BACK COUNTRY

Back country is a geographic term that dates back to the American colonial period. Sometimes also referred to as upcountry, the region called back country designated the lands that lie west of the Atlantic coastal areas where the Europeans first settled.

In the late 1600s and into the first half of the 1700s, immigrants landing at eastern seaboards did not always integrate into the coastal and near-inland settlements of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. Many of these newly landed immigrants were Scotch-Irish and German who chose to make their homes in the interior—in the woods of New England, the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and the Piedmont of the Carolinas.

The back country regions soon flooded with newcomers, and the colonies were faced with the problem of how to extend their governments, schools, and churches to the new settlements. Because back country settlers were highly independent people, however, they sometimes rejected outside authority. Conflicts arose between the established societies to the east and the new settlements of the frontier. (Such differences were felt even during the American Revolution [1775–1783]; back country settlers tended to remain loyal to Great Britian, because they felt they had little in common with the eastern establishment.)

Clashes between the old guard and the new arrivers in the Carolinas resulted in the Regulator movement (1765–1771), in which extremists became determined to bring law and order to the back country by their own hand. A direct conflict never ensued because the colonial governors pacified the lawless frontier by giving the back country settlers legislative representation and establishing schools in the interior.