appalachian problems. If Appalachia's difficulties — its poverty, its political marginalization, its health disparities — are the products of a deficient white culture (the Celtic thesis, the "hillbilly" narrative), then they have nothing to do with race. The region's problems become purely about class, not about the intersection of race and class that has shaped every other part of the American South. Erasing Black Appalachians makes it possible to tell a story about Appalachia that is entirely about white people and their problems — a story that is incomplete, misleading, and ultimately useful to the very systems of power that created those problems.

The myth supports the "deserving poor" narrative. If Appalachian white people were always poor, always free of the taint of slaveholding, always independent and egalitarian, then their poverty is innocent — the result of geographic isolation and bad luck, not of the same structural forces (land concentration, extractive industry, racial capitalism) that produced poverty in the plantation South. This narrative makes it easier to feel sympathy for Appalachian poverty than for Black poverty — a distinction that has shaped federal policy, media coverage, and public attitudes for over a century.

The myth obscures the role of racial ideology in Appalachian politics. If there were no Black people in the mountains, then the racial politics of the region — its alignment with the Confederacy in many areas, its resistance to Reconstruction, its history of racial violence, its modern political conservatism — must be explained by something other than race. The myth makes race invisible, which makes it impossible to analyze honestly.

The historian John C. Inscoe, whose work on western North Carolina has been foundational, has documented how the "no slavery" myth was constructed in the decades after the Civil War — a period when white Southern memory was being actively reorganized around the Lost Cause narrative. In the Lost Cause version of history, the South fought the Civil War over states' rights, not slavery, and mountain Unionism was reframed as a matter of local loyalty rather than antislavery conviction. The Black people who had lived in the mountains were written out of the story, and the white people who remained were given a sanitized history that served the interests of regional pride and racial solidarity.

Then and Now

The erasure of Black Appalachian history is not only a historical phenomenon. It continues today. When contemporary commentators describe Appalachia as "Trump country" or "white working-class America," they are reproducing the myth — treating the region as racially homogeneous, erasing the Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities that live there now, just as earlier versions of the myth erased the enslaved people who lived there then. The Affrilachian movement — named by the poet Frank X Walker in 1991 — is a deliberate, ongoing effort to reclaim Black Appalachian identity and insist on the presence that the myth denies. We will return to this movement in Chapter 40.

Resistance: What Enslaved People Did

Enslaved people in Appalachia, like enslaved people everywhere, resisted their bondage. The forms of resistance were shaped by the specific conditions of mountain slavery — the small scale, the isolation, the terrain — but they were real and persistent.

Running away was the most dramatic form of resistance, and the mountain terrain made it both more possible and more dangerous than in the lowlands. The forests and ridges provided cover, but the isolation of mountain communities meant that a fugitive had further to travel before reaching a free state. Newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved people — published regularly in the valley newspapers of the Shenandoah, the Kanawha, and the Tennessee valleys — provide evidence of the frequency of escape attempts. These advertisements describe the fugitive's age, appearance, clothing, and suspected destination, and they offer rewards for capture. Read against the grain, they document acts of extraordinary courage by people whose names we know only because their owners wanted them back.

Work slowdowns, tool-breaking, and feigned illness were forms of everyday resistance — acts that fell short of flight but that asserted a measure of control over the pace and conditions of labor. These acts are difficult to document, precisely because they were designed to be invisible to the slaveholder. But the frequency with which slaveholders complained about the laziness, incompetence, or sickness of their enslaved workers — complaints that appear in letters, diaries, and court records — suggests that everyday resistance was widespread.

Maintaining cultural and spiritual life was itself a form of resistance. Enslaved people in the mountains, like enslaved people throughout the South, maintained religious practices, oral traditions, musical traditions, and family bonds that the institution of slavery could not fully destroy. The survival of African American cultural traditions in Appalachia — traditions that would later contribute to the region's music, foodways, and religious life (see Chapters 27 and 29) — is a testament to the resistance of people who preserved their humanity under conditions designed to deny it.

Arson, poisoning, and violence are documented in the historical record, though they are rare in the Appalachian context. The small scale of mountain slavery made collective revolt nearly impossible — there was no critical mass of enslaved people in most mountain communities. But individual acts of violence against slaveholders are recorded in court records, and the fear of such acts — the ever-present awareness that a person held in bondage might, at any moment, choose to fight back — shaped the slaveholder's world as surely as it shaped the enslaved person's.

The Intersection of Class and Race on the Mountain Frontier

One of the most important and most uncomfortable aspects of mountain slavery is the relationship between the slaveholding elite and the non-slaveholding white majority.

In most Appalachian counties, the majority of white families owned no enslaved people. This has been used to argue that the average mountain white person had no stake in slavery and no investment in the racial hierarchy that sustained it. This argument is wrong.

Non-slaveholding white Appalachians lived in a society organized around racial hierarchy. They benefited from that hierarchy, even if they did not own enslaved people, because the existence of a class of people below them — people with no legal rights, no property, no political voice — guaranteed that they would never occupy the bottom of the social order. The philosopher Edmund Morgan, writing about colonial Virginia, called this the "American paradox" — the coexistence of slavery and freedom, where the freedom of white people was psychologically and politically sustained by the bondage of Black people. This paradox operated in the mountains exactly as it operated in the Tidewater.

Non-slaveholding white families aspired to slaveholding. It was a marker of success, a threshold that separated the struggling from the prosperous. A farmer who had cleared enough land, raised enough livestock, and accumulated enough capital to purchase an enslaved person had crossed a line — not just economic but social. He was somebody now. The aspirational function of slavery — the way it served as a goal and a measure of status for people who did not yet practice it — tied non-slaveholding whites to the institution even when they did not benefit from it directly.

And the racial ideology that justified slavery — the belief that Black people were inherently inferior, naturally suited to bondage, incapable of self-governance — was shared across class lines. Poor white mountain farmers who owned no enslaved people still believed in white supremacy. They still participated in slave patrols. They still supported the fugitive slave laws that required them to return escaped enslaved people to their owners. They still voted for politicians who defended slavery. The racial hierarchy was not merely the property of the slaveholding elite. It was the shared ideology of white Appalachian society.

This matters because it complicates the popular narrative of mountain Unionism in the Civil War (Chapter 11). When Appalachian communities divided over secession, the division was not simply between antislavery whites and pro-slavery slaveholders. It was a complex negotiation of class interest, local loyalty, economic calculation, and racial ideology that cannot be reduced to a simple morality tale.

Primary Sources: Voices from Mountain Slavery

The voices of enslaved people in Appalachia are rare in the historical record, but they are not entirely absent. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Collection, compiled in the 1930s through interviews with formerly enslaved people, includes narratives from individuals who had been enslaved in the mountain South. These narratives must be read with care — the interviewees were elderly, the interviewers were almost always white, and the power dynamics of the interview situation affected what people were willing to say — but they provide irreplaceable testimony.

Primary Source Excerpt — WPA Narrative: Robert Glenn, North Carolina (recorded 1937)

"I was born in Orange County, but my master moved us to the mountains when I was young. He had a farm near the French Broad River. We raised corn and raised hogs and done all kinds of work... There was four of us that belonged to him. My mother, she worked in the house and in the field both. There wasn't no overseer. Master worked right alongside us. But don't let nobody tell you that meant it was easy. He worked alongside us because he couldn't afford not to. And when he was dissatisfied with the work, he let us know it."

Glenn's narrative captures the reality of small-farm mountain slavery: diverse labor, close proximity between enslaver and enslaved, and the persistent threat of violence.

Primary Source Excerpt — WPA Narrative: Hannah Jones, Kanawha County, West Virginia (recorded 1937)

"My daddy was hired to the salt works every year. Every January they'd come and take him. He was gone most of the year. Mama didn't see him but twice, maybe three times a year. When he come back, he was used up. Hands all burnt from the furnaces. They worked them men hard at the salt works. Some of them died there and nobody told the family for weeks."

Jones's narrative documents the slave hiring system and its impact on families — the annual separation, the dangerous working conditions, and the dehumanizing indifference of the industrial operation.

These narratives, and others like them, are not marginal footnotes to Appalachian history. They are Appalachian history. The people who speak in them lived in these mountains, worked this land, built these communities. Their experience is as central to the story of Appalachia as the experience of the Scotch-Irish farmer or the German valley settler. To exclude them from the narrative is not merely an omission. It is a lie.

The Numbers in Context: Appalachia and the Broader South

It is important to place the Appalachian data in comparative context — not to minimize the significance of mountain slavery, but to understand its specific character.

In the Deep South cotton belt, enslaved people constituted 40 to 70 percent of the population in many counties, and slaveholding rates among white families ranged from 30 to 50 percent. In the Appalachian region, enslaved people typically constituted 5 to 25 percent of the population, and slaveholding rates among white families ranged from 5 to 20 percent.

These differences are real and significant. They shaped the character of mountain communities, the dynamics of local politics, and the trajectory of the Civil War in the mountains. But they do not support the conclusion that the myth-makers draw from them.

A community in which 15 percent of the population is enslaved is not a community without slavery. It is a community with slavery. A community in which 10 percent of white families own enslaved people is not a community where slavery is marginal. It is a community where the most powerful, wealthiest, and most influential families are slaveholders — where the institution of slavery structures economic life, social relations, and political power even for the majority who do not participate in it directly.

The analogy to consider is this: in most American communities today, the majority of people are not millionaires. But no one would argue that wealth is "absent" from those communities, or that the economic elite has no influence on the life of the community. The same logic applies to slaveholding in Appalachia. The slaveholders were the elite. Their institution shaped the world everyone else lived in.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Chapter 6 Portfolio Task: Researching Slaveholding in Your County

Using the United States Census data for 1860 (available through the National Archives, the University of Virginia's Historical Census Browser, and Ancestry.com), research the enslaved population of your selected county. Answer the following questions:

1. How many enslaved people were recorded in your county in 1860? What percentage of the total population did they constitute?
2. How many slaveholders were recorded? What was the average number of enslaved people per slaveholder?
3. Were there any free Black residents recorded? How many?
4. If slave schedules are available for your county (they list slaveholders by name and their enslaved people by age and sex, though not by name), examine them. What do the ages and sexes of the enslaved population tell you about the kinds of work they were likely doing?
5. Are there any local records — estate inventories, court documents, church records — that mention enslaved people by name? If so, what do these records reveal?

Write 500 words connecting your findings to the themes of this chapter. Were you surprised by the data? How does it compare to the narrative you may have encountered about your county's history?

Chapter Summary

The myth that there was no slavery in Appalachia is false. Census data from 1790 through 1860 documents the presence of enslaved people in every Appalachian subregion and in the vast majority of Appalachian counties. Enslaved people worked on farms, in homes, at salt works, at iron furnaces, and in other industrial operations that were integral to the mountain economy. The slave hiring system extended the reach of slavery beyond the slaveholding household, creating an industrial labor system that was particularly significant in the Kanawha Valley salt industry and the iron furnaces of the Shenandoah Valley and southwestern Virginia.

Mountain slavery differed from plantation slavery in scale, in the crops produced, and in the living arrangements of enslaved people. But these differences did not make mountain slavery less real, less brutal, or less consequential. Family separation, physical violence, total legal subjugation, and the denial of basic human rights characterized slavery in the mountains just as they characterized slavery everywhere it was practiced.

Free Black communities existed in Appalachia, formed through manumission, self-purchase, and birth to free mothers. These communities were small and precarious, subject to legal restrictions and constant social pressure. But they existed, and their persistence contradicts the myth of an all-white mountain homeland.

The erasure of Black Appalachian history serves specific interests: the construction of a white regional identity, the deflection of moral responsibility for slaveholding, the simplification of Appalachian politics into a story about class rather than race, and the support of "culture of poverty" explanations that blame Appalachian problems on the character of mountain people rather than on the structural forces that produced them.

To understand Appalachia, you must understand that Black people have been part of these mountains for as long as European settlement has existed. Their labor built the communities. Their presence shaped the social order. Their erasure is a historical act that demands the same critical analysis we bring to any other exercise of power. The story of Appalachia is not a white story. It has never been a white story. And telling it as though it were is not an innocent simplification. It is a choice, and it is a choice that serves the powerful at the expense of the truth.