Key Takeaways: Chapter 6

Core Concepts

The myth that "there was no slavery in Appalachia" is false. Census data from 1790 through 1860 documents enslaved people in every Appalachian subregion and in the vast majority of Appalachian counties. Enslaved populations ranged from 5 to 30 percent of the total population depending on the county, with higher concentrations in the valleys and in counties with industrial operations.

Mountain slavery differed from plantation slavery in scale and form, but it was still slavery. The average Appalachian slaveholder owned fewer than five enslaved people, and the crops and living arrangements differed from the Deep South. But these differences did not make mountain slavery less real. Enslaved people in the mountains could be sold, separated from their families, beaten, and denied all legal rights. The historian Wilma Dunaway has shown that the small scale actually worsened some aspects of enslavement, particularly family separation and social isolation.

Slavery was industrial as well as agricultural in Appalachia. The Kanawha Valley salt works employed 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved workers, and iron furnaces throughout the Shenandoah Valley and southwestern Virginia relied on enslaved labor. The slave hiring system extended the reach of slavery from farms to industrial sites, creating a secondary market in human labor that was central to the mountain economy.

Free Black communities existed in Appalachia despite enormous legal and social pressures. Formed through manumission, self-purchase, and birth to free mothers, free Black communities were small and precarious but real. They built churches, maintained kinship networks, owned property, and persisted for generations. Their existence contradicts the myth of an all-white mountain homeland.

The erasure of Black Appalachian history is an active historical construction, not a passive oversight. The "no slavery" myth serves specific interests: constructing a white regional identity, deflecting moral responsibility for slaveholding, simplifying the region's racial politics, and supporting "culture of poverty" explanations for Appalachian problems. Understanding who benefits from the erasure is essential to understanding the erasure itself.

Non-slaveholding whites were connected to slavery through aspiration, ideology, and economic structure. The slaveholding families were the community elite, and non-slaveholding whites lived in a society organized by racial hierarchy. The belief that most whites had "no stake in slavery" ignores the psychological, economic, and political benefits of whiteness in a slaveholding society.

Connections to Coming Chapters

• Chapter 7 examines the frontier economy, including the salt and iron industries whose dependence on enslaved labor this chapter has documented
• Chapter 11 explores the Civil War divisions in Appalachia, where the intersection of class, slaveholding, and Unionism was far more complex than the simple narrative of "antislavery mountaineers"
• Chapter 12 continues the story of Black Appalachians through emancipation and Reconstruction — the period when the erasure documented in this chapter began to be constructed
• Chapter 19 documents the racial diversity of the coalfield communities that emerged in the late nineteenth century, including the Black miners whose presence in the mountains continued a long tradition
• Chapter 40 centers the Affrilachian movement and other contemporary efforts to reclaim Black Appalachian identity

Key Terms

Mountain slavery — The institution of slavery as it operated in Appalachia, characterized by smaller slaveholdings, diversified agriculture, and integration with industrial operations, but sharing the fundamental features of unfreedom, family separation, and racial domination that defined slavery everywhere.

Slave hiring system — An arrangement in which slaveholders rented the labor of enslaved people to other parties for specified periods, creating a secondary labor market that was particularly important in Appalachian industrial operations.

Kanawha Valley salt works — The largest industrial enterprise in antebellum Appalachia, producing millions of bushels of salt annually and employing 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved workers — one of the largest concentrations of enslaved industrial labor in the United States.

Overwork system — A practice at some industrial operations where enslaved workers could earn small payments for production above a daily quota, providing a marginal economic space within the institution of slavery.

Free Black communities — Communities of free people of African descent in antebellum Appalachia, formed through manumission, self-purchase, and birth to free mothers, existing under severe legal and social restrictions.

Freedom papers — Legal documents proving a free Black person's status, required to be carried at all times and essential for protection against kidnapping and enslavement.

Everyday resistance — Forms of resistance practiced by enslaved people that fell short of flight or violence — including work slowdowns, tool-breaking, feigned illness, and the maintenance of cultural and spiritual life — that asserted agency within the constraints of bondage.

Lost Cause narrative — The post-Civil War rewriting of Southern history that reframed the war as a conflict over states' rights rather than slavery, and that contributed to the erasure of Black Appalachian history by writing Black people out of the mountain narrative.

Affrilachian — A term coined by poet Frank X Walker in 1991 to describe African Americans with roots in Appalachia, reclaiming a presence that the dominant narrative has denied.