Kinship Migration to Northwestern Virginia, 1785-1815: the Myth of the Southern Frontiersman
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Kinship Migration to Northwestern Virginia, 1785-1815: The Myth of the Southern Frontiersman Philip W. Sturm Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Ronald L. Lewis, Ph.D., Chair Ken Fones-Wolf, Ph.D. Mary Lou Lustig, Ph.D. A. Michal McMahon, Ph.D. Irvin D. Talbott, Ph.D., Glenville State College Department of History Morgantown, West Virginia 2004 Keywords: Frontier, Frontier Mythology, Kinship, Migration, West Virginia, Wood County ABSTRACT Kinship Migration to Northwestern Virginia, 1785-1815: The Myth of the Southern Frontiersman Philip W. Sturm For nearly 100 years American historians, with few exceptions, have maintained that migration of colonists to the trans-Appalachian frontier was a communal experience for those from New England and Northern regions but that the Southern frontiersman represented a non-communal, individualistic spirit of colonization. This dissertation traces the migration and settlement patterns of the earliest colonists along the northwestern Virginia frontier, the area organized as Wood County in 1799, from three Eastern regions, New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Northern Neck of Virginia. It determines that emigrants from all regions migrated cohesively and sequentially in large kinship/neighbor groups and that their settlement behaviors were remarkably similar. It challenges the myth of the individualistic Southern frontiersman. Table of Contents List of Tables............................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................. 1 Chapter 1, First Generation Virginians: The Neal-Phelps Kinship Group ................ 19 Chapter 2, The Connecticut Yankees: Kinship Migration to Vienna and Belleville ......... 47 Chapter 3, The Stereotypical Frontiersmen: The Isaac Williams Kinship Group ........... 71 Chapter 4, Northern Neck Kinship Migration: The Planter Aristocrats ................. 84 Chapter 5, The Revolution of 1800: Kinship Controversy and the Creation of Wood County ..................................................... 109 Chapter 6, Kinship and the Uses of Land: Resident and Non-Resident Landowners and Speculators ......................................... 128 Chapter 7, Kinship Migration and Town Building ................................. 162 Chapter 8, The Bonds of Sisterhood: Women and Frontier Kinship Migration ........... 190 Chapter 9, Slavery at the Periphery: Kinship and Regional Patterns ................... 217 Epilogue ................................................................. 244 Bibliography ............................................................. 251 Appendix................................................................. 266 iii List of Tables Table 6.1....................................................................129 Table 6.2 ..................................................................130 Table 6.3 ..................................................................131 Table 6.4 ..................................................................132 Table 6.5 ..................................................................133 Table 9.1 ..................................................................219 Table 9.2 ..................................................................220 Table 9.3 ..................................................................222 iv Introduction: Kinship and the Myth of the Southern Frontiersman The phenomenon of American interregional migration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been noted by American historians for over a century , and its significance in the social and economic evolution of the new nation is pivotal: “In the era between the Revolution and the Civil War, a key determinant of American economic development was the westward migration of its people.”1 Not only the economic significance but also the social and political nature of outmigration from the East to the West has further engaged scholars of several generations, as they have noted regional differences in population movement and even stereotyped those processes. The father of American frontier history, Frederick Jackson Turner, observed an essential difference between settlers of the trans-Appalachian region based on ethnic and regional dissimilarities. He wrote: “The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersman showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces on the later history of the West . But in general, the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the Southern individual.”2 Turner noted this antithesis particularly in the areas north and south of the Ohio River, where the officer class of the Ohio Company of Associates and of the Connecticut Western Reserve seemed to him to differ materially from the emigrants of the Upland South. Ray A. Billington, a Turnerian disciple of the mid-twentieth century, came to disagree 1 with this bipolar model of Northern and Southern colonists. His studies brought new attention to the role of the land speculator in westward migration, who sold tracts to the highest bidder “with little thought of contiguous settlement by nonprofit-seeking true believers.” He concluded that “[t]his desire for profits changed the whole course of New England’s westward advance by breaking down the emphasis on groups and preparing the descendants of Puritans to move into the trans-Appalachia area as individuals.”3 Billington, then, saw migration to the West as an individual rather than as a communal effort, not only for the Southern frontiersman but also for the New England emigrant as well. Among more recent studies, Joan E. Cashin’s account of the migration of planter families from the Old to the New South reaches a similar conclusion but for different reasons. She notes the solidarity of kinship networks among the coastal settlement of Virginia and the Carolinas: “[S]eaboard relatives frequently settled near each other, so that individual families lived surrounded by kinfolk. These kinship networks operated on the principle of reciprocity: the assumption that relatives should help each other manage plantations and households and support each other through the vicissitudes of life.”4 However, when planter families migrated westward, often due to economic necessity or a family dispute, they tended to move in nuclear units limited to parents, children, and slaves. Once settled on their plantations in the New South they usually found themselves adrift, having to forge new friendship rather than kinship associations: “In contrast to seaboard families, who lived surrounded by kinfolk, Southwestern families lived near a few relatives or none at all. The planter family was reduced to its nuclear core.”5 Cashin’s book, limited to aristocratic families, draws no conclusions about ordinary westward-moving settlers from the tidewater region. 2 Other studies of family systems and cohesion unrelated to migration reveal inconsistent regional patterns. A comparison by Stephanie Grauman Wolf of familial homogeneity in the eighteenth century between Chatham, Massachusetts, and Germantown, Pennsylvania, suggests a much higher rate of kin propinquity in New England: 4.56 families per surname compared to 1.47.6 Another analysis refers to the phenomenon of kinship proximity in New England as an “anomaly” and reports lower rates of isonymic (same-surname) relationship within the same community in the mid-Atlantic region and the South.7 These conclusions are limited by a methodology that Daniel Scott Smith concedes to be “quick, easy, cheap, and crude,”8 the determination of kinship solely on the basis of like surnames. In northwestern Virginia, every major kinship group was bound together at the core by the ties of sisterhood more often than of brotherhood. Whether this is anomalous may be determined only by similar studies on other frontiers. But it suggests that a genealogical approach to kinship migration, cohesion, and persistence is a legitimate method of study. In early Wood County, (West) Virginia, the area of this study, a single kin network of the Neal- Phelps families and the Kincheloe-Creel-Leach-Athey clan linked together by their mutual relationship to the Hardin-Wycliffes accounts for at least one-fifth of the total population of the county in 1800. Analysis of another half dozen kinship groups reveals analogous connections accounting for four-fifths of the first generation colonists of northwestern Virginia. Only a systematic and painstaking examination of the connections between both-sex siblings, in-laws, and collateral families can fully reveal such linkage. A monograph which overcomes some of these isonymic limitations and stereotypes is John Mack Faragher’s Sugar Creek, based on the early frontier experience of settlers in 3 Sangamon County, Illinois. Three-fourths of those who settled at Sugar Creek near future Springfield were Southern frontiersmen from Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and the Virginia upcountry. Another fifteen percent came from Northwest Territory regions after having moved there from the Southeast. In other words, ninety percent of these settlers had roots in the South. In view of the conclusions of Turner, Billington, Cashin, Wolf, and Smith, one would expect this migration to have been individual