The Black Patch Wars

Hillbillies, Sharecroppers, and Racial Capitalism

I love studying the histories of words, and I recently had cause to look up the origins of the term “hillbilly.” A quick search revealed some contradictions. Were hillbillies scabs or anti-racists? Or just exoticized mountain people? Does the term refer to a political conflict in the British isles, or is it originally North American? In a deeper dive to get to the bottom of these questions, I came across a largely forgotten history about a messy war between plantation owners and monopolists in a region I was recently visiting.

It turns out that use of the term “hillbilly” is first documented in the Appalachian and Ozark regions starting at the end of the 19^th century. It would have been used even earlier, a few years or a few decades, and the presence of “billy,” meaning “fellow” or “comrade,” suggests a Scottish origin, likely from the immigrants settling that part of the country. The term was first put to print by northern newspapers already marketing the spectacle of rural southern ignorance and backwardness. Where the story becomes truly interesting, though, is in its first massive use, during the Black Patch Wars of 1904 to 1909. The term was popularized by the Planters’ Protective Association during their struggle against the monopoly held by the American Tobacco Company. The ATC was one of the original 12 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896, and was owned by James Buchanan Duke, a southern capitalist who got his name put on Duke University in exchange for a sizable donation.

By assembling a monopoly of tobacco buyers, Duke was able to drive the price of dark-fired tobacco (grown in western Kentucky and northern Tennessee) down from eight to ten cents per pound to four or even two cents a pound, when it cost six cents a pound just to grow it. In response, tobacco growers formed the Planters’ Protective Association, effectively a producers’ union using collective bargaining to push prices back up. They also unofficially formed an illegal offshoot, the “Night Riders” or “Possum Hunters” who blew up ATC warehouses and attacked scabs who kept selling tobacco to Duke. It was the PPA and the Night Riders who smeared the scabs as hillbillies, conflating those who broke solidarity with the more rural, poorer, upland small farmers who often couldn’t afford to turn their crop over to PPA warehouses and wait indefinitely for it to get sold.

There is a major element to this history that gets left out of many of the mainstream tellings. Race. Who had the most power in the Planters’ Protective Association? White plantation owners, the very same ones, or their sons, who were the major slave owners a few decades earlier. In fact, David Amoss, the founder of the Night Riders, was the son of a Confederate officer who actively promoted the growing mythology of a heroic Confederacy.

And though the PPA initially had a higher proportion of support from the Black population than from whites, the Night Riders, effectively the PPA’s paramilitary arm, were exclusively white, and largely targeted Black farmers and laborers. In other words, Black people in Kentucky and Tennessee showed up in a big way to support what might have been a radical experience of interracial labor organizing against the growing power of monopolies. Instead, white planters made sure that it would become a formative experience for the terror tactics of a resurgent KKK in the 1910s and 20s.

Like many conflicts that are mentioned in the official history, “both sides” were bad guys, and the interests of the oppressed and exploited have to be found in the nuances, in the dust, as they were trampled underfoot by larger players. As we have seen, the Planters’ Protective Association was basically an arm of the plantation owners, the former slave-owning class, trying to maintain their regional power against the arrival of an even more formidable capitalist opponent, the monopolists represented by the American Tobacco Company and the person of James Duke, himself the son of a Confederate officer. Duke was the quintessential robber baron and carpetbagger, but unlike the stereotype, he was from North Carolina. The fact that many of the most effective carpetbaggers were from the South shows how drawing an identitarian line between North and South effectively obscured what might have been an actual line of conflict, one of class.

The way the Night Riders largely targeted Black people and used the hillbilly trope to their advantage also reveals something about the hidden war between above and below, particularly as regards race. The plan developed by the PPA—to store their tobacco in the warehouses of members wealthy enough to have warehouses, and one year, to not even plant—was clearly designed in accordance with the interests and the possibilities of plantation owners and large farmers with enough resources to sit tight during hard times. It did not take into account the interests of small farmers, Black and white, largely in the mountainous eastern part of Kentucky, who lived from harvest to harvest, or the mostly Black sharecroppers who, if they didn’t work, didn’t eat. When Duke started offering eight cents a pound to tobacco growers who would break ranks with the PPA, it’s no surprise that these were the people who often cashed in. They had no elite status to defend, and no resources to favor other choices.

I don’t think there are excuses for scabbing, but an organization that only protects the interests of its wealthier members has already broken solidarity. When the PPA started calling the poor farmers who were selling to Duke “hillbillies,” I don’t know if they were applying the epithet to Blacks and whites alike. If so, it’s extremely relevant how since then it has come to be considered an exclusively white category. Whatever the case, they were certainly making an appeal to whiteness by conflating poor people and rural people with traitors who threatened their livelihood. It was a dog whistle to the Southern aristocracy who had long promoted a mythology of betrayal linked to the Civil War (remember that Kentucky was a divided state during the War, and the mountainous eastern part was mostly anti-slavery). It was also a form of conditioning levied by wealthy whites against poorer whites: you have the opportunity to identify with us, the crème de la crème, the peak of civilization. Join us, follow us, or you might be confused with white trash.

The Night Riders took it even further. Their assaults on the American Tobacco Company were usually directed at property, and though they also attacked whites, their most vicious assaults were against Black people, including the 1908 lynching of the Walkers, a Black family with a small farm, consisting of the parents and five children, one of them an infant. The same year, a mob of 100 white men removed 4 Black men from the local jail and lynched them. They had been jailed, and were then lynched, for speaking out in approval of a fellow sharecropper who had killed an assailant in self-defense. It should be noted that in the case of large landowners who sold tobacco to the ATC, the Night Riders directed their worst violence against the mostly Black sharecroppers who did the work. Also in 1908, the Night Riders attacked a town of free Blacks, Birmingham, Kentucky. They shot two people to death and beat many others.

In the following years, the American Tobacco Company was disbanded by antitrust legislation, and what was considered a sustainable price was reinstated for dark-fired tobacco.

Although in this history, interests of race and interests of class are fully intertwined, overlapping, and intersecting, it is significant that the logical progression in the accumulation of capital—monopolies—did not become the dominant organizing principle for US society. Rather, white supremacy tended to define and limit people’s interests, actions, strategies, and narratives throughout the conflict, and when the conflict proved intractable the US government responded by shaping society in accordance with what we can understand today as a counterinsurgency plan.

Over the following years, various institutions and elite sectors continued to shape the region, not to suppress future conflicts but—in line with counterinsurgency practice—to mold future conflicts to the State’s advantage, to make sure that “both sides” were constitutive of the oppressive social order, loyal to the State and to racial capitalism. Thus, anyone trying to do any actually transformative work was consigned to the cracks and the shadows.

Racial segregation was intensified. In 1915, the KKK was refounded in Georgia (its original incarnation disappeared in the 1870s) and quickly spread throughout the South, the Midwest, and the West. Through their tactics of racial terrorism, they reinforced one form of segregation. Property owners, real estate developers, and urban planners developed another form of segregation, which would end up lasting significantly longer. Nascent federal police forces carried out the first Red Scare, primarily targeting immigrant anarchists. Subsequent police and paramilitary campaigns stamped out communist organizing in the rural and largely Black south, and an increasingly massive and effective cultural apparatus, together with political and police pressure against the labor unions, suppressed the radical organizations like the IWW and made sure the dominant unions were fully “nativist,” patriotic rather than internationalist, oriented towards white male citizens.

In the 1950s, when it became clear that one plank of this strategy for social control, legal segregation, would have to give way to other strategies, there was a major third wave of evangelism, this one overwhelmingly conservative and targeting the South. Christian evangelism was so effective it would create a set of practices, as well as multiple lucrative capitalist enterprises, that would be exported as a primary form of counterinsurgency to quell revolutionary movements in the Global South, primarily South and Central America and Africa. But that is the topic for another essay.

A Note on Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency is a framework I’ve been helping develop to describe a key set of practices the State deploys to shape society, constituting a motor of history and a cutting edge in the actual development of capitalism.

I’ll be coming out with a more extensive work eventually, but in the meantime here is some reading and listening, from myself and others.

Interview I did with Submedia, “Counter-insurgency as State Philosophy”

Articles I wrote for It’s Going Down and Roar Magazine, breaking down the counterinsurgency strategy being used during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, “Questions in the Face of Counterinsurgency” and “Counterinsurgency: dousing the flames of Minneapolis”

Article I wrote for It’s Going Down analyzing different campaigns of reaction in historical perspective, “The Reaction This Time”

Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, a solid analysis of the deployment of counterinsurgency practices in US policing.

Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned, an excellent history of various episodes of the social war throughout the US South

Alexander Dunlap, “Wind Energy: Towards a ‘Sustainable Violence’ in Oaxaca,” an investigation of the use of counterinsurgency practices in the violent imposition of capitalist green energy projects.

Sources on the Black Patch Wars

Christopher Waldrep, “Planters and the Planters’ Protective Association in Kentucky and Tennessee”

Terry Bisson, “Tobacco Terror”

Chuck Stanion, “The Black Patch Tobacco Wars”

The latter constitutes a mainstream view sympathetic to the PPA. Stanion mentions race, but portrays it as a factor that crept into the conflict towards its end rather than an element from the beginning.

William Funk, “Brutal Saviours of the Black Patch”

Funk represents the worst of mainstream historiography, openly glorifying the attacks of the Night Riders while not mentioning any of the people they killed, erasing their racism and their lynchings.

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