7 Things You Should Know About Slavery in Appalachia

Despite enslaving fewer African Americans than the rest of the South, Appalachians have a lot of work to do in reckoning with our racist past.

Chattel slavery was practiced in every county in southern Appalachia. On top of that, Burke, North Carolina was among the leading counties in terms of enslaved populations.

A prevailing notion permeates throughout Appalachia that we’re historically less complicit in slavery and less tainted by racism than elsewhere in the South. I still encounter this mindset in local Facebook groups, comment sections, and even at county commissioner meetings.

The so-called ”Lost Cause” ideology lingers within us, even in the hills and mountains.

Downplaying Appalachia’s racist history is a common reaction among naysayers pushing back against the work groups like Burke Coalition for Reconciliation are doing to address racial injustices in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

This Appalachian exceptionalism permits us to overlook current social injustices. 

And it discourages us from being curious about the challenges our African American neighbors experience as a legacy of chattel slavery practiced by our forebearers (to say little about present-day mass incarceration). 

After all, if we don’t see a problem, we don’t have to change how our local governments, businesses, or churches are run.

We don’t have to call out the cultural norms that exclude and harm Black voices, either because we’re oblivious to these barriers or willfully ignorant of the impact race still has on Appalachian communities. 

The sad reality is that chattel slavery was practiced in every county in southern Appalachia. On top of that, Burke, North Carolina was among the leading counties in terms of enslaved populations.

Many parts of our mountain region have yet to reckon fully with this horrific heritage.

One step is to gain a more comprehensive picture of slavery and race relations in the Appalachian Mountains during the Antebellum period.

Toward that cause, I’m highlighting seven things we should know about slavery in southern Appalachia.

1. Slavery Existed Throughout All of Southern Appalachia

People were enslaved in every Appalachian county south of the Mason-Dixon line (Maryland’s northern border).

It was written into law and gave slave owners considerable economic advantages, for obvious reasons. While the population of enslaved people in some counties was much higher than others, such as 27% in Burke County in 1850, that figure was less than 10% for most mountain counties.¹

Many of the African Americans enslaved in Burke County were owned by a powerful slaveholding elite.

You’ll certainly recognize several slaveholding family names common to the area, including Avery, McKesson, Caldwell, Rutherford, Harshaw, Erwin, Walton, Forney, and McDowell, to name a few.²

2. The Appalachian South Once Had an Abundance of Anti-Slavery Societies

A majority of anti-slavery societies in the United States were in southern Appalachia prior to the Civil War. In 1827, 106 of the 130 anti-slavery societies in the United States were in the South, mostly in the mountains.

They weren’t all abolitionists, however. These anti-slavery movements fit into three different groups.

• Colonizationists lamented the introduction of Blacks into American society in the first place and strategized on how to relocate them to a colony in the Caribbean or back to Africa.

• Emancipationists hoped for a gradual end to slavery by compensating slave owners and enslaved people born after a certain date. Others advocated freeing enslaved people once they reached a certain age.

• Immediate abolitionists desired to end slavery, well, immediately. As you might imagine, this position angered Southerners the most, and very few immediate abolitionist societies existed in southern Appalachia.

These anti-slavery sentiments, however, were largely driven out of the region as tensions heightened in the lead-up to the Civil War.³

3. Enslaved People Were Forced to Work in Appalachian Gold Mines When Cotton Prices Were Down

Planters and slaveholders leased gold lands and worked their slaves in mines when gold prices were high and metal resources were abundant in the early nineteenth century. Slaves were used less and less in gold mines, however, when southern Appalachian gold discoveries diminished in the 1840s, particularly in Georgia.

Mining was dangerous.

Hurridely dug tunnels braced by inexperienced workers and undertrained slaves led to frequent cave-ins. If not buried alive, many enslaved people lost limbs and acquired all manner of injuries and illnesses.

Some slaves were permitted to keep a tiny portion of the gold they discovered. For a few, this was enough to buy their freedom. But in most cases, they were worked to the bone or killed while attempting to escape from their horrid conditions.

They were taken into the mines as slaves and remained slaves.⁴

4. Southwest Virginia Was the Most Pro-Slavery Area in Appalachia

This part of Appalachia had dynamics at play similar to the foothills region of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Many counties that bordered the Piedmont were pulled between the poorer and less slavery-based cultures of the mountains and the slave economies of the Piedmont to the east.

As historian Kenneth W. Noe puts it, “Southwest Virginia was better connected with the eastern counties economically, and its political leaders invariably drew closer to their former eastern antagonists as their goals and concerns became more shared. . .”

The slaveholding and political elite of Burke County held strong ties with the state government in Raleigh.

Sometimes referred to as “the Western Capital of North Carolina,” its county seat Morganton was heavily influenced by the slaveholding class who wanted to connect more with the Piedmont's wealth and slave-based economy than the supposed poor backwoods culture they attributed to mountain people.

Hence, both areas were hotbeds of chattel slavery.

“While slaveholding in southwest Virginia was not as extensive as it was in the non-mountain sections of the South,” Noe continues, “of all sections of the southern mountain region, southwest Virginia was among the leaders in the most slaves and the most slaveholders.”

It is from southwest Virginia that slavery spread “into the more mountainous parts of the region.”

Whites who couldn’t afford or refused to participate in the slavery system pushed further into the rugged terrain of the Appalachian Mountains, “swelling those counties’ white populations.”⁵

5. Enslaved People Built the Appalachian Railroads

It was common practice for slaveowners to lease out their human property for other hard labor, including building railroads throughout the mountain region.

As Kenneth Noe puts it, “Indeed, the completed railroad functioned as a silent monument to the abilities and tenacity of the Black laborers who performed most of the line’s construction and maintenance,” including the Asheville to Salisbury passenger line.

Enslaved Blacks graded, cut wood, broke up stone, laid track, and cleared snow from construction lines.

Hired slave labor was much cheaper than paying white laborers, saving the railroad 50 percent on labor costs. Plus, given the inherent dangers of the work, the railroad had fewer qualms with Black laborers becoming permanently disabled or killed compared to their white counterparts.

“Though envisioned by whites,” Noe observes, “it was Black southwest Virginians who made the dream of a mountain railroad a reality.”⁶

6. Even Poor Appalachians Benefitted from the Slave Trade

“Contrary to popular mythology and much scholarly romanticism, southern Appalachia was neither isolated from nor culturally antagonistic toward the interstate slave trade,” writes historian Wilma A. Dunaway. “From poor white to local sheriffs to wealthy elites, numerous Appalachia households participated directly or indirectly in the interstate trafficking.”

So, while less prevalent compared to the rest of the South, the peculiar institution was pervasive in the mountains and foothills. Roughly one of every 154 Appalachian households netted income from slave-trading activities.

And it wasn’t just the wealthy elites that benefitted.

Poor Appalachians acted as bounty hunters, profiting from the capture of runaways. They would sleuth around looking for Blacks working independently who supposedly resembled recently runaway slaves. These bounty hunters would then contact owners and collect a reward for their assistance.

Less wealthy Appalachians would also participate in blackbirding, the practice of kidnapping or deceiving people to work as slaves. Roughly four percent of slave narratives in the mountain region describe such incidents.⁷

7. Slavery Continued in Southern Appalachia Long After the Civil War Ended

The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared free all enslaved peoples in Confederate States.

Chattel slavery—the racialized system of enslavement and ownership of African Americans and their offspring as property—was ended throughout the United States in June 1865.

However, slavery found a way to evolve in southern Appalachia. Following the end of the Civil War, it took the form of convict leasing.

Numerous mines that generated massive wealth off the backs of enslaved Blacks sought to retain their economic system by leasing out convicts at hourly rates much lower than the standard for white laborers.

“Under the convict-leasing system,” writes historian Ronald L. Lewis, “a white power structure benefitted financially from forcing Black prisoners against their will to labor under physical and psychological conditions that were all too reminiscent of slavery.”

All sorts of racially motivated and trumped-up charges targeted Blacks in southern Appalachia.

This ensured an abundance of cheap labor for industrialists and capitalists who cared even less about working conditions. If a convict was injured or killed in a mining accident, there were plenty more waiting in their chains.

Since these convicts were not their property, they suffered no financial loss when fingers or limbs went missing due to poorly constructed tunnels or mishandled equipment.

This created a pernicious cycle of imprisoning Blacks on fabricated charges or morally dubious grounds who were then used and abused by wealthy elites with insatiable appetites.

Prison populations skyrocketed while Appalachian capitalists’ pocketbooks ballooned.

“Bulging jails and automatic convictions were to the financial advantage of nearly every public official in the criminal justice network,” Lewis continues. “Paying sheriffs and the clerks of court out of fees, rather than a fixed salary, practically guaranteed a bountiful supply of convict labor.”⁸

The convict leasing system ended in southern Appalachia in 1928 when Alabama became the last state to pass a bill abolishing it.

Tragically, slavery has found yet another life under mass incarceration, fueled by the prison industrial complex.

Mass incarceration refers to the reality that the U.S. incarcerates and criminalizes more of its people than any other nation in the history of the world. And its criminal justice system disproportionately targets Black Americans and other persons of color.

Under this contemporary slavery, prison populations in the U.S. increased 500 percent between 1980 and 2014.

All this to say, slavery and racism run deep in these mountains.

That legacy continues to corrode the moral foundation of Appalachian communities. And it will do so unless we address it head-on (such as removing the Confederate monument from downtown Morganton, to cite one concrete example.)

So, when neighbors claim slavery had little impact on Appalachia, down current racial injustices, or argue we have less need than other communities to reckon with a racist history, we have a responsibility to speak up and set the record straight.

Appalachians have just as much work to do as anywhere else across the United States.

1. Drake, Richard B., “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

2. Phifer, Edward W., “Slavery in Microcosm: Burke County, North Carolina,” Journal of Southern History (1962)

3. Drake, Richard B., “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

4. Williams, David, “Georgia’s Forgotten Miners,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

5. Noe, Kenneth W., “‘A Source of Great Economy’: The Railroad and Slavery’s Expansion in Southwest Virginia, 1850-1860,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

6. Noe, Kenneth W., “‘A Source of Great Economy’: The Railroad and Slavery’s Expansion in Southwest Virginia, 1850-1860,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

7. Dunaway, Wilma A., “Put in Master’s Pocket,” Appalachians and Race (2001)

8. Lewis, Ronald L., “African American Convicts in the Coal Mines of Southern Appalachia,” Appalachians and Race (2001)