Tuckahoe-Cohee - Background

Background

The word "tuckahoe" first appears on a map drawn by Captain John Smith in 1612, providing a Powhatan Indian word to describe an edible plant or fungus utilized by tribes in the tidewater area of the present Virginia and North Carolina (and is unlikely the name of an undocumented Indian tribe). The use of the word to describe the aristocratic, affluent and politically powerful class of low-country Virginia/Carolina planters probably originated in the decades prior to the Revolutionary War (ca 1740-1770). It was during this period that the Great Wagon Road, originating in Pennsylvania, and the Valley Pike, transiting the lower Shenandoah Valley, became a major highway funneling a steady stream of poor, largely Scotch-Irish families south and west into upland Virginia (later into upcountry North and South Carolina and eventually into Tennessee and Kentucky) in search of cheap land. These early up-country settlers shared little of the ethnic, social or religious roots of the low-country, which had been founded and developed by English-Anglican colonists over the previous 100-plus years.

Politically, the low-country governments of Virginia and the Carolinas did little to assist and much to exploit this cohee migration. During the earliest decades, the established Anglican Church refused to recognize Presbyterian weddings and required exorbitant marriage bond fees of the up-country settlers in order to obtain a legally recognized marriage certificate. Failure to obtain legal marriage documentation could have severe consequences when trying to sell land, and during the handling of estates. Similarly, upcountry political representation in colony governments was inhibited, while wealthy low-country aristocrats held dominance in political, military and taxation matters. The stage was set for a major cultural divide, and tuckahoe-cohee antagonism grew from this early social dynamic.

The term “cohee” has been traced to the Scotch-Irish dialect/accent, for “quoth he” used instead of “he said” in normal conversation of the time. It tended to sound like “quo he” which became “cohee” to the lowland Virginia planters. Thus the term “cohee” is tightly associated with the Presbyterian Scots-Irish upland settlers and most powerfully expressed in western Virginia and western North Carolina.

In the Piedmont area of Virginia and the Carolinas, these "northward" families mixed with low-country families migrating westward. First in the Piedmont, later in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountain regions, and still later in the eastern regions of the Mississippi River valley, these two cultures co-existed and competed for political and economic resources. By the middle 19th century, some writers were describing the sectionalism of American politics as the conflict between "yankee", "tuckahoe" and "cohee" cultures representing, respectively, mercantile New England; the slave-owning southern agriculturist, and the western self-reliant pioneer.