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suggest a “racial innocence” and “Anglo-Saxon purity.” Blacks were vital players, sometimes as unwilling and unfree victims of white mountain residents, sometimes as free agents whose ambition and drive allowed for somewhat better opportunities either within or beyond the region. As we begin to recover more of their stories, we should become increasingly aware that, for better or worse, southern highlanders, white and black, shared much in common with other southerners and other Americans in the long and often turbulent history of their interactions.
    NOTES
    1. Charles B. Dew,
Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). The account of Williams’s life is drawn from Dew’s book and from his essay “Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave at Buffalo Forge, Virginia,” in
Race, Region, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward
, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199–240, reprinted in
Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation
, ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 74–100.
    2. Washington himself was never certain of his birth date and wrote on different occasions that he was born in 1857, 1858, or 1859. See Louis R. Harlan,
Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 325n1. On speculation regarding his paternity, see ibid., 3–5.
    3. Ibid., 6–7. In his autobiography, Washington referred to the Burroughs farm as a plantation, implying a much larger operation than was actually the case. See Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901), chap. 1.
    4. Washington,
Up from Slavery
, 26.
    5. John E. Stealey III,
The Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), chap. 3.
    6. Washington,
Up from Slavery
, 26–27.
    7. Ibid., 38–39.
    8. Washington engaged in much political and religious activity during the years of his return to West Virginia in the late 1870s. See ibid., 75–79, 92–93;Harlan,
Booker T. Washington
, 93–96. For the political and religious tradition among West Virginia African Americans in which Washington participated, see Joe William Trotter Jr.,
Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932
(Urbana:Univerity of Illinois Press, 1990), chaps. 1 and 2 (which deal with the late nineteenth century).
    9. William Brewer, “Moonshining in Georgia,”
Cosmopolitan
23 (June 1897): 132; Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” in
Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture
, ed. W. K. McNeil (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), 150–51.
    10. John C. Campbell,
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), 94.
    11. Edward J. Cabbell, “Black Invisibility and Racism in Appalachia: An Informal Survey,” in
Blacks in Appalachia
, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 3–10 (quotes on p. 3).
    12. On the distribution of slaves in Appalachia, see Robert P. Stuckert, “Black Populations of the Southern Appalachian Mountains,”
Phylon
48 (June 1987): 141–51. On the postwar demographic shifts in the region, see William H. Turner, “The Demography of Black Appalachia, Past and Present,” in
Blacks in Appalachia
, ed. Turner and Cabbell, 237–61.
    13. On blacks in Appalachian coalfields, see Ronald L. Lewis,
Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), chap. 7; Lewis, “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Migration of Southern Blacks to the Central Appalachian Coalfields,”
Journal of Southern History
55 (Feb.