oodward was not as racially progressive a Yankee as he featured himself and who toured the South after the Civil War, observes in his journal that people in the Knoxville, Tenn., region, "had not been accustomed to depend for support upon their slaves; they suffered the less, therefore, from the sudden disappearance of slaves."
Such a topography and such a cultural mind-set are to be contrasted with the vast bottomlands and culture of the parts of the Deep South that were historically associated with highly socialized plantation industry and culture. The contrast, however, is decisive, and is relevant to two features of Smoky Mountains history. One is the feature of Cherokee culture, which did not become marginalized until after 1830. In 1819, when white settlement first started in the area, the land in eastern Tennessee, western Carolina, and north Georgia belonged to the Cherokee nation. The status of the Cherokee people, almost alone among the indigenous Native American peoples, was at best ambiguous and at worst in flux. It is worth noting, by the way, that when Civil War did come, the Cherokee in the Smoky Mountains region sided with the South, not the North, since the North, as the Union, was the dreaded agent of the native American diaspora. The complaints were articulated in 1861 in a Declaration designed to explain why the US government was not worthy of Cherokee loyalty in the current unpleasantness. In part the Declaration took its text from what the Cherokee conceived to be the US government's treatment of Cherokee women:
Foreign mercenaries and the scum of cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted . . . to commit the basest of outrages on women . . . even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet ministers; while the press ceased to be free, the publication of newspapers was suspended and their issues seized and destroyed.
In the background of that 1861 declaration was the fact...