Life in Appalachia from a Pre and Post-Civil War Perspective

Social Structure

Communication among settlements was sparse, except for major upheavals such as the Civil War; interaction with the rest of the nation was limited. Isolation was common in the 19th into the 20th century.

Politics and religion were the two major opportunities for mountain residents to engage in organized community life, but these institutions were themselves organized along kinship lines. Local political factions divided according to kin groups, and local churches developed as communions of extended family units. Both institutions reflected the importance of personal relationships and local autonomy in their operation and structure. Tied by rather tenuous bonds to the larger society (as was evident, during the Civil War), the mountain population reflected the values and social patterns characterizing most pre-modern rural communities.

Most mountaineers owned their own land and occupied and cultivated that land with the manpower provided by their own families. While slavery existed in almost every mountain county before the Civil War and prospered among a few wealthy families in the larger valley communities, the “peculiar institution” never influenced Appalachian culture and society as it did that of the lowland South. In fact, settlements of free blacks thrived in some areas of Appalachia both before and after the war, and their descendants came to have much in common culturally and economically with their white neighbors.

Transportation

After 1830, the construction of railroads and macadam turnpikes began to bring improved transportation facilities to come American communities, but the transportation revolution did not affect most rural roads until the twentieth century. Antebellum investors, public and private,...

... middle of paper ...

.... Among a new generation of southern leaders, moreover, the road to wealth seemed no longer to lead to the plantation but rather to the coal and iron fields of the Appalachians.

Early Industrial Developments

To urban middle-class Americans of the late 19th century, nothing symbolized the progress of the American civilization quite as much as the railroad. Not only had the great surge in railroad construction after the Civil War helped to create a modern market economy, but the iron horse itself seemed to embody the energy, force, and technology of the new order. In fact, the fanning out of railroads from urban centers was an integral part of the modernizing process, tying the natural and human resources of rural areas to the industrializing core.

Works Cited

Eller, R. (1982). Miners, millhands, and mountaineers. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press.