The Black Community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900
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Life Beneath The Veneer: The Black Community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900 Darin J. Waters A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Dr. Harry Watson Dr. Fitzhugh Brundage Dr. Heather Williams Dr. Genna Rea McNeil Dr. James E. Crisp ©2011 Darin J. Waters ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract DARIN J. WATERS: Life Beneath the Veneer: The Black Community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900 (Under the direction of Harry Watson) The focus of this dissertation is the social, economic, and political development of the black community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900. It spans the period of slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, Fusion politics, and disfranchisement. From 1865 to 1900, blacks in Asheville experienced some progress. As the city’s popularity as a national tourist and health resort grew, especially after the arrival of the railroad in 1880, blacks found jobs in the city’s growing service sector. Service sector jobs did not provide blacks with the type of financial opportunities necessary for any significant economic or social progress, however. The racial attitudes of whites added to the challenges that blacks faced in Asheville. As a very small minority, blacks never had any significant degree of political power in Asheville and, thus, were thus without any means through which they might challenge their marginalization. Asheville’s importance rests in its role as the economic, social, and political center of western North Carolina. After the Civil War, blacks throughout the South were drawn to towns and cities out of a belief that such places offered them greater social, economic, and educational opportunities than what they might find in the rural South. Although small when the Civil War ended, Asheville was more urban than any other area in western North Carolina and thus attracted blacks from the surrounding countryside. While, Asheville did iii offer blacks more opportunities than elsewhere in the region, the small size of their population and the racial attitudes of whites ensured that any opportunities for advancement were more significantly limited than those of blacks in towns and cities that boasted larger black populations. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. THE BEGINNINGS……………………………………………………8 II. WORKING TO SERVE……………………………………………… 48 III. SAVING SOULS AND ENLIGHTENING MINDS . ………………. 99 IV. A PLACE OF THEIR OWN…………………………………………135 V. BARELY SEEN AND RARELY HEARD………………………… 169 APPENDICES ……………………………………………………………………... 224 v Introduction When the Civil War ended in 1865, life changed drastically for blacks who had been slaves when the war began. For the first time in their lives they faced a world that offered them the opportunity to control and guide their own destinies. While much has been written about the efforts that these former slaves made to take advantage of their freedom, little is known about the specific experiences of blacks who lived in Asheville and western North Carolina. Instead, most of what is known about the black experience after the Civil War comes from studies that focus on areas of the South that were dominated by the plantation economy. The number of blacks who lived in those areas was large since their labor was needed to produce cash crops for domestic and foreign markets. Not surprisingly, historians are drawn to study those areas because they afford the opportunity to examine the social, political, and economic impact of emancipation in environments where the black population was more highly concentrated. In such areas, emancipation not only upset social and political relations, it also threatened to unravel local economic structures and did in many cases. This was not the case in Asheville and western North Carolina. Unlike towns and counties of the lowland regions of the state, Asheville and its neighboring mountain region was never dominated by the plantation system. Instead, much like the entire southern Appalachian Mountains, Asheville and the surrounding county of Buncombe were primarily the domain of white yeomen farmers, whose views on issues such as slavery, and later secession, were different from those of lowland plantation owners. Traveling through the North Carolina mountains in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, a northern journalist and social critic, noted that white highlanders tended to be contemptuous of slaves, slavery, and slaveowners. Olmstead even discovered that many were proud that the region’s slave population was small and believed that the state and nation would have been better off without the institution of slavery.1 Despite the absence of a large-scale plantation system, slavery did exist in Asheville and western North Carolina and was the primary reason that there were blacks in the region. According to the 1860 census, there were 15,522 slaves and 1,831 free blacks living in the 18 counties that fell within the Appalachian region of western North Carolina. Out of the more than 15,000 slaves who lived in the region, 1,933 lived in Asheville and Buncombe County. In addition, there were 111 free blacks in the area before the war, creating a total population of 2,044 blacks constituting 16.2 percent of the total population. While the number of blacks living in Asheville and western North Carolina were far fewer than the more than 300,000 blacks who lived in the state’s eastern coastal counties, emancipation was still an event of major significance. Although it did not threaten to overturn the structure of the region’s economy, it did challenge the area’s social and political norms. Like their counterparts in other parts of the state, the people of western North Carolina were forced to make many social, political, and economic adjustments after the Civil War. This was especially true in Asheville because the size of the post-war black population grew significantly. Examining how Asheville’s black population adjusted to 1 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-58, (New York, New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 226. 2 freedom, and how a distinct mountain culture and the lack of a plantation economy influenced and shaped their adjustment is the primary focus of this study. Although scholars have begun to give greater attention to the social, political, cultural, and economic history of western North Carolina, there is a persistent belief that blacks have little history in the region. In this sense, western North Carolina shares much with southern Appalachia, the region of which it is a part. For years, it was assumed that there were few blacks in southern Appalachia and western North Carolina. Writing in 1967, John C. Belcher, a sociologist who examined the region’s racial demographics, wrote that “the number of Negroes in the Appalachian Region is such a small proportion of the total population that the social consequences of their presence and migration are not of any great significance.”2 While it is true that Appalachia’s antebellum and post-bellum black population was smaller than the black population of other regions of the South, the experiences of Appalachian blacks should not be ignored, especially since population statistics show that from 1865 to 1900 blacks constituted approximately 14 percent of the total population of southern Appalachia.3 This figure is comparable to what one finds in Asheville. Writing about the lack of research about the black experience in the mountain South, historian William Turner, who published an anthology about blacks in Appalachia in 1985, states that the failure to examine the presence of blacks in the southern Appalachia leaves us 2 John C. Belcher, “Population Growth and Characteristics,” The southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 152. 3 William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia, Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Press of Kentucky, 1985), 5. 3 with an incomplete picture of the region’s history.4 According to Turner the absence of studies about mountain blacks has led many to believe that unlike the lowland regions of the South, southern Appalachia is a testimony to “white purity” and “racial innocence,” a view that was first articulated by John C. Campbell, the pioneering scholar of Appalachian studies in 1921. 5 In his often cited book, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, Campbell stated that while there were more blacks in the mountains than one might expect the “often repeated statement that there are no Negroes in the mountains” is generally true. “In many of the more remote counties, especially those where there are few large valleys, few mining or industrial developments, or few cities there are few Negroes,” he wrote.6 Because of this, Campbell, and many of the scholars who followed him, gave little attention to the experiences of blacks in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The publication of Turner’s anthology in 1985 shows that scholars are no longer ignoring the experiences of black highlanders. In one of the essays that Turner included in his collection, historian Theda Perdue argues that the genesis of the black presence in the Appalachian region of western North Carolina can be traced to the mid-1500s. In an essay titled, “Red and Black in the southern Appalachians,” Perdue explores the relationship between blacks and Native Americans in western North Carolina. She also states that there is substantial evidence to suggest that the Cherokee Indians, whose nation encompassed a large portion of the mountains of western North Carolina, “encountered Africans at least as early 4 Ibid. 5 John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, (Lexington, Kentucky: the University Press of Kentucky, 1921), 201.