The history of Appalachia between 1754 and 1829 encompasses an ongoing migration of peoples, their struggle to secure political and economic interests, and a blending of Indian, European, and African cultures into a unique regional identity. Although the Spanish explored Appalachia as early as 1539, significant interaction between Europeans and Indians came only after 1650 with the arrival of English and Dutch explorers. At that time resident tribes included the Cherokee in the South, Algonquian groups in the mountains of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern Iroquois Confederation. Contact led to the development of a profitable fur trade between European rivals and the Indians of Appalachia, competition for hunting grounds, and, increasingly, European settlement of lands originally controlled by Indians.
European settlement expanded rapidly after 1730, when Virginia law awarded land speculators one thousand acres for every family settled west of the Blue Ridge and North Carolina offered free "headrights" of one hundred acres to prospective settlers. From 1730 to 1830, waves of German, Scotch-Irish, and English immigrants pushed south and west from Pennsylvania into Appalachia, displacing Indian peoples and resettling western Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.
Eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish and German immigrants into Appalachia came from war-torn and impoverished regions and were motivated by a desire to own land and to practice their own forms of religion. They moved together and established communities dominated by particular ethnicities and religious sects, including Mennonite, Moravian, Baptist, and Methodist. English immigrants included miscellaneous groups of religious dissenters, such as Quakers and French Huguenots, and, though they lacked the ethnic cohesion of the Scotch-Irish and Germans, accounted for one-third of all settlers and a substantial portion of the economic and political elite that later dominated Appalachia. Slave and free, Africans lived and worked in Appalachia throughout the eighteenth century and participated in the exploration of Indian territory, the construction of frontier homes, the clearing of land for cultivation, the harvesting of crops, and the formation of a regional cultural identity.
Competition between British and French fur traders led to the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and the Cherokee War (1759-1761). In both cases American colonists, hoping to open new land for western settlement, supported the British cause. Although victory secured British control of Appalachia, it limited options for Indians in the region and encouraged the Pontiac Conspiracy, a multinational Indian uprising against European settlements. Though ultimately defeated, the uprising led the British to issue the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding white settlement beyond the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. American colonists opposed the Proclamation of 1763 because it countered their achievements in the French and Indian War—access to trans-Appalachian lands for settlement and trade. In the next decade, as the British further restricted access, Virginia fought to strengthen western land claims in Lord Dunmore's War against Chief Cornstalk, a formidable military strategist, and his Indian forces in 1774. The Proclamation of 1763 and other British policies that limited access to western lands were a major cause of the American Revolution.
When the American Revolution began, it was not certain that Appalachian settlers would support the independence movement. In the Regulator Movement (1767-1771), western backcountry settlers in North and South Carolina violently protested their colonial governments' failure to provide adequate protection from Indians, representation in legislative assemblies, and legal and judicial services. Once the Revolution began, however, the British strengthened alliances with Indians and selected military leaders from among non-Regulator constituents; in doing so, they pushed western settlers into the Revolutionary ranks. Major battles of the American Revolution took place in the Appalachian region and involved mountain peoples, including the Battle of Kings Mountain and Cowpens, both victories for the revolutionary cause.
The American Revolution strengthened white settlers' hold on the Appalachian region, forcing the Cherokee to surrender thousands of acres and destroying the Iroquois Confederacy. After the Revolution, Scotch-Irish immigration into Appalachia and the "Long Hunter" culture, both predating independence, resumed and led to the attempted, but failed, statehood of the mountain State of Franklin, and to the successful statehood of Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796). Controversies with the East continuing during the early Republic focused on the use of federal power, Indian removal, and slavery.
A sign of Appalachia's struggles with the new federal government, the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania began when mountaineers protested a federal excise tax on the distilled whiskey they produced. Similarly, southern mountaineers protested federal Indian policy throughout the 1790s. Although Hamiltonian policies pushed many in Appalachia to embrace Jefferson's Republican Party between 1800 and 1825, southern mountaineer demands to move Indians west were not addressed until one of their own became president in 1828. Andrew Jackson and his successors used federal troops to forcibly remove the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, including the Cherokee in the infamous Trail of Tears. Despite this, remnant elements of the Cherokee eluded federal troops and remained in the Smoky Mountains.
As the East moved toward a cash economy after the Revolution, the majority of people in Appalachia experienced a cash-poor yeoman agricultural economy until at least 1830. A significant minority, however, tied the region to the broader capitalist system by participating in the expansion of mining salt, charcoal, coal, and gold and trading furs, meat, dry goods, and slaves.
After the American Revolution the backcountry's landed gentry achieved their goal of expanding slavery in the region, and a slaveholding elite came to dominate economic and political affairs in many mountain counties. However, only a minority of small landholders in Appalachia became slaveholders, and many others supported antislavery and abolitionist movements in the nineteenth century. Antislavery activities in the mountain South included the development of antislavery societies, the publication of antislavery journals, the founding of antislavery "log cabin colleges" by Presbyterian ministers, and the 1831 debate when western representatives proposed legislation that would gradually emancipate all slaves and end slavery in Virginia. Just months after Nat Turner's slave insurrection and after a full week of debates, Virginia state legislators voted 73 to 58 against emancipation—seven votes short of abolishing slavery.