The Colonial Mood: Anxiety and Insecurity in the Back Settlements

A backcountry gentleman was once heard to pray, “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn.”¹ This supplication captured the prevailing cultural mood in the back settlements, which were profoundly conservative and xenophobic. The people of this region were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of “foreigners.” One student of the Appalachian dialect found that “the word foreigner itself is used here [in Appalachia] in its Elizabethan sense of someone who is the same nationality as the speaker, but not from the speaker’s immediate area.” All the world seemed foreign to the backsettlers except their neighbors and kin.²

The people of the southern highlands would become famous in the nineteenth century for the intensity of their xenophobia, and also for the violence of its expression. In the early nineteenth century, they tended to detest great planters and abolitionists in equal measure. During the Civil War some fought against both sides. In the early twentieth century they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic. In our own time they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists. The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies—which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion or nationality.

Behind these attitudes lay the same deep feelings of cultural anxiety and insecurity that had existed in most other colonial societies. These emotions were specially intense among the first generation. They reached their climax in the violent movement called the Regulation, which swept through the back settlements of North and South Carolina from 1765 to 1771. In both colonies, the Regulators were backcountry vigilantes who sought to impose order by force upon their region, and also attacked outsiders. Their actions were part of a cultural process which was common to all new colonies—an expression of feelings of cultural danger and loss.³

Another symptom of this attitude was a strong mood of cultural conservatism. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, travelers in the backcountry often remarked upon the intensity of its attachment to ancestral ways. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason wrote in disgust, “They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it.”⁴ That statement, without its pejoratives, described an instinctive conservatism which was also noted by other travelers and acknowledged by the backsettlers themselves. “We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds,” wrote an Appalachian woman with an air of pride.⁵

This mood caused the backsettlers to cling tenaciously to the customs that they had carried from the borderlands of North Britain. The result was a complex process of continuity and change, similar in its form to that which occurred in other cultural regions of the New World, but different in its substance. Let us examine this subject in more detail, beginning with the speech ways which were carried to the American backcountry.