In Mountain Masters, Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina, John C. Inscoe’s research of Western North Carolina unravels the false ideas that, “Antebellum South Appalachia had no slaves, resided in poverty, and lacked the economic and social diversity to form distinguishable class hierarchy.” Inscoe argues that Carolina highlanders before the Civil War were, “far from being the deprived, isolated, self-centered mountaineers depicted in later accounts,” but, rather, “...their society was a vigorous, complex, and growing one.” Inscoe takes on more than a century’s worth of historical and popular assumptions about Southern Appalachia in this book.
The first few chapters dive into Agriculture, Community, and Commerce. Inscoe …show more content…
The North became increasingly industrialized and found a ready source of inexpensive labor in the swarms of European immigrants, particularly the Irish and Germans. “The North was more inclined toward having the federal government pay all or part of the costs of internal improvements such as canals, railroads, and lighthouses. The South remained primarily agrarian and its large farms, or plantations, depended mostly on slave labor.” It opposed federal money being spent for internal improvements because at the time, tariffs were the primary source of federal income. High tariffs protected the industrial goods of the North but not the cotton and tobacco of the South, where the tariffs only raised the cost of imported goods Southerners depended on. “The slave-holding states of the South drew closer to each other and farther from their Northern partner. They feared that if slavery were not permitted to expand into new territories acquired by the United States, the South and its concerns would lose political power in the nation’s capital.” A new political party, the Republicans, wanted to prevent the spread of slavery beyond where it existed, and many Republicans were radical abolitionists hoping to end slavery everywhere in America. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and the success of his party in the 1860 election was the cause that led …show more content…
Mountaineers felt discriminated against because eastern North Carolina was the seat of state government and insensitive to their regional concerns. The mountaineers fought hard to close the gap of injustices. After Andrew Jackson left the presidency, “the Whig party dominated the region and the area was referred to as ‘the Gibraltar of Whig principles.’” Despite the Whig stronghold, Democrats operated within Western North Carolina, and by 1850, the two parties maintained an even hold in mountain politics. The growing national friction between North and South shifted the focal point of Western Carolinian politicians from their differences with the eastern portion of their state to their identities as southerners. “The road toward expanded sectionalism began with the ardent pro-slavery rhetoric of Thomas Lanier Clingman. Clingman owned no slaves and represented the smallest slaveholding county in Western North Carolina in Congress, but his extremist southern-rights ideologies and broad band of support within the region illustrates the ‘strong southern identity and sectional loyalty of mountain voters.’” While the majority of mountaineers desired to stay in the Union, the secession of the southern states ushered in strong support for the Confederacy because the people of Western North Carolina “felt awful