The Service of the Mountaineers
If we take the term southern mountaineers in its broadest extent, all must agree that the service rendered the nation by the mountaineers of the South has been a notable…
Location: Appalachian Mountains
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“The Service of the Mountaineers” from The Southern Mountaineers by Samuel Tyndale Wilson, 1906.
If we take the term southern mountaineers in its broadest extent, all must agree that the service rendered the nation by the mountaineers of the South has been a notable one.
They conquered the Alps beyond which untold millions of later compatriots were to find their fruitful Italy. It was, indeed, no small service that Boone, and Robertson, and Bean, and Sevier, and the Shelbys lent the struggling colonies and later the infant republic, by pressing backward the long-time frontiers until those frontiers practically vanished in the sunset West.
As backwoodsmen, clad in buckskin, and bearing their trusty rifles, the pioneers took their lives in their hands and scaled the might barriers that Nature had piled before them, and braved wild beast and wilder Indian, and defied the dread of unknown evils in an unknown wilderness. What we pass in review in a day cost them the efforts of the best part of a lifetime. Their days were spent in arduous toil, and their nights were too often wasted in anxious vigils. The annals of the frontiersmen are full of the stories of daring exploits and uncomplaining endurance.
Such service was the cost that civilization pays for new conquests, but it was paid not by the salaried emissaries of an organized government, nor by the subsidized forces of great trading companies, but by individuals that went always at their own charges, and sometimes at the cost of all things; more often than not, hindered rather than encouraged by the unappreciative governments they had left behind them when they plunged into the depths of the forest.
They took with them the Bible and Protestant Christianity, and established their hereditary faith in every district of the mountains. There is no infidelity native to the Appalachians. An infidel is an imported monstrosity. The only heresy is that of conduct. Men believe in the Bible as the only infallible rule of faith and practise. "Thus saith the Lord," when once ascertained, is the end of all their frequent theological controversies.
The legends of Londonderry may have faded from the memory, but the Orangemen of Ulster are not more inveterate foes of Romanism than are the southern mountaineers. A traveler in the Blue Ridge stopped at a cabin for a gourdful of water. As the mistress of the cabin, "on hospitable thoughts intent,” was bringing the water, a little child clung to her skirts and hindered her. In her annoyance she reproved the child, and in a warning voice said, "You must be good or Clavers will get you."
Thus has the once-dreaded name of Claverhouse survived as a bogie among those that are unfamiliar with the pages of history. In somewhat the same way has a deep-seated hatred of Roman Catholicism been inherited from the past. Strange to say, Rome has as yet made no effort to win the mountain people; she either overlooks them or deems them an unpromising field of proselytism.
Mr. Fiske, in his "Old Virginia and her Neighbors," tells of a great service rendered by the Scotch-Irish of the Appalachians. He says: “In a certain sense the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent Appalachian region may be called the cradle of modern democracy. In that rude frontier society life assumed many new aspects, old customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished, social equality acquired even more importance than unchecked individualism... This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so long as frontier life retains any importance, can nowhere be so well studied in its beginnings as among the Presbyterian population of the Appalachian region in the eighteenth century."
Out of the chaos of individualism, the frontiersmen soon evolved all the necessary elements of civil government in many places they founded law and order as substantially as they exist anywhere in the states. In some sections they introduced a good observance of the Sabbath—a better one than is now to be found in most of the cities of our land. There are worthy citizens in the remotest coves that do not hunt on the Sabbath, even at the present day; and the author recalls one instance where the people of a very mountainous region discussed the advisability of using mob law to rid their neighborhood of an intruder from another country, who, despite their protests, persisted in hunting on the Sabbath day.
Another mountaineer apologized, on his own initiative, for having been out with his team after midnight of Saturday night, justifying himself on the good old Shorter Catechism ground that his work was one of "necessity and mercy." In many places, however, the Sabbath is in as extreme peril as it is in our great cities.
The fatal mistake of the pioneers, if it was not in many cases an unavoidable necessity, was their allowing the hardships of their lot to prevent them from giving their children as good an education as they themselves had enjoyed. As Mr. Roosevelt investigated the early documents that deal with the settlement of the Alleghany frontier, he noted the absence of signatures made by mere signs or marks. In 1776 out of one hundred and ten pioneers of the Washington District who signed a petition to be annexed to North Carolina, only two signed by mark. In 1780 two hundred and fifty-six pioneers of Cumberland signed the "Articles of Agreement," and only one signed by mark.
But the mistake referred to was by no means a universal one. In the case of the people of the rich valleys and plateaus, the first care of the pioneers was to establish their log church; their next was to plant by it an academy. Many such schools perished either during our Civil War or in the course of the years; yet there remain as the lineal descendants of such schools, supported and perpetuated at the cost of unbounded sacrifice on the part of able Presbyterian ministers, at least six of the so-called "small colleges" to which the people of our generation are so generously paying eloquent tribute.
The service that the southern mountaineers have rendered in national matters can hardly be overestimated. They were possessed by a fierce love of liberty, and so the birthplace of American liberty very appropriately was in the mountains. In Abingdon, Virginia, at the junction of the valleys of the Blue Ridge and East Tennessee, as early as January 20, 1775, a council met that as Bancroft says, "was mostly composed of Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish descent."
"The spirit of freedom swept through their minds as naturally as the wind sighs through the fir trees of the Black Mountains. There they resolved never to surrender, but to live and die for liberty."
This was four months before the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the lowland hills of North Carolina issued the "immortal Mecklenburg Declaration," which in its turn antedated the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress.
While the very fewness and the inaccessibility of the mountaineers were their best defense from the armies of the redcoats, on the other hand, their insignificant numbers and remoteness from their only Share in the friends exposed the frontiersmen to the deadly assaults of the Indians, the allies of Britain.
The mountaineers have been called by Gilmore in the title of one of his books, "The Advance Guard of Civilization"; and with equal appropriateness, in the title of another of his books, "The Rearguard of the Revolution."
Twice during the Revolution, "the grand strategy" of the English planned simultaneous assaults upon the colonies from the coast-line and the Indian frontier; and twice did the little band of Watauga settlers frustrate the successful carrying out of those sagacious and most sinister plans of campaign. In 1776, while four hundred and thirty-five men behind palmetto logs in Charleston beat off the British fleet with its five thousand sailors and seamen, Sevier and Shelby and their two hundred and ten backwoodsmen repulsed and defeated the Cherokees led by Oconostota and Dragging Canoe.
Then from Georgia northward to Virginia, the frontiersmen swept in retributive wrath upon the Tory-led Indians, and dealt them such a blow as extorted from them an unwilling but at least a temporary peace. At the same time the Tories that infested the frontier were either driven out or forced to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederation.
In 1779 when, on the coast, Savannah had been taken by Clinton's expedition, the frontier invasion was forestalled by the timely capture of all the ammunition stored for the coming campaign by the British and their allies at what is now Chattanooga, by seven hundred and fifty mountaineers led again by Shelby and Sevier. Thus were the southern colonies protected without help from the Colonies, by the woodsmen who while fighting for their own existence also contributed materially to the saving of the infant nation.
Nor was this all the service that the frontiersmen rendered during the Revolution.
The darkest hour of the War of Independence in the South was in 1780, when Charleston was captured by the English, Gates and DeKalb were defeated at Camden, and the interior was overrun by the victorious British soldiery. Washington said: "I have almost ceased to hope."
Especially troublesome was the presence of Colonel Ferguson, who established himself with two hundred regulars in the western border counties, attempting to draw to the royal banner the rougher element that inhabited the foothills and were neither planters nor mountaineers. Two thousand Tories had joined the standard, and Ferguson was threatening the frontier.
In August he sent word to Shelby threatening to "march his army over the mountains, to hang the patriot leaders, and to lay the country waste with fire and sword." The Indians had rallied from their confusion of the previous year, and were menacing the settlements; but not for a moment did the "rear-guard" hesitate when they saw their duty and their opportunity. When all other opposition in the South was practically dormant, Shelby and Sevier formed the instant purpose not to act on the defensive by guarding the mountain passes against the foe, but the rather bravely to issue from their natural defenses and to assault and capture Colonel Ferguson and his force.
The story of the Battle of Kings Mountain is too long to tell here, but no more heroic or romantic chapter is found in our nation's history. The mountain clans mustered on the Watauga and a draft was taken, not to decide who should go, but who should stay to defend the settlements. By September twenty-fifth, eight hundred and forty mountain men were ready for the fight, including four hundred "Backwater Presbyterians" under Colonel Campbell.
Of the six leaders, five were Presbyterian elders. Dr. Doak, the founder of Washington College, committed the expedition in prayer to the God of battles, and addressed the volunteer soldiery, closing his address with the words: "Go forth, my brave men, go forth with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon."
A few days later, at Kings Mountain, after great hardships and sufferings, nine hundred and sixty militiamen surrounded and took by storm an entrenched natural fortress, and captured over eleven hundred English soldiers.
"That glorious victory," said Jefferson, "was the glorious annunciation of that turn in the tide of success which terminated the Revolutionary War with the seal of independence."
The mountaineers had, without order, without pay, without commission, without equipment, and without hope of monetary reward, struck a decisive blow for the entire country. And then, upon their arrival at their cabin homes, without a day's rest they had to hurry into the Indians' territory to check the war-like expeditions that were about to descend upon the settlements.
Thus were the trusty rifles of the pioneers used within one short month against the British regulars at Kings Mountain, and against their savage allies at Boyd's Creek, three hundred miles distant.
The mountaineers again guarded the frontier for the Government during the second war with Britain. Many volunteers served in the northern armies, but most of them served under General Jackson in the "Creek War" and at New Orleans. The intensity of the patriotism may be judged by a philippic against laggards preached in 1813 by Dr. Isaac Anderson in his Maryville pulpit. His text was, "Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty."
"British rum and Albion gold have roused the Creeks' lust for rapine and blood. We are exposed to their incursions; let us carry the war into their country, and go in such numbers as to overwhelm them at once. Apathy on this subject would be criminal. The call of country is the call of God."
A few weeks later one of the patriot doctor's patriot schoolboys, young Ensign Sam Houston, was the second to mount the breast-works of the Indian stronghold on the Tallapoosa. Three severe wounds he received that day, but he lived to be a figure of national importance. The men of the mountains crushed the Creeks in a campaign of many battles; and then at New Orleans struck the British the heaviest blow that they received during the war.
In 1817 the only volunteers General Jackson took with him to the Seminole War were eleven hundred Tennesseeans. In the war with Mexico, so eager were the mountaineers that, at the first call in Tennessee for three thousand men, thirty thousand volunteered their services. The state became known as "the Volunteer State” but the entire Appalachian section also merited the name.
Naturally in the days of the Civil War, there were divisions and alienations and feuds in the Appalachians. Many on the Virginian side of the mountains and among the North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama mountains, espoused the cause of the Confederacy, and made as good soldiers as the valorous hosts of the South could boast. "Stonewall" Jackson was a mountaineer indubitably of the first class, and his famous "Stonewall" brigade was made up largely of the men of the hills. The West Virginia, Kentucky, and East Tennessee mountains were overwhelmingly for the Union; while, also, there were many men of the other sections referred to that fought for the Union. No better soldiers were found on either side of the great debate at arms than were those that enlisted from the mountains.
While it may be an exaggeration to say that the loyalty of the Appalachians decided the great contest, that loyalty certainly contributed substantially to the decision; for the mountains cleft the Confederacy with a mighty hostile element that not merely subtracted great armies from the enrollment of the Confederacy, but even necessitated the presence of other armies for the control of so large a disaffected territory. The Federal forces actually recruited from the states of the southern Appalachians were as considerable in number as were the armies of the American Revolution gathered from all the thirteen colonies and considerably exceeded the total of both mighty armies that fought at Gettysburg, while those from East Tennessee alone numbered over thirty thousand men.
These soldiers were not conscripted or attracted by bounty, but rather in most cases ran the gauntlet through hostile forces for one, two, or three hundred miles to reach a place where they could enlist under the flag of their country. The congressional district in East Tennessee in which the writer lives claims the distinction of having sent a larger percentage of its population into the Union army than did any other congressional district in the entire country.
The story of the loyal mountaineers is as romantic and thrilling a one as was ever told by minstrel or by chronicler of the halcyon days of chivalry. No doubt their position was one of the divinely ordained influences that contributed to that outcome of the fratricidal strife which all Americans now recognize to have been providential and, therefore, best.
The happy union of later days was most auspiciously manifested in the service rendered side by side by the sons and grandsons of the veterans of both armies of the sixties, as these younger Americans united to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny. Of the men enlisted during the Spanish-American War, a little army gathered from the states of the southern mountains—a number far in excess of the quota to be expected from those states. The officers testified heartily to the superior quality of the young mountaineers as soldiers and campaigners. Said one of the officers: "The soldiers from the mountains of the South were the best soldiers we had in the war."
This chapter would be incomplete were it not to call attention, before closing, to the service rendered their country by individuals of this mountain region. A mere mention of a few representative names will emphasize the great part that, in spite ot all their seclusion, the Appalachians have had in the affairs of the nation. There are the pioneers Boone, Sevier, the Shelbys, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston; the presidents Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson; the famous Confederates Zebulon B. Vance, John H. Reagan, and "Stonewall" Jackson; the renowned Unionists Parson Brownlow and Admiral Farragut; the inventor Cyrus H. McCormick; and the man of the nation, Abraham Lincoln.
Surely the annals of the country would be the poorer were the deeds of the men of the Appalachians not found recorded in them.
Wilson, Samuel Tyndale. The Southern Mountaineers. The Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1906.
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