Running from Washington to New Orleans, briefly known as the “Appian way of the South”, the federal road was soon made redundant by steamboats, railways and the telegraph. But during its brief heyday it sparked a war with the Creek, then helped to vanquish them. After conquest came migration: “Once the Indians were whipped,” says Mr Drummond, an expert on the road, “a flood of settlers came down it.” Some of the earliest took the fertile land of central Alabama—known as the Black Belt for its rich soil—and established cotton plantations, importing slaves to work on them. Others did the same on the floodplain of the Tennessee river. Later, poorer migrants settled the sandy Wiregrass region in the south-east, and in the beautiful but less fecund northern hills, where there were few slaves and fewer roads.
This economic pattern soon became a political one that, in essence, has endured across two centuries—even as the electorate has evolved and the road that helped to delineate it was reclaimed by the wilderness. In that pattern, Alabama’s yeomen farmers, and their descendants, have sporadically risen up against the plantation class and its modern equivalents, typically when hardship rallied them to a charismatic leader’s standard.
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In the decades after the civil war, the yeoman farmers of Alabamian hill counties like Winston, and in the Wiregrass, believed they were being exploited. And they were. Land values plummeted even as property taxes rose. Needing cash, many began growing cotton, the price of which promptly collapsed. Some were ruined by the interest charged by supply merchants or—after they sold up and were forced into tenant farming—by rapacious landlords. In “Poor But Proud”, Wayne Flynt, a historian, charts the trajectory of David Manasco, a farmer in Winston County. In 1860 he owned land and property worth $1,400, no mean sum. By 1880 he was a sharecropper, the lowest form of tenancy.
As well as the hardship, there was a loss of honour. The soil may have been thin, but at least it had been theirs, and there was the hope of acquiring more of it. They had sunk from the freedom of the frontier to dependency. “We in Alabama have had more of that than most of the rest of the nation,” says Mr Bridges of that downward mobility. It hasn’t abated. These days many of the modest homes scattered amid Winston County’s deep forests and unexpected lakes are for sale. In what is still among the poorest parts of one of America’s poorest states, shops, warehouses and even some of those superabundant churches are shuttered. Junkyards abound. Around Double Springs, says Mr Robinson, the biggest employers are sawmills and mobile-home manufacturers; he hopes more tourists will come. The skyscrapers of Birmingham seem remote, just as the industrial prosperity of the vaunted post-war “New South” did to Kolb’s followers.
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The ongoing need points up two consistent features of life and politics in the hill country. The first is its isolation, cultural as well as geographical, which endures despite the patina of sameness conferred by fast-food chains and motels. The other is a conflicted attitude to government among its warily hospitable residents. They still think it’s a racket, and, as ever, take pride in self-sufficiency. Here, says Ronald Jackson, whose family has lived in Winston County since before the civil war, “you don’t depend on the government, you take care of your own.” At the same time, unblinkingly and understandably, they want a bigger chunk of its largesse.
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