As the
plantations expanded, these freedmen were pushed further and further
back upon more and more sterile soil. They became "pine-landers" or
"piney-woods-people," "sand-hillers," "knob-people," "corn-crackers" or
"crackers," gaining a bare subsistence from corn planted and "tended"
chiefly by the women and children, from hogs running wild in the forest,
and from desultory hunting and fishing. As a class, such whites lapsed
into sloth and apathy. Even the institution of slavery they regarded
with cynical tolerance, doubtless realizing that if it were not for the
blacks they would be slaves themselves.

Now these poor whites had nothing to do with settling the mountains.
There was then, and still is, plenty of wild land for them in their
native lowlands. They had neither the initiative nor the courage to seek
a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the
western country. They were a brave enough folk in facing familiar
dangers, but they had a terror of the unknown, being densely ignorant
and superstitious. The mountains, to those who ever heard of them,
suggested nothing but laborious climbing amid mysterious and portentous
perils. The poor whites were not highlanders by descent, nor had they a
whit of the bold, self-reliant spirit of our western pioneers. They
never entered Appalachia until after it had been won and settled by a
far manlier race, and even then they went only in driblets. The theory
that the southern mountains were peopled mainly by outcasts or refugees
from old settlements in the lowlands rests on no other basis than
imagination.

How the mountains actually were settled is another and a very different
story.--

The first frontiersmen of the Appalachians were those Swiss and Palatine
Germans who began flocking into Pennsylvania about 1682. They settled
westward of the Quakers in the fertile limestone belts at the foot of
the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. Here they formed the Quakers' buffer
against the Indians, and, for some time, theirs were the westernmost
settlements of British subjects in America. These Germans were of the
Reformed or Lutheran faith. They were strongly democratic in a social
sense, and detested slavery. They were model farmers and many of them
were skilled workmen at trades.

Shortly after the tide of German immigration set into Pennsylvania,
another and quite different class of foreigners began to arrive in this
province, attracted hither by the same