as would come from common leadership or a sense of common
origin and mutual dependence.

And they are a people without annals. Back of their grandfathers they
have neither screed nor hearsay. "Borned in the kentry and ain't never
been out o' hit" is all that most of them can say for themselves. Here
and there one will assert, "My foreparents war principally Scotch," or
"Us Bumgyarners [Baumgartners] was Dutch," but such traditions of a
far-back foreign origin are uncommon.

Who are these southern mountaineers? Whence came they? What is the
secret of their belatedness and isolation?

Before the Civil War they were seldom heard of in the outside world.
Vaguely it was understood that the Appalachian highlands were occupied
by a peculiar people called "mountain whites." This odd name was given
them not to distinguish them from mountain negroes, for there were,
practically, no mountain negroes; but to indicate their similarity, in
social condition and economic status, to the "poor whites" of the
southern lowlands. It was assumed, on no historical basis whatever, that
the highlanders came from the more venturesome or desperate element of
the "poor whites," and differed from these only to the extent that
environment had shaped them.

Since this theory still prevails throughout the South, and is accepted
generally elsewhere on its face value, it deserves just enough
consideration to refute it.

The unfortunate class known as poor whites in the South is descended
mainly from the convicts and indentured servants with which England
supplied labor to the southern plantations before slavery days. The
Cavaliers who founded and dominated southern society came from the
conservative, the feudal element of England. Their character and
training were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not
town-dwellers, but masters of plantations. Their chief crop and article
of export was tobacco. The culture of tobacco required an abundance of
cheap and servile labor.

On the plantations there was little demand for skilled labor, small room
anywhere for a middle class of manufacturers and merchants, no
inducement for independent farmers who would till with their own hands.
Outside of the planters and a small professional class there was little
employment offered save what was menial and degrading. Consequently the
South was shunned, from the beginning, by British yeomanry and by the
thrifty Teutons such as flocked into the northern p