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  For Leslie

  The social order is a sacred right … Yet that right does not come from nature and must therefore be founded on conventions.

  —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

  For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874)

  PREFACE

  THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT an American settler culture, how its people hunted, foraged, farmed, and gardened, and how they lost their land. We all learned a version of American history that emphasizes the widening possession of land. That version tells of the brave women and men who voyaged into the wilderness. They did build homes in the wilderness, and they were brave, but in making homes for themselves they took homes from others. Their possession caused the dispossession of Shawnee, Cherokee, Munsee, Creek, and other nations. Many other Americans lost their lands and livelihoods during the last two centuries or were prevented from gaining access in the first place: African-Americans coerced into sharecropping throughout the South after the end of slavery and Mexicans evicted from their ranchos after the takeover of California. Even the descendants of those pioneering settlers were forced to leave their gardens and woods after little more than a century.

  I am interested in how people get kicked off land and why we don’t talk about them. Americans tend not to think of ejectment and enclosure as central to the history of the United States. In the decades after the pioneers arrived in the mountains, they established families and communities and propelled their sons and daughters into households of their own. Yet when they weren’t moving westward anymore, they no longer advanced the American Empire. Their story no longer coincided with the one about a nation destined to embrace a continent. They no longer served a particular role in the version of American history we all learned. They continued to grow maize in narrow hollows and graze their cattle in forest openings. But for some reason their persistence became a problem. They entered a period of conflict and decline that is the shadow of another story we’ve been told, about the Industrial Revolution. The central event in Ramp Hollow is the scramble for Appalachia, or the rapid onslaught of joint-stock companies to attain the rights and ownership needed to clear-cut the forests and dig out the coal. How this happened and what was lost is the subject of this book.

  This book is also about country people throughout the Atlantic World over the last four hundred years. By country people I mean settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders, all of whom make their livings by hunting, foraging, farming, gardening, and exchanging for the things they cannot grow or fashion themselves. The general word for them is agrarians. My purpose is to unite the experience of backcountry settlers of the southern mountains with that of agrarians elsewhere, to demonstrate that English peasants in 1650 and Malian smallholders in 2000 shared a similar fate and encountered similar sources of power as Scots-Irish farmers in 1880. My method is to create a thick context around the particular story I tell.

  It can be difficult to understand people who live close to their environments. While preparing these chapters, I found critics who said either that agrarians work interminably for little gain or that they don’t work hard enough. Both can’t be true. The apparent contradiction between futile drudgery and laziness has nothing to do with how much time households spend in their gardens. Instead, these are two ways of saying that such people waste their time and labor no matter what they do. We tend to see settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders as relics of the past. I ask the reader to look at them differently, as inhabiting the same planet and the same moment in time as everyone else. There are no primitives, savages, or backsliders. There are only humans in various social arrangements. I present their way of life, not as unfit or doomed but as functional and legitimate, though often riven with hardship. Yet in the years I spent traveling to libraries and archives where I read all sorts of documents, I often came across an idea that amazed me but that I could not understand, the idea that historical progress required taking land away from agrarians and giving it to others.

  * * *

  RAMP HOLLOW IS A TRIBUTARY of Scotts Run, once a profitable but now an abandoned coal seam just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia. A few years ago I traveled there with H.R. Scott, an agent for the West Virginia University Agriculture Extension Service. We’d been visiting sites in the area all day when H.R. stopped at a neighborhood that followed a road up a gentle grade. I stepped out of the truck where a trickling branch emptied into a larger creek. While H.R. rested, I walked unhurriedly in the afternoon humidity, after the sun had fallen just below the rim of the tiny valley. It narrowed and steepened, with each house at a slightly different elevation. Behind the houses, trees and brush covered the abrupt inclines that rose to a height of about 150 feet. The bottom of the hollow was just as wide, making it seem like I was walking in the rut of a giant wheel.

  Halfway up I came to an abandoned house, older than the others. White windowpanes stood out against red tar paper. A metal roof extended over a pocket-like porch. The windows on one side had fallen in, and I could see things left behind by the last residents. This was a miner’s shanty, circa 1900. I imagined a man walking out in the morning, a woman with children inside, smoke from the chimney floating to the canopy. An outhouse stood a few feet away, almost over the branch. It reminded me that humans packed close together become intimate with each other’s waste.

  The coal miner who earned the money that supported the family who lived in the tar paper dwelling might have been William Fulmer or Ross Spicer or John Raketsky—names from the Census of 1940. Everyone in Scotts Run was a miner or married to one or the child of one. They lived fairly well when wages covered food and rent, but many reported no income for at least one week in 1939. I wondered whether they had once had their own farms or if they had been brought up in Scotts Run. I wondered how they lived when the money stopped. I kept a photograph of that house on my desk while writing this book, next to one of a different house.1

  The day before, I visited the dairy farm belonging to Charles Hunter, on the spine of a hill twelve miles from Ramp Hollow. We stood a little awkwardly in the barn as H.R. and Charles shot glances at each other before asking me what I wanted to see. I wasn’t sure. I suggested a garden that H.R. had told me about. We set off in that direction, when the wreck of a log cabin came up on the left. I asked Charles to stop the truck. The roo
f had caved in, making it impossible to get inside. Charles told me that John Hoard had acquired the land by grant from the last colonial governor of Virginia, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore. Hoard died in 1778 while a captain in the Virginia militia and is buried next to the cabin, along with other members of his family. The last Hoard on Hoard Road had been born in that very cabin. He fought in the Second World War and then returned to live there the rest of his life. He died in 1984.

  But that’s not the cabin that made the greatest impression on me. Charles mentioned another one, half a mile up a muddy cow path overlooking the Monongahela River. It stood on one side of a hilly clearing with everything but the roof intact. A two-sided hearth and chimney (for cooking inside and outside) survived in almost perfect condition. Straw, stones, bark, and grass still filled the gaps between beams cut from large trees. The floorboards had rotted away, and a great willow presided over the middle of the only room, draping the house in a tent of leaves. I picked at fragments of newspaper stuffed around a window frame for insulation. It was the Toledo Weekly, dated 1903. It told of the goings-on three hundred miles away to the northwest. Clapboard and wallpaper still covered the walls here and there. All these touches reminded me that I was in someone’s home, where members of the Stewart family had lived for two hundred years. People had slept and cooked in this room. Babies had crawled on this floor. Jessy and Anabelle Stewart lived here into the 1940s, though both were over the age of seventy by then. They described themselves to a census taker as retired farmers with some other source of income. They did odd jobs for the Hunters and lived in the cabin until they died in the 1970s. I took a picture.2

  The log cabin in the high meadow and the tar paper shanty in the industrial hollow form a pair of sorts, a unity of apparent opposites. In one sense, they stand for two moments in Appalachian history. The cabin gave way to the shanty, just as a free and robust set of subsistence practices gave way to impoverishing wage labor. But history does not offer us neat formulations. By the time extractive industry had reordered the landscape, the people who inhabited both houses lived almost the same way. Husbands and sons spent their days in the mines, while wives and daughters tended gardens. The distinction between cabin and shanty had collapsed into Appalachian poverty.

  * * *

  I SET OUT TO BROADEN and deepen the narrative of dispossession in the southern mountains. I read the works of historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and sociologists. I read corporate records, private correspondence, popular magazines, government reports, and novels. The result is episodic. My exact setting is southern Pennsylvania to southern West Virginia, but every chapter excavates a different stratum. The first considers Appalachia itself and how Americans have thought about it from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The second explains the history of enclosure as part of the history of capitalism, contrasting that with peasant economy. The third reinterprets the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion, a conflict I see as arising from tensions over what served as money and the uses of land. The fourth takes up the destruction of the Appalachian forest and how the elimination of this ecological base contributed to the dependency of mountain households.

  An interlude follows, in which I think through artistic depictions of dispossession in nineteenth-century America, including paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Hovenden, and George Inness. The sixth chapter explores the transfer of subsistence production from mountain cabins to coal camps, where garden vegetables reduced the wages paid to miners. The seventh and final chapter explains the persistence of peasant economy in the thinking of anthropologists and economists involved in economic development during the twentieth century. This book closes with land grabbing in Africa in the twenty-first century, suggesting that the story I tell is not done and over with, not really past at all.

  1. Contemporary Ancestors

  FROM DANIEL BOONE TO HILL-BILLY

  In all societies there are off-casts. This impure part serves as our precursors or pioneers.

  —J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (1782)

  IT IS AN ORDINARY MAP of southern West Virginia, adorned with shapes representing private property. Some of the shapes adhere to watercourses. Others run ruler straight, throwing squares and trapezoids across innumerable hills and hollows. Distant investors consulted the Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley for its cross-section diagrams, which reveal the depths and strata of bituminous minerals. They learned the exact distances by river and railroad from these deposits to factories in Cincinnati, Richmond, and New York City. But their two-dimensional aspirations did not match three-dimensional reality. Thousands of people hunted and gathered, planted beans and maize, and raised livestock beneath the ownerships of the men whose names mark each survey. Looked at in this way, a mundane illustration of cadastral boundaries, “fixed by litigation or otherwise,” posed a threat in cartographic form, a lit fuse in an ongoing war over the control of subsistence in the southern mountains.1

  There are many other maps like this one, each a fragment of a region known better by myth and legend than by history. The named investors believed that the best use of the Kanawha Valley was to remove its trees and dig its coal. They believed that these commodities enriched not only them but West Virginia, the United States, and even the world—that imposing private property over these mountains enlisted a neglected land and a forgotten people in an inevitable movement. They also believed that nothing stood in their way. As they saw it, the Kanawha Valley lay within a propitious region where wealth multiplied without social or environmental obstacles. For their part, the people on the ground had never paid much attention to lines demarcating private property or to landowners who often lived far from the mountains. Together, the investors and residents created a region, not by cooperating or by participating as equals in a political process but by the outcome of their conflict. We know the geographical location of this region as the southern extent of the Appalachian Mountains. The industrial invasion that took place there gave it another name: Appalachia.2

  Where is Appalachia? Is it a province of eastern North America, locatable on any map? Or is it a set of cultural characteristics, not entirely limited to elevation or topography? West of Washington, D.C., the traveler makes a gradual ascent, rising 328 feet in forty miles to the undulating plain of the Piedmont. The Blue Ridge comes into view, topping off at 1,100 feet outside of Harpers Ferry. The landscape then slopes into the northernmost point of the Shenandoah Valley. The Civil War battlefield Antietam lies on the eastern bank of the Shenandoah River. On the other side begins a physiographic formation known as Ridge and Valley, including Spruce Mountain (4,863 feet), Cheat Mountain (4,848 feet), and Back Allegheny Mountain (4,843), features of an escarpment called the Allegheny Front. Crossing over, the countryside extends west and south as the broad, highly eroded Appalachian Plateau. A forester writing in the 1880s described rivers with myriad tributaries, each opening to still smaller forks and branches. “What renders the topography of this region most remarkable is the extraordinary narrowness of its numberless watersheds, the different creeks and brooks taking rise in the immediate neighborhood of each other.”3

  We could just leave the question there and say that Appalachia consists of these uplands, including southwestern Pennsylvania, a sliver of Virginia, all of West Virginia, the eastern thirds of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the elevated counties of Georgia and the Carolinas. But physical features are not always enough to define a place as distinctive. One government report concluded that the various counties and corners often referred to as Appalachia “have only one feature in common—an elevation higher than that of the surrounding country.” There is also a wider conception that draws in all of western Pennsylvania, the bottom tier of counties in New York, parts of Ohio, a third of Alabama, and a bite of Mississippi. Not all of these areas are particularly elevated. The first use of the name Appalachia offers no clarity. While wandering in what is now nor
thern Florida, the survivors of a disastrous Spanish expedition heard the name of a village as Apalachen. A map from 1562 has the word hovering over a vague northern territory.

  Nor does Appalachia have a specific or unique ethnic identity. Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, and Cherokee all lived there at different times, but none of them exclusively. Many among the descendants of the white settlers who found their way to the mountains after the American Revolution kept on moving, generation after generation. Before the end of the nineteenth century, they had arrived in the Ozark Mountains, the Illinois prairie, the Great Plains, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Whether highland whites composed a separate subculture of the South or a slight variation in the foodways, music, and lore found in the lowlands depends on whether we choose to emphasize minor differences or major similarities. As late as 1900, a Cherokee in northern Georgia, an African-American in North Carolina, and a Hungarian recently arrived in Kentucky would not have thought that they lived in the same region.4

  There might be no reliable way of defining a cultural region. But consider that human patterns in tandem with landscapes create lived experience. People change their boundaries, migrate to escape drought or cold, and enlarge their presence through trade and conflict. We could construct a region entirely from the mental maps of its inhabitants, keyed to seasonal work or the burial grounds of ancestors. If this is right, then a region is a set of defining events, process unfolding in place. Every region is based on a theory.

  There are plenty of theories. In the nineteenth century, geographers began to think of regions as clusters of interactions within spatial limits. In particular, they asked how markets located in cities changed surrounding landscapes. A German named Johann Heinrich von Thünen came up with a model in which a town at the center of a uniform agricultural plain influenced what farmers planted over the entire territory. He expected to find perishable products close to market and hardier ones farther away because strawberries, unlike wheat, would not survive days in transit. For Thünen, city and country worked together to create a geographical division of labor in which both merchants and farmers benefited. Every exchange took place between equals and every outcome served the greater good, without a hint of class conflict or asymmetric power. He assumed the universality of capitalist rationality, in which everyone acted to maximize profit.