American Nations: A History Of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures Of North America by Colin Woodard

Author:Colin Woodard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, *Retail Copy*, American History
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Appalachia Spreads West

It is little wonder that historians have long identified the Appalachian people with the frontier. Borderlanders were the first to move across the Appalachians, forcing their way into Native American territory in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. They were founding renegade governments like Transylvania and the State of Franklin long before the Continental Congress got around to creating the Northwest Territory or conquering the Indians that lived within it. Yankees and Midlanders generally waited until federal military forces had defeated Indian peoples before moving into their lands; Borderlanders often carried out the conquest themselves. While New Englanders were still colonizing upstate New York, Appalachian folk were rafting down the Ohio River to stake out claims in southern Indiana and Illinois. By the time Midlanders reached Ohio, Borderlanders were skirmishing with Cherokees in central Tennessee. They were very often on the cutting edge of Euro-American expansion because of their willingness—even desire—to live beyond the effective reach of government.

Greater Appalachian culture spread faster and wider than that of the other nations. Attracted by better soils, cheap and properly surveyed land, and easier access to markets (via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers), hundreds of thousands fled Virginia in the first half of the nineteenth century, causing the Old Dominion to cease to be the most populous state in the Union. This mass movement out of Virginia and other eastern states came to be known as the Great Migration, and it was in large part an Appalachian movement. By 1800 Borderlanders had colonized much of what is now Kentucky, north-central Tennessee, and southwestern Illinois. Thirty years later—at a time when Yankeees had yet to reach Illinois or Wisconsin—Borderlanders had seized control of northern Alabama, much of the rest of Tennessee, the Ozarks of Arkansas, and the Mississippi Valley of southern Illinois and Missouri. In 1850 they were spreading across north Texas, carrying the speech patterns of Ulster and the English Marches to their homes on the range. The culture’s turbulent, highly mobile people were deflected only by the power of the Deep Southern planters and stopped short only upon reaching the treeless, arid prairies they encountered at the edge of the Far West. The culture they laid down—allegedly that of “real Americans”—was very different from that of its neighbors, many of whom found its disorderliness distasteful.

But during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Borderlanders became so numerous and widespread that their leaders were able to seize control of national affairs, occupying the White House and branding an epoch of American history with their values.

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