In the land of saddle-bags : The Protestant people of Appalachian America

Un tbe Xanfc of SafrMe^Baas.

The Protestant People of Appalachian
America.*

by rev. william goodell erost, ph.d.
President of Berea College, Kentucky.

On a modern map we see a well-defined terri-
tory, comprising the western portions of the
Atlantic States, northern Georgia and Ala-
bama, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky,
which may be said to constitute one of the natur-
al grand divisions of our continent. This region
has great diversity of climate, altitude and
surface, but it all has one striking character -

*The record of Protestant emigrations from Europe
to America is necesarily obscure and defective. They
did not go out with a flourish of trumpets. The Hugue-
nots of France melted from sight, taking with them the
brain and nerve of the nation, and were scattered over
both hemispheres. Germany had its evictions and sliif t-
ings of population. England and Scotland have been
continuously drained. But these great movements have
been inconspicuous. Secrecy was often necessary to
safety, and when the great cause seemed to fail, protest-
ing churches and households acted independently and
resolutely, and set their faces toward some land of new
promise. They disappeared before the face of the op-
pressor, and fulfilled a Divine purpose in a new and
larger world. The Mayflower company is an example,
most fortunately put on record, showing the trials and
aspirations of the families of a Protestant exodus
whose limits no historian has yet defined. It is the pur-
pose of the present article to show how one great
stream of this Protestant migration has been lost in
the wilderness for thrice forty years.— W. G. F.

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isfcic — it is a land of saddle-bags. One great
limitation confronts its inhabitants — they can
travel only on horseback. It requires more ef-
fort for the average American Highlander to
reach the capital of his State than for a resi-
dent of Chicago to visit London.

It seems like a surprising geological oversight
that this territory has no kindly arms of the
sea, no inland lakes and no navigable streams.
The lack of waterways renders it more inacces-
sible than any mountain district in Europe.
Bridle paths, following the course of streams,
and circuitous wagon roads threading the
"gaps" and traversing the larger valleys, form
its only avenues of communication with the
world.

But this condition of affairs was not so evi-
dent to new settlers in America four and five
generations ago. To them all "the western
country" was a wilderness, and no maps ex-
isted which could reveal the difference between
western New York, with its lakes and the great
coming Erie canal, and western Virginia. Be-
sides, the first settlers found very good valley
land in the Southern mountains — ample do-
mains for the first generation. It was only
with the increase of population that it became
necessary to cultivate the thinner soil and
steeper sides of the "knobs."

This, then is the unwritten history of the first
comers. There were the Scotch-Irish, most
numerous of all, with their well-known charac-
istics of temperament and principle. And then
came the English dissenters, (Cromwell himself
once engaged passage to America). The town
and family names of the west counties of Eng-
land which were most concerned in the ill-
starred uprising of "the Protestant Duke"
of Monmouth are to be found to-day in eastern
Kentucky and Tennessee. The German con-
tingent was much smaller, and came mainly
through the southwest valleys from Pennsylva-

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nia. The Huguenot strain made its mark in
men like John Sevier, in Tennessee.

Many of these adventurous exiles tarried for
a generation in the coast colonies, and then
"went west" under the same great impulse
which affected all Americans after the Eevolu-
tion. A smaller number seem to have found
their way almost at once into the hills.

The influence of slavery showed itself in the
first half of this century in driving many of
these liberty-loving families into the mount-
ains, and in walling them up there with a bar-
rier of social repulsion. The line between
mountain and lowland came to represent di-
versity of type and ideas, animosity even, and
so made more effective the isolation of the
mountain folk.

OUR CONTEMPORARY ' ANCESTORS.

And now what has been the unwritten his-
tory of the descendants of these Protestant
dissenters in the obscurity of their mountain
home during the last hundred years? The an-
swer must be that, compared with what has
been going on in the great modern world,
nothing has happened to these solitary dwellers
in the hills. They took into their mountain
valleys the civilization of the colonial period —
and that is the prevailing type among them
still. To understand the mountain people of
to-day one needs a little historic imagination.
With this he will perceive that most of what
a superficial observer would call their faults are
really honest survivals from the times of their
forefathers. The colonial dialect, with its
strong Saxon flavor, and scores of words like
brickety, sorry, soon for early, pack for
carry, etc., is one of the first discoveries. As
we become more intimate with them we find
that unlettered dames can repeat long ballads
from the old Scotch and English anthologies —

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ballads which refer to "the Turkish lady" and
other subjects of Crusading times, with odd
variations to adapt them to their far-off
American home!

And the colonial condition of arts and sciences
still survives here in large degree. Splint-bot-
tomed chairs, such as went to the attic in
western New York fifty years ago, homespun
bedcovers which are coveted by fashionable
ladies to-day, grease lamps, burning lard with
floating wick, hand-mills, which turn out a de-
licious grist for breakfast cornpones, black-
smiths who can also tinker clocks, extract teeth,
preach, and "raise a crap" — these are a few of
the externals which lead us to characterize the
mountaineers as "our contemporary ances-
tors"

Passing beyond externals we find a colonial
hospitality, a colonial disregard of the sacred-
ness of human life, and a colonial religion of
literalism and fatalism. And it is here that
we find sad divergence from the Protestant
characteristics of the earlier time. Pioneer
conditions prevented the maintenance of the
educational standard so essential to Protest-
antism. Preachers were scarce, and they could
have meetings but once a month. They had
the civilization of the colonial jjeriod, but that
civilization did not include the common school,
the division of labor, or the full idea of tolera-
tion. Preachers were scarce and they began
to "put up with" men who had little or no ed-
ucation. This was the fatal fall, for Protest-
antism without intelligence is impossible. No
Protestant people has ever been so destitute of
educated leaders. That a man should not
know the meaning of Easter, and preach upon
the story of Queen Esther on Easter Day, is
more amusing than harmful perhaps, but when
he begins to boast that he preaches without
study, and without "taking thought," so that
when he gets up in the pulpit " the devil him-

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self don't know what's a-going to be said," we
can not smile. It is no wonder that such men
neglect "the weightier matters of the law " and
give their main efforts to obscure and contro-
verted points. A solemn debate as to whether
the "Missionary Baptist " or the "Southern
Methodist " is the only true church has occur-
red within a few miles of Berea. Eesolutions
denouncing' missions as unwarrantable inter-
ferences with the "decrees" of Providence,
and Sunday-schools as unauthorized by Scrip-
ture, are passed by ministerial conventions
every summer. Of course these views are not
held by all the numerous denominations in the
mountains, but those who do profess a belief
in missions and Sunday-schools too often fail
to contribute to the one or sustain the otheri

And meanwhile the people are without the
true incentives of the Gospel. It is pathetic
to find an intelligent young teacher complain-
ing that he can not find out what Christianity
is, or what the' Lord really wants of him, al-
though he has listened to preaching more or
less all his life. And it is still more pathetic
to find an aged woman who has brought up a
large family of children, faithfully training
them in the best of all the traditions with
which she is acquainted, and who yet says
with a quaver in her voice, "I haint never
heard no call of the speerit. I haint nary sign
that I'm one of the elect."

The morality of the mountain people, too
often quite separable from their religion, is
greatly varied, though on the whole much bet-
ter than would be expected. Their conven-
tionalties are not the same as those of our
towns and cities, but they have moral stand-
ards to which they adhere with rigid insist-
ence. In one valley it sometimes happens that
the leading families remove, as did the Lin-
colns, to some western State, and society col-
lapses. The tales of extreme degredation told

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by travelers may be true, but they need not be
accepted as typical.

These then are the striking characteristics
of this great population: First, the absence
of the distinctively modern ideas and habits of
thought. Second, a survival of many customs
and ideas which belong to past centuries.
And, third, a certain pathetic shyness mingled
with a proud sensitiveness as they realize that
somehow they are at a disadvantage in the
presence of "strangers," or "furriners," as
visitors from the outside world are often called.

THE RECORD OE THE MOUNTAINEERS.

Although thus isolated from their fellow-
countrymen, the mountain people have con-
tributed their share to our national greatness.
A number of writers have recently been rescu-
ing from oblivion their Revolutionary record.
In the same county where Berea College now
stands Daniel Boone was besieged in his fort
by a company of Indians under command of a
British officer, and summoned to surrender in
the name of King George. It was a horde of
stalwart hunters from Tennessee, Kentucky and
the Carolina mountains who administered a
crushing defeat to the British forces at King's
Mountain, and set in motion the current of
events which culminated at Yorktown. In the
war of 1812, New Orleans was defended by
men with long rifles from the hills whose pow-
der-horns were filled with stuff of their own
manufacture, the saltpeter having come from
caves in the mountains.

In the Civil War their services were still more
marked. The great mountain region was not
tenanted by slaveholders. Its inhabitants were
not the "poor whites" degraded by competi-
tion with slave labor, but a self-respecting yeo-
manry — really the best middle class the South
possesses. They owned land and had the in-

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dependence of spirit which belongs to posses-
sors of the soil. Neither the Northern nor the
Southern leaders seemed to have taken ac-
count of the mountain element, but they were
speedily reminded of it by the action of West
Virginia in seceding from secession, and the vig-
orous opposition of Eastern.Tennessee simply
showed the temper of the whole region. Union
soldiers were actually enlisted in the mount-
ains of Alabama and the Carolinas. Ken-
tucky was held in the Union by its mountain
counties. And the transfer of 200,000 fighting
men from the forces counted upon for the Con-
federacy, to the Union side, was a mighty
make-weight in the scales of civil war. Every
movement of the Confederates from the East
to the West was hindered by this island of
loyal sentiment. The Union soldiers who in
other parts of the South were guided by the
faithful negro, and assisted in their escape
from Southern prisons by his friendly aid, re-
ceived like services from the mountaineers.
Their loyalty is the more to be admired because
it was loyalty in the immediate presence of the
enemy : a loyalty that cost them dearly in the
breaking of cherished associations, the de-
struction of property, and the sacrifice of many
lives. And it is a service to the nation which
has never been fitly commemorated nor re-
corded. The mountain regiments had no
badges, poets, or historians. They dispersed to
their scattered homes and it is only at the fire-
side that their deeds of valor find commemor-
ation to-day.

It is to be remarked that for many mountain
men the war was an education. They were
carried out of the narrow circle of previous ex-
perience and brought into contact with men
from other sections, and returned to their
homes with larger ideas than their fathers or
grandfathers had ever had.

That the native vigor and capacity of these

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people has been obscured but not extinguished
is shown by the record of those few individuals
who have made their way to the region of larger
opportunities. Stonewall Jackson, Abraham
Lincoln, Admiral Farragut (whose mother's
name was Mclven), Munsey, the great Meth-
odist orator of Baltimore, Eev. George J.
Burchett, of Oregon, Commander Maynard, of
Spanish war fame, Parson Brownlow, Col.
Eobert Clay Crawford (" Osman Pasha") are
examples of the sterling abilities of the mount-
ain people. — The Missionary Revieiv of the
World.

Published by the Christian Woman's Board of Mis-
sions, 152 East Market Street, Indianapolis, Ind. Price,
1 cent each ; 10 cents per dozen.

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