University of Kentucky UKnowledge United States History History 1968 Three American Frontiers: Writings of Thomas D. Clark Thomas D. Clark University of Kentucky Holman Hamilton University of Kentucky Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Clark, Thomas D. and Hamilton, Holman, "Three American Frontiers: Writings of Thomas D. Clark" (1968). United States History. 55. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/55 Three American Frontiers This page intentionally left blank Three American Frontiers WRITINGS OF THOMAS D. CLARK Edited with an introduction by HOLMAN HAMILTON UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS LEXINGTON 1968 COPYRIGHT © 1968 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-29637 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works of Thomas D. Clark: Selections from Frontier America: The Story of the Westward Move­ ment by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright© 1959 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from The Rampaging Frontier: Manners and Humors of The Pioneer Days in The South and The Middle West by Thomas D. Clark (now available as a Midland Book from Indiana University Press) are reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright © 1939 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from A History of Kentucky are reprinted with the per­ mission of the author. Copyright© 1937 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from Pills, Petticoats and Plows: The Southern Country Store by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of the Uni­ versity of Oklahoma Press. Copyright © 1964 by the University of Oklahoma Press. (This volume was originally published by Hobbs­ Merrill in 1944.) Selections from The Southern Country Editor by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright © 1948 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from The Emerging South by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1961 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from The South Since Appomattox: A Century of Regional Change by Thomas D. Clark and Albert D. Kirwan are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1967 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Selections from Kentucky: Land of Contrast by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Harper & Row, Publishers. Copyright © 1968 by Thomas D. Clark. Selections from The Kentucky by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright © 1942 by Thomas D. Clark. "Research Possibilities in Southern History" was published in the February 1950 (Volume XVI) issue of The Journal of Southern History, pp. 52-63. Copyright © 1950 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Managing Editor. "Preserving Southern Historical Documents" was published in the January 1953 (Volume XVI) issue of The American Archivist, pp. 27-37. Copyright© 1953 by the Society of American Archivists. "The Common-Man Tradition in the Literature of the Frontier" was published in the Spring 1957 (Volume LXIII) issue of The Michigan Alumnus, pp. 208-17. Copyright © 1957 by the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan. "Americana in a State University Library" was published in the 1963 [Volume XXIII] Bulletin of the University of Kentucky Library. "Travel Literature" was published in Research Opportunities in American Cultural History, edited by John Francis McDermott. Copy­ right © 1961 by the University of Kentucky Press. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Holman Hamilton vii I. THE FRONTIER WEST AND SOUTH One: WESTWARD EXPANSION 3 The Social Meaning of the Frontier · French and British Settlers · Boonesborough: An Early Settlement · Land Systems of Kentucky · Boom Poles and Paddle Wheels · William Ashley, Missouri Trader · Cattle Trails on the Frontier · Rounding Out a Continent Two: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRONTIER COMMUNITY 28 Marriage and the Household · The Country Store · The Country Newspaper· Go Tell Aunt Lydia· The Farm- er's Almanac· Death Always Came at Night· Frontier Amusements · Between the Plow Handles of Experi- ence · Last Social Barriers of the Frontier Three: THE FLAVORFUL FRONTIER LIFE 84 Kentucky Society · Fiddlin' · Liars · Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang-Doodle Mourneth for His First­ Born · The Sign of the Cockpit · Tollgate Riders · The Pen of the Country Editor II. THE FRONTIER OF SOCIAL CHANGE Four: SOUTHERN BURDENS 133 The Southern Mind in Thralldom · Big Hogs Grew in Iowa · The Halt, the Lame and the Bilious · The Day Goes By Like a Shadow on the Heart · The New South: A Perspective in Change vi CONTENTS Five: CHANGING PATTERNS OF RACE RELATIONS 174 Uncle Tom, Good Night · The Dilemma · In the Toils of Inequity· The Challenge of Negro Education· The Central Theme Six: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND MODERNIZATION 206 The Burden Grows Lighter · On the Face of the Land ·The Road South· Urbanization of the South· By Day a Pillar of Cloud, by Night a Pillar of Fire · The Image of the Future III. THE FRONTIER OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Seven: A SCHOLAR'S APPROACH TO IDSTORY 261 Research Possibilities in Southern History · Travel Literature · The Common-Man Tradition in the Litera­ ture of the Frontier · Preservation of Southern His­ torical Documents · Americana in a State University Library INDEX OF MAIN TOPICS 329 INTRODUCTION The North Central Hills section of the State of Mississippi is terra incognita to most Americans. Even the nomenclature is misleading, for much of the section is east central rather than north central-and the hills have little altitude. It was the fortune of Thomas D. Clark to be born and reared in this area of challenging economic conditions, remoteness from urban advantages, horse-and-buggy and mule-and-wagon transporta­ tion, no rural electrification, low hills, hard work, and cotton. Fortune? A person who has not met a man like Tom Clark, and never sized up Clark himself, might superficially conclude that it was a matter of unadorned misfortune in the early 1900s to be a child and then an adolescent in such a place, where life assuredly had harsh features and where opportuni­ ties for improvement of a farmboy's lot did not seem to beckon. And yet to one who knows him or is aware of his contributions to American scholarship and American culture it was a singularly beneficial circumstance that an outstanding historian of the American frontier should have been so inti­ mately acquainted with the realistic conditions-the pluses and minuses-of something akin to pioneer life. Rural Mississippi between 1903 and 1928 was unlike the frontier in that most of its communities, though small, had long been settled. Its soil had yielded crops many decades before to ancestors of twentieth-century farmers. The dogtrot clapboard houses, the country stores, schools, and shotgun churches were by no means all new; many of them had long antedated the parents of Clark's generation. A further dis­ similarity from much of the frontier lay in the fact that the North Central Hills area had its thousands of Negroes, even though they were not nearly so numerous as in Mississippi viii INTRODUCTION regions of generally richer soil-to the east in the Black Prairie or to the west in the fabled Delta. Frontier and near-frontier conditions, however, abounded. Louisville, Winston County's seat of government and largest town, contained only 1,181 people in 1910. Noxapater, ten miles to the south, had only 311; Highpoint Village, 104, while places like Rural Hill and Flower Ridge were barely hamlets, aptly named. With slightly more than 17,000 people in the county, almost everyone was a member of a farm family. Louisville had its bank, its stores, and its newspaper office. But manufacturing plants were nowhere to be seen; young­ sters, except a few who wandered "a fur piece," had no first­ hand view of a factory, a rolling-mill, a foundry. The Gulf, Mobile & Northern Railway was an innovation, connecting such communities as Pontotoc, Laurel, and Hattiesburg. And the only other intruder on traditional ruralism was the lumber industry with its steam sawmill. The Clark farm where Tom grew up was situated off to the right, or west, of the unpaved road that led southward from Louisville to Noxapater, about eight miles from the former and four from the latter. Thomas D. Clark's mother belonged to an old Winston County family that included Grandfather Dionysius Bennett-a local leader who served as a County Supervisor, a post giving him much authority in the sphere of road and fiscal operations. A schoolteacher both before and after her marriage, Sallie Bennett Clark bore seven children, of whom Thomas was the eldest. There is abundant evidence that she was the most important influence in the early intellectual development of her son. And equally certain it is that her younger brother, a superintendent of schools in Virginia, was just as influential in speeding the day of his nephew's first successes in higher education. Tom's father, John Collingsworth Clark ("Johnnie C." to his neighbors), was a member of a family which had settled in New England after crossing the Atlantic in colonial times. INTRODUCTION ix The name was spelled "Clarke" in those days, just as Bennett was "Bennet," and early Clarkes were prominent regionally and nationally as well as in Rhode Island. Eventually some of them headed south and west. Matthew Clark and two of his sons participated in the Revolutionary War, serving under George Washington at Yorktown. Over half a century later, four of Matthew's sons moved from Anderson County, South Carolina, to Mississippi near the Naniwaya Mound in the heart of the Choctaw country.