I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

 I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

          ___Langston Hughes

               American Poet

 Since the beginning of time humans have settled along rivers and other great bodies of water. These rivers have served as migration and commerce vehicles, as sources of food, and as the very essence of life for plants and animals, including humans, along their banks. 

Such was the case with the Piedmont region of North Carolina which had several rivers to include the Dan, Deep, Haw, and Yadkin Rivers. These rivers, among other things, provided fertile farmland and hydro-power for industrial development. Tobacco farming and manufacture, furniture and textile manufacturing was the economic backbone of the upper Yadkin Valley. Today tobacco farming has been replaced by grapes as the area now has its own American Viticulture designation commonally called the Yadkin Valley wine region. Other traditional manufacturing is being replaced by technology, especially in the bio-medical field.

While the upper Yadkin Valley makes up much of the Piedmont Triad, it is not the same in that its boundaries move further to the west and less to the east.  It also does not extend as far south.

Upper Yadkin Valley Region

Before European colonization, the area now called North Carolina was inhabitated by American Indians of the Iroquoian, Siouan, and Algonquian language families. The Cherokee, linguistically related to the Iroquois, dominated the upper Yadkin Valley.

North Carolina became an English Colony in the mid-1600s. The first settlements were in the eastern part of the state but it would be approximately another century before colonization expanded into the western half of the state. The upper Yadkin Valley region of the Piedmont was settled by Europeans in the mid-1700s. The ethnic groups moving into the area were predominately English, Scotch-Irish, German, and African. This in turn spawned the early development of Protestant Christian congregations that included the Baptists, German Reformed, Lutherans, Methodists, Moravians, Presbyterians, and Quakers, among others. These settlers from Pennsylvania, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and directly from Europe wanted freedom of religion and rejected the concept of a "state religion" as England wanted the Anglican Church to be in the American colonies.  

Africans ultimately learned to negotiate this religious landscape by their spiritual sympathies with various aspects of the different groups: a monotheistic European religious system and belief in a Supreme Being; instantaneuos religious conversion and spirit possession; baptism by submersion and the watery world of the ancestors; physical estatic religious expresssions such as shouting and ritual dance; the preacher and the village chief. However, underlying all of these affinities and creolizations was the African quest for literacy.  They had seen through missionaries in Africa that there appeared to be power and magic in the words from the Europeans' sacred texts and they wanted to possess that power and magic.

The Three Faces of Slavery

Africans in America faced three very different enslavement scenarios depending upon the socio-economic conditions of their immediate environment. Television and movies have generally given us a look at only one of the three __ plantation enslavement and all its ugliness. The other two, urban and small farm enslavement, are rarely shown.

North Carolina, as with most of the colonies along the eastern seaboard, had all three forms as well as some varying combinations therof.

In 1790 most of the counties in eastern North Carolina had enslaved populations exceeding twenty percent of the total population with a few over fifty percent. The enslaved population in the western portion of the state was less than twenty percent in 1790 with most counties in the upper Yadkin Valley at fifteen percent or less. By 1860 most counties in the east had enslaved populations exceeding fifty percent while the western part of the state generally remained less that twenty percent.

Wealth and political power was concentrated in eastern counties which held the greatest majority of plantations.  Urban centers also developed first in the east with coastal towns such as  Edenton, New Bern, and Wilmington being centers of government and commerce.

The west was made up predominatley of small farms and trading villages and was generally lacking in colony-wide political clout.

Most plantations were self-sufficient enterprises operated like a business. Consequently, many plantations held several African families representing at times a hundred or more enslaved persons.  This required different layers of "management" and techniques to excercise firm control over those held in bondage.  Enslavers used slave drivers to manage their human chattel.  Some of the drivers were themselves enslaved Africans but most were Europeans, some of whom were indentured.

In either case, most drivers were not members of the enslaver's family and had no financial interest in the human "property". This often led to the atrocities dipicted in most films on slavery.  Most plantation owners had little on-going contact with their enslaved people beyond those assigned to household duties. This is not to say there were not some evil enslavers who brutalized their captives just to exert their own power.

On the other hand, many of those enslaved in urban and small farm environments had a somewhat different perspective on their plight. First, they were more likely to be one of only two or three adults bound to the same enslaver.  In many intances they were a family unit. There were no drivers and the "marching order" came directly from the enslaver. This at least provided the opportunity for a more intimate relationship to develop between the enslaver and the enslaved.

One signal of how those formerly enslaved felt about their enslavers can be seen in the surnames taken by the Freedman between 1865 and the 1870 census. There were many on plantations in eastern North Carolina who chose not to assume the last name of their previous enslavers. Conversely, in the Yadkin Valley region practically all assumed the surname of their enslaver and many named their chidren for European family members.  Another signal is how many left their immediate environment when freedom came.

There are other differences among these three economies and slavery but the above, I feel, are the most significent.  

                                ____ Mel White

Selective References:

Bennett, Lerone Jr. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 5th ed.  Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1982.

Billingsly, Andrew. Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Crews, C. Daniel. Neither Slave Nor Free: Moravians, Slavery, and a Church that Endures. Winston-Salem: Moravian Archives Southern Province, 1998.

Dunaway, Wilma A. Slavery in the American Mountain South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Moss. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 6th. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Frey, Sylvia R. and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998.

Heywood, Linda M. (ed.). Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hilty, Hiram H. By Land and Sea: Quakers Confront Slavery and its Aftermath in North Carolina. Greensboro (NC): North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1993.

Lefler, Hugh Talmage and Albert ray Newsome, 3rd ed. The History of a Southern State: North Carolina. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1973

Lincoln, C. Eric. "Black Religion in North Carolina from Colonial Times to 1900", Black Presence in North Carolina, Exhibit Catalogue. Jeffrey J. Crow and Robert S. Winters, Jr. (eds.). Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of History, 1978.

MacGaffey, Wyatt. Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Neese, James Everett. The Dutch Settlement on Abbotts Creek. Lexington (NC): J. Everette Neese, 1979.

Nichols, Elaine (ed.). The Last Miles of the Way: African American Homegoing Traditions, 1890 - Present. Columbia (SC): South Carolina Humanities Council and the South Carolina State Museum, 1989.

Phillips, Donyell L. Keepers of the Faith: African American Religious Experiences in Wachovia 1822-1857. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Wake Forest University, 1999.

Thompson, Robert Ferris. Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and African Americas. New York: The Museum of African Art, 1993.