Backcountry Wealth Ways: Border Ideas of the Material OrderAcross so vast a global space, the great magnet that drew the British borderers to American backcountry was land—the dream of fertile farmland to be had for the taking. This motive dominated the settlement of the southern highlands for many generations. In the year 1796, Moses Austin observed the steady stream of settlers moving west along the Wilderness Road. As they passed by he asked why they were traveling, and recorded their replies in the backcountry dialect.
Ask these Pilgrims what they expect when they git to Kentuckey the Answer is Land, have you any. No, but I expect I can git it. have you any thing to pay for land. No. did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land, can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds travelling hundreds of miles, they know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky … and when arrived at this heaven in idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. Exhausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Obliged to become hewers of woods and drawers of water.1
Their frequent disappointment was caused by the pattern of land distribution in the southern backcountry, which differed very much from that in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and tidewater Virginia.
In the southern highlands, many different sovereignties created a chaos of conflicting claims that “overlapped like shingles on a roof,” as one historian has written. Small tracts of land were given out on a headright or bounty system. Individual patents of a few hundred acres that were sold for small sums.2 At the same time, huge tracts were granted to a few great landowners with connections in London and colonial capitals. A majority of adult males in the southern highlands owned no land at all. The result was a system of landholding characterized by a large landless underclass of tenants and squatters, a middle class that was small by comparison with other colonies, and a few very rich landlords.
By far the largest individual holding in the backcountry was Granville District in North Carolina, which had been granted to John Carteret, Earl of Granville (1690-1763) in settlement of a proprietary claim. The Granville District was so vast that it was measured not in acres or miles but degrees of latitude and longitude. North Carolina’s Governor William Tryon described it in a letter to the Earl of Shelburne in 1767:
His Lordship’s District contains nearly one Degree of Latitude, and better than five Degrees of Longitude, from Currituck Inlet to … the western boundary. … There is thirteen counties in his Lordship’s District, the two westernmost of which counties contain a tract more than ten times the contents of Rhode island.
One county alone (of thirteen) was sixty miles square; another measured 60 by 150 miles. Altogether, Granville District encompassed approximately twenty million acres—and all of it was the property of one Englishman. Granville was able to defend his title, and by the 1760s he was collecting rents from backsettlers who had moved upon his land.
Many of these settlers had very modest estates. There was a class of small landowners in the backcountry who have been called the southern yeomanry. Their numbers were relatively smaller than in New England or the middle colonies. At the same time, large numbers of backsettlers owned no land at all, but merely squatted on the lands of others. Many remained poor and landless for generations. This pattern of land distribution—a few large absentee owners, a small class of yeomanry, and many landless families, was characteristic of the southern highlands.
One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition. This national folk legend is, unhappily, very much mistaken. With some exceptions, landed wealth was always highly concentrated throughout the southern highlands, as it would be in the lower Mississippi Valley, Texas and the far southwest. Inequality was greater in the backcountry and the southern highlands than in any other rural region of the United States.
In this respect, as in so many others, the southern backcountry resembled the borderlands of North Britain. Every region of Great Britain has been marked by deep and pervasive inequalities. But some regions have been more unequal than others, and among the most inegalitarian of all were the borderlands of North Britain. Throughout the northern counties of England, and the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland, a large part of the best land was owned by a small number of people—many of them absentees.
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, England’s richest peers owned a large part of productive resources in Cumberland and Westmorland, but in the year 1680, not a single peer of the realm actually lived in either of those counties.3 The majority of adult males in Cumberland and Westmorland owned no land of their own. Most were tenants or subtenants who held their farms on terms that were increasingly exploitative. On Cumberland manors the majority of tenants (55% by one historian’s count) paid arbitrary rents which could be raised at will by the owner. Tenants were also required to pay many feudal dues and fines. “Fines,” writes historian Charles Searle, “were the principal means by which the lords pumped the surplus out of Cumbria.”4Between great landlords and humble tenants, there was also a small middling order of “statesmen,” as they were called in Cumbria. Some of these middling families did very well for themselves during the seventeenth century. But many were hard pressed, and the general drift was toward greater inequality.5
In Scotland and northern Ireland, the concentration of wealth was even more extreme. One historian writes that “except for parts of southwestern Scotland, virtually the whole of the Lowland countryside belonged to wealthy landowners. There were very few small owners in Scotland, and freeholding as a status did not exist. In many areas all landed property was in the hands of as little as one or two percent of the population … an extreme stratification probably greater than any other rural area of England.”6
This system of inequality was rooted in the conditions of life which shaped so many other parts of border culture. An historian of Northumberland and Durham observes that “forms of land tenure long outmoded further south had been maintained by the crown, which owned many of the border manors, in order to retain a sufficient supply of fighting men. … Customary tenure was very secure, and in the larger manors of Wark and Harbottle descent was by partible inheritance, so that potential fighting men were virtually guaranteed enough land for subsistence. … The resultant overpopulation had deleterious effects.”7
The pacification of the borders was followed by the eviction of tenants in both England and Scotland. Large numbers of landless poor were created by this process. Local officeholders were compelled to devote much of their attention to this problem of poverty in their region. Many emigrants who sailed from North Britain to America had been the victims of this social process.8
Ironically, parts of the same exploitative system were also carried to the New World. Before the end of the eighteenth century, the distribution of landed wealth had become highly unequal in the southern highlands. There were, of course, many local variations, but the same general pattern appeared in seventeen out of nineteen counties of western North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky where distribution of wealth could be measured for the eighteenth century.
Throughout this great region where virgin land existed in abundance, most men were landless. At the same time, a few families owned very large tracts. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, Gini ratios for landed wealth were in the range of .60 to .88 throughout many counties in this region—the highest levels of concentration in any rural part of the United States at that time. The top decile of wealthholders owned between 40 and 80 percent of the land. In many areas, one-third to one-half of taxable white males owned nothing. This was the case in eight counties of East Tennessee, from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.9
A similar pattern also appeared in eleven counties of Kentucky from 1792 to 1819, where Gini ratios ranged from .66 to as high as .92 for property in land and slaves. A few of these counties (Cumberland and Christian) were more equal than others. But by comparison with rural parts of New England and the Delaware, most counties were highly unequal.10
As time passed, inequalities diminished in some of these counties and increased in others, but the general pattern persisted throughout much of the region into the nineteenth century for many years. The United States Census in 1850 and 1860 found evidence of extreme rural inequalities throughout the old southwest. Studies of eight sample counties of Tennessee in 1850 showed that more than half of all adult males (free and slave altogether) owned no land at all. The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of improved land and 99 percent of the slaves. In between was a rural middle class of yeoman farmers who were a minority of the adult male population of Tennessee in 1850.11
The same patterns persisted into the twentieth century, when an elaborate study of wealth distribution in eighty counties of Appalachia came to this conclusion:
The image of Appalachia as the land of rugged individuals, owning and working relatively small family holdings, is strong in the literature about the region. But … the reality is a region where the ownership of land is concentrated in relatively few hands.12
In 1983, the top 1 percent of owners possessed half of the land in Appalachia. The top 5 percent owned nearly two-thirds. This pattern of wealth distribution in the southern highlands in the twentieth century was much like that which had existed two hundred years earlier.13