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From the 1730s, immigrants entered the region not so much by trekking inland from the
Atlantic, but by following the Great Wagon Road down the Valley of Virginia past
already-claimed land in Pennsylvania. Farm families along the banks of the Hyco, Eno,
and Haw rivers of North Carolina were part of a Scotch-Irish migration that brought
perhaps 150,000 people from Ulster by 1755. English and Germans arrived in lesser, but
significant numbers. Enslaved African Americans made up ten percent of the Carolina
Piedmont's population in the 1760s. By 1800, only two or three counties had black
populations of more than thirty percent. The formidable distance, lack of adequate wagon
roads from the coast into the hinterland, impassability of rivers, and difficulties of
movement around the cascades and boulder-strewn rapids of the fall line left the growing
number of Carolina Piedmont farmers largely to their own resources and social arrangements
in the root-hot-or-die decades. Map: Routes of Carolina Piedmont Settlement |
Although the Carolina Piedmont has shared in all that is "southern," it has a distinctive history and geography. A yeoman farming society took shape in this region, formed, as cultural geographer D. W. Meinig has written, "by peoples whose origins, social character, economic interests, and political concerns differed sharply from those of the older coastal societies." Almost all of the Piedmont lies west of a line drawn by linguist Hans Kurath separating the American South's two major dialect groupings, the South Midland and Southern Coastal. Retaining inflections of Midlands English and Lowland Scottish dialects, adapting their own agricultural practices and construction techniques, borrowing from Germans and English, the dominant Scotch-Irish spread a subsistence-agriculture, log-house, livestock, corn, and woodlands-pasture culture throughout the region and into the Appalachians.
The Piedmont became a redundant landscape of farms and mixed forests, interrupted by the occasional plantation, punctuated by crossroads stores, gristmills, and meetinghouses that lent their names to loose neighborhoods. Smiths, millwrights, iron workers, carpenters, cobblers, gravestone carvers, quilters, potters, basketmakers, coopers, makers of furniture and wagons suggest the diversity of the region's artisans. Shape-note hymnals, love ballads, and fiddle tunes testify to the flowering of its folk culture. The patriarchal family structure nested within a social structure that was loosely hierarchical, swayed by the authority and example of leading men in these rural communities and nascent towns.
"The Piedmont is another land," wrote North Carolina journalist Jonathan Daniels in 1939. "It has always been a more serious minded land. [It] seems to have grown from the stern spirits of the Quakers of Guilford, the Moravians of Forsyth, the Calvinists of Mecklenburg, the ubiquitous Baptists, and that practical Methodism from which the Dukes emerged." Stirred by the backwoods democracy of camp-meeting revivalism in the early nineteenth century, the region's evangelical fervor soon turned to the growth and maintenance of congregations and to the ordering of counties. Anti-slavery impulses acquiesced to the temptation of exploiting African American slave labor for the production of cotton and tobacco.
Although slavery expanded steadily in the Carolina Piedmont, slaves remained less numerous and planters fewer and characteristically less wealthy than in the Low Country, Tennessee Valley, Tidewater, Mississippi Delta, and Black Belt regions. Despite yeoman pressure for political reform, slaveholders, especially coastal planters, held the political upper hand in both the Carolinas until after the Civil War. Resistance to secession grew stronger the further one ventured up-country. For Piedmont farmers to make themselves into rebel soldiers took Lincoln's call for troops, the threat to home, kin, and property that fear of Yankee invasion represented, nightmares of a countryside filled with freed blacks, and appeals to "fight like men for our firesides."
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Because Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston
surrendered to General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union army
one April day in 1865 on a farm known as the Bennett Place, the
wooden hall-and-parlor house of James and Mary Bennett and their
three children today stands reconstructed on its original Durham
County, North Carolina, site. The houses of plain folk have rarely
received such attention. The Bennetts were typical of Carolina
Piedmont farm families. Through hard work, sacrifice, frugality,and
luck, they had risen from the status of tenants to that of landowners.
Producing food crops and raising a few animals, they grew enough
corn and wheat to sell a surplus for cash. Like the vast majority
of Piedmont Carolinians, they owned no slaves. |
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Bennett
Place Durham County, N.C. |
In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, residents of the Piedmont assumed that the future, like the past, lay with farming. But as the region broke from the broken world of the Old South, industrialization slowly emerged, its antecedents traceable to water-powered, grist mills, antebellum cotton-yarn factories, and slave-operated tobacco presses. The men most ready to take advantage of this wide-open, rough-and-tumble situation — hard-driving men with names such as Hammett, Holt, Lineberger, Tompkins, Cannon, Gray, Springs, Love, Reynolds, and Duke — applied a capitalist paternalism derived not only from planter-slave relations, but from the Carolina Piedmont's traditional white culture, its Protestant patriarchal authority and habits of industry, its merchants' bookkeeping practices.
