"It is likely that in East Tennessee there was considerable prevalence of such amalgamation of African and Scotch-Irish race stocks, with white motherhood. The reasons were largely economic.
Many of the whites who came to live in the lower farm lands down from their first holdings on the rocky slopes and unfertile soil, were driven from these more productive lowlands by the rich white land owners who preferred to have large plantations with great numbers of blacks to raise the crops, rather than to rent or sell to small farmers.
For these poorer white neighbors there was no recourse but to take to the mountains and to cultivate there the less desirable lands. The life they had to live was necessarily very rough and hard ; their principal diet was corn, and often the rocky soil only yielded them that grudgingly and scantily.
They frequently came in contact with the slaves, and the latter were known to steal provisions from their masters' storehouses and bring to these hill-country people appetizing additions to their meager provisions. And the slaves were also known to mingle with them in the quilting, husking, barn-raisings, and other rural festivities, being undoubtedly made welcome.
It requires no immoderate imagination to state here the likelihood of much racial intermixure, as we know, from testimony, of more than a few specific cases, and we have, in this rather strange way, the account of social intermingling and the secret gifts of the black men who visited these mountain homes."
– Article by Rev William Lloyd Imes, the Black Presbyterian minister of St James' Church of Harlem NYC, in Carter G Woodson's Journal of Negro History, Volume IV, 1919. Imes was born in Memphis Tennessee, was educated at Fisk University in Nashville (which had developed from the work of Anahilt-born Rev Joseph McKee) and for a time was President of Knoxville College, a Presbyterian institution.
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