Backcountry Time Ways: The Border Idea of “Passing the Time”The backsettlers were also distinctive in their ways of thinking about time. Like others of their age, they believed in the ancient rule of Ecclesiastes that “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.” But backcountry seasons and times were not the same as in other regional cultures of British America. The rhythms of life in the southern highlands differed from those of New England, tidewater Virginia, and the Delaware Valley.
A case in point was the season of marriage. In Congregational New England, as we have seen, the “marrying time” came in the autumn—especially in November and December. In Anglican Virginia, on the other hand, the favorite season of marriage fell between Christmas and Lent. The Quakers of the Delaware Valley kept a third custom, in which the rhythm of marriage showed two annual peaks in spring and autumn. All of these American patterns followed regional folkways in England.
In the backcountry a fourth rhythm appeared: a single predominant season of marriage in April, May, June and July. Among Scots-Irish settlers of Augusta County, Virginia, the favorite month for marriage was May. Two-thirds of all recorded marriages occurred in the spring and summer; the least active period was the fall.1
This rhythm was not invented in America, nor was it the product of frontier conditions. It had long appeared on the borders of north Britain, where weddings were normally held in the spring during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.2
The rhythms of backcountry life were different in other ways as well. The backsettlers organized their lives by events in the Christian calendar, but not in the same way as other cultures of British America. They preserved ancient Christian rituals which had lingered in the borderlands of North Britain long after they had been abandoned in other regions.
For example, many borderers kept a day which they called the “Old Christmas” on January 6 when there was a feast in even the poorest houses, and bonfires at night with much gunplay and fireworks. This had also been a folk custom in North Britain, where the revelry of “Old Christmas” reached its climax in a practice called “stanging,” a rough and sometimes violent ceremony in which a victim was hoisted on a long pole and made to dangle in the air until he bought himself free.3 In America’s southern highlands, these customs survived for many generations. Even in the twentieth century, folklore collectors were startled to find that the custom of the “Old Christmas,” with its roaring bonfires and gunplay, still flourished in Appalachia. In the highlands of North Carolina, one noted:
In some parts of this county it is the custom to observe what is known as Old Christmas. Opinion varies as to the date; some believe it is the fifth and some the sixth of January. This day is believed by the people who keep it to be the real Christmas, the birthday of Christ. They say the Christmas we regularly keep is the “man-made” Christmas.4
Another folklorist observes that “the shooting of firecrackers and the discharging of firearms at Christmastime are customs rarely, if ever, observed anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.”5
Other ancient Christian customs also came from North Britain to the backcountry. The borderers celebrated Easter in a special way, with “pace-egging,” and the ritual performance of a folk play called St. George and the Black Morocco Dog. Easter Monday was a day of wild revelry, with much cockfighting. Whitsuntide was a time for hiring laborers. In late summer English borderers kept the ritual of Rushbearing, when they collected bundles of rushes “to carpet the muddy floors of the churches afresh.” The fall was celebrated by Halloween customs of exceptional extravagance. At various appointed times the borderers also observed “young folks days” and “old folks nights,” “bidden weddings,” wrestling tournaments, field days and various other events.6
Some of these rituals did not survive in the New World. Quickly abandoned were events such as rushbearing which had been tied to the established church. But folk rituals which centered on the family and neighborhood became an established part of back-country culture. The folk custom of wild revelry on Easter Monday survived in the southern highlands, together with cockfighting and heavy drinking on that day. Most of these customs were kept in the backcountry for a longer time than in other parts of British America.7
The backsettlers also kept other temporal customs of high complexity. Their culture assigned many fixed seasons for doing things. Their folklore told them, for example:
Never mix April 30th milk with that of May 1st or the butter will be slow in coming.
Make soap on the full of the moon or else it won’t set.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon
A swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly.
As slow as Christmas coming.
Sprinkle ashes on animals and fowl on Ash Wednesday.
The flow of life was regulated by many of these rhythms—annual, monthly, weekly, even daily. Sunday, of course, was a day of worship. Mondays and Tuesdays were favorite days for visiting. Fridays were days for going to market. But Friday and Saturday were thought to be unlucky for new enterprises. President Andrew Jackson, “to the end of his life, never liked to begin any thing of consequence on Friday, and would not if it could be avoided.”8 At the same time that these folk rules were kept with great care, the people of the back settlements startled travelers from other cultures by their complaisant attitudes toward the use of time. The proverbs of the backcountry showed a strong spirit of temporal fatalism in a world of insecurity:
To-day’s to-day and tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Come day, go day, God send Sunday.
You can’t rush God.
Never trouble trouble, ’til trouble troubles you.
Do not argue with the wind.
These were not a people who took time by the forelock. The folkways of the backcountry differed very much in that respect from the attitudes of New England, the Delaware, and even tidewater Virginia. Of all the inhabitants of British America, the back settlers were the most conservative and the least instrumental in their time ways. By and large the people of the backcountry tended to believe that the rhythms of life were inexorable and ineluctable, and beyond the capacity of mere mortals to change in any fundamental way. In place of the more instrumental attitudes of improving time, or redeeming time, or even killing time, the backsettlers had a fatalistic idea of passing the time—letting it happen in its ineluctable way. Here was another striking paradox of backcountry culture. The more these people moved through space, the more rooted they became in time.