I was listening to this (very enjoyable) podcast and when this line was uttered I paused it and immediately google for clarification but couldn't find much. The transcript of the comment:
Elizabeth Kat:
Yeah, do you know the origins of the word hillbilly?
Jad:
No.
Elizabeth Kat:
So I won't take up too much of your time, but it is kind of interesting. One iteration of the story is that hillbilly was a specific term deployed against people who were from East Tennessee right after the civil war when individuals were trying to form what what historians would probably call fusionist government. So governments where African Americans and white individuals had equal political power. And so the word hillbilly was a degrading term for white people who politically organized with African Americans.
-- Source
I just have one question: is there any truth to this or is it feel-good revisionism?
Tennessee was always an edge case in the Civil War; they were last to join the Confederacy in 1861 and the vote for secession was such that East Tennessee -- the mountainous part of the state, with less enslaved people -- voted mostly Unionist. A group petitioned the legislature to allow East Tennessee to split and be its own state; the governor ordered troops in and controlled Knoxville with the military until the Union army took over in 1863.
After Lincoln picked Johnson (Governor of Tennessee at the time) as his Vice President the Unionists not only made an amendment abolishing slavery (ratified by the voters, meaning they abolished it without the federal government needing to intervene), they picked William Brownlow for governor in 1865, a Radical Republican. He was not originally an abolitionist -- while very much pro-Union, in his 1862 book (Sketches of the rise, progress, and decline of secession; with a narrative of personal adventures among the rebels) he wrote:
I am a pro-Slavery man, and so are the Union men generally of the border Slave States. I have long since made up my mind upon the Slavery question, but not without studying it thoroughly.
He certainly tended to abolition after, declaring "a loyal Negro was more deserving than a disloyal white man".
Ex-Confederates of the state could not vote, but Radical Republicans were isolated politically from the rest of the electorate (even Unionists), so voting rights were given to African Americans which led to an entire slate of Radical Republicans being voted in for the 1867 election. After that came a flurry of petitions to Brownlow including one allowing African-Americans to run for office. It is possible deeper progress would have been made had the Radical Republicans stayed in power. However, when Brownlow left in 1869 to a Senate seat, his successor (DeWitt Senter) allowed ex-Confederates to vote, thus winning the full election with their support and crushing the Radical Republican alliance with African-Americans.
This window is what is being referred to as "fusionist government". I would not use the term, as it has particular technical definition of multiple parties having the same person on their ticket, which isn't the case here.
Having narrated that, it seems rather unlikely that "hillbilly" arose from all this.
Firstly, the term never even appeared in print until, at the earliest anyone has found, 1892:
...I don't think it is right to hire some Hill Billy and give him the same right as I just because he was hired the same time I was.
and just to note another instance, from 1898:
...one night I ventured out to the Exposition all alone, and being a "Hill Billie" of first rank I traveled by instinct, not reason...
While words can be coined a fair amount of time span before they show in print, especially if they are slang, this still represents a giant gap of evidence. (Additionally, any folk etymologies of the word that stretch especially late, to the 18th century, are almost certainly false.)
Secondly, the exact conditions of Brownlow's rise to power were somewhat of a conditional fluke, and the Radical Republicans -- while centered in East Tennessee -- were not a majority, and not any more associated with "the country" than others not in the party. It is possible a term quite specifically applied could later be applied more generally to mountainous folk, but it puts added unlikelihood on the case.
Thirdly, the early associations aren't even with East Tennessee! The 1892 quote was Kentucky. The 1898 one was from Nashville (Tennessee, but far from the East). A much more specific 1900 definition from the New York Journal states
In short, a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires of his revolver as the fancy takes him.
Points #2 and #3 are circumstantial enough to be overlooked, but point #1 remains there is no evidence in print of any particular origin, and any etymologies you may read on the Internet that go farther back are likely just folk wisdom.
...
Coker, P. (2001). "Is This the Fruit of Freedom?" Black Civil War Veterans in Tennessee. PhD diss., University of Tennessee.
Drake, R. B. (2003). A History of Appalachia. University Press of Kentucky.
Harkins, A. (2005). Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
McBride, W. G. (1989). Blacks and the Race Issue in Tennessee Politics, 1865-1876. United States: Vanderbilt University.