The Economic and Social History of Southeastern Tennessee from the Civil War to the Present and Its Impact on My Novel, Field of Stones
One of the results of the South losing the Civil War was a decimated economic system and the refusal of the North to abide by Lincoln’s wish of helping the South recover without slave labor. In Tennessee, the Eastern part of the state had not supported session with the majority of those who fought fighting for the North. It’s something that I put in my book when Vestie tells Lettie about her family’s encounter on their farm. After the Civil War, as industry took off and coal was needed to run the new economy, it was the Eastern part of the state that had the potential to turn the fortunes of Tennessee around. Tennessee is an exceptionally long and narrow state with distinctive regions of Eastern mountains, Central plateaus and Western flatlands, The state government was located in Nashville in the Central part of the state. Central and the Western parts of Tennessee were deeply embedded in the slave economy. After the War, the Southern aligned economic forces prevailed in the governance of the state with the Eastern part being an outlier.
One particularly crucial factor that needs to be emphasized was that “convict African American” labor was being used in the anti-secession and pro-Union Eastern part of the state. While the solution of using “convict” labor was very much a part of the Southern states attempt to exploit the use of former slave labor and keep wages down for white laborers. By the 1890s convict labor was increasingly becoming African American. Before the Civil War, Tennessee’s convict labor was 95 percent white. In the 1890’s, it had become 75 percent African American. The decision to use convict labor in the pro-union Eastern part of the state led to the uprising to stop the use of convict labor in the coal mines of Eastern Tennessee. The Coal Creek War in the Anderson County was a significant labor battle especially in terms of ridding the South’s of its armed labor uprising in the took place primarily in Anderson County, Tennessee, a significant anti session and antislavery area of the state. It had seceded from the state during the Civil War because it wasn’t a war they believed in.
One of the most important scenes in Field of Stones is Vestie’s retelling of her family’s experience of being caught in a battle between the northern and southern armies during the Civil War. The Eastern part of Tennessee never supported the south in the war. If you look at the roll call of soldiers during the war, you will see that the majority fought for the North. I was in a restaurant a few years ago in Crossville, Tennessee and saw a memorial plaque to Civil War soldiers. On that plaque a majority were soldiers had fought for the North.
This labor conflict ignited when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system. These former wage-earning Coal Creek miners repeatedly attacked and burned both state prison stockades and mine properties, all while releasing hundreds of the state convict laborers from their bondage to the mine companies. Many of these coal miners were wounded or killed in small-arms skirmishes during the Coal Creek War, along with dozens of Tennessee state militiamen. The Coal Creek War was part of a greater labor struggle across East Tennessee. As miners and their unions launched a war against the state government’s controversial convict leasing system, which allowed the state prison system to lease convict labor to business enterprises with the effect of suppressing employee wages in the open market across the state.
The Coal Creek War ended with the arrests of hundreds of former company coal miners during 1892, but the adverse exposure exposed the state’s conflict with private labor generated nationwide attention and led to the downfall of the Governor and forced the Tennessee General Assembly to reconsider its state convict labor-leasing system. The Tennessee state government later refused to renew its convict labor-lease contracts with private businesses upon the arrival at the 1896 expiration dates, making Tennessee one of the first states within the southern United States to end this controversial practice.
Most of the violence centered around communities in upper east Tennessee at the upper end of Coal Creek near its source. There was a parallel anti-leasing conflict that took place in Grundy and Marion County about one hundred miles away in 1892. The Grundy and Marion Counties rebellion in the Southeastern part of the coal mining areas are where, in my book, Lettie’s grandfather and his began their fight for labor unions and a staunch commitment to Eugene Debs’s vision for a more equitable distribution of capital back to the workers whose labor created and for a while union membership increased in area although it was bloody and difficult to organize in this area.
By the 1920s, coal miners and other groups like farmers were already seeing wages fall as over production and the lack of even before the Depression of the 1920s. It was during this time that union representation began to fall as over production began to outstrip demand. Coal wages were falling so low that feeding their families became a struggle for many miners including Lettie’s grandfather. Contrary to widespread belief most people in the United States saw an erosion in their incomes with only the top income earners doing well. The bureau of Labor statistics reported that over 60 percent of families were living on less than 2,000 dollars a month which was considered a minimum livable income. It was during this time that Lettie’s grandmother died of poor nutrition and complications of childbirth and it also the time that Lettie’s mother Sarah leaves her husband and takes Lettie back to her family.
Lettie’s grandfather was broken by the time Depression finally hit. He felt by then that his unionizing triumphs had come to less than nothing. He was too old and disillusioned to continue to fight, but he still clung to the strong belief that the goals of Eugene Debs and his certainty in a more equitable society were right and just. Through his stories about his own experiences with class struggle, Lettie came to realize how valuable his teaching was to her belief system and the make-up of her character that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
In Field of Stones, Lettie’s family’s decision to settle in the area in the 1890s was based on living and working in a thriving community of miners. However, by the 1930s when Lettie was a young girl it had become a wasteland of sorts as the coal mine owners abandoned the area, and the need for coal dwindled significantly. The economic collapse of the mines was a significant contributing factor in the vast increase in illegal whiskey production in the area. The increase in illegal whiskey began growing in the 1920s during prohibition, but the Depression witnessed a substantial increase in illegal moonshining and the violence that it entailed during the Great Depression.
Many people began to leave the area toward the middle and end of the Depression due to a lack of employment and the continued increase in violence in the area. They went North to work in the auto industry. Auto production began to surge toward the end of the 1930s as World War Two finally began to bring parts of the US economy back into production. It was Lettie and Houston’s dream to leave the area and start a new life in the north that they thought would be their ticket out. Houston goes to work in the auto factories and comes back for Lettie, but fate and the horrible violence associated with illegal whiskey production intervened and shattered Lettie’s universe.
One significant event that eventually would bring the area back from the abyss was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 as part of the New Deal. TVA had a dual mission of electrification of the entire region and reviving the area economically. It would take decades to bring the area back from its almost total economic collapse, but it did provide widespread electrification even in remote parts of the region which led to paved roads and better access to healthcare jobs in the area although the wages there were still barely enough to feed a family. In field of stones Lettie’s decision to go to work for TVA in Knoxville after her college graduation from Berea College in Kentucky gave her the opportunity to work on projects like the recording of Cherokee archaeological sites in areas that were to be flooded and provided her the opportunity to help improve the quality of life in the area. These two goals became her life’s mission, and she was able to see a lot of progress in both of these areas. Whiskey making became obsolete as TVA and corporations like Dupont started paying decent wages and kept more people in the area. The continued preservation efforts of the archaeological and cultural remains of the Overhill Cherokee tribe in the region continue to show fruition.
