This dissertation examines the eighteenth-century origins of southernness in the South Carolina piedmont. Looking through the lens of a single community the Waxhaws, a predominately Scots-Irish settlement in the lower Catawba valley Toil and Strife challenges the notion that the Carolina upcountry was a static, undeveloped backwater region until cotton planters transformed it after 1800. Rather, in the halfcentury preceding the cotton boom the Waxhaws underwent a comprehensive social, economic, and cultural transformation of its own making, one driven by the internal dynamics of the community itself immigration patterns, neighborhood rivalries, changing religious and ethnic identities, population growth, and developing markets for slaves and wheat not by land-grabbing speculators and aggressive planters. When cotton finally penetrated the piedmont in 1800, the Waxhaws bore little resemblance to the backcountry community of the late colonial period. The stress of economic, demographic, and generational change was felt most acutely in the communitys central institution, the Presbyterian church. For three decades neighbors and competing kin groups, divided by class, ethnicity, and doctrinal issues, struggled to control church location, leadership, worship, and the force of the Great Revival. This struggle ultimately set the church, once so vital to community life, on the path to obsolescence. In addition to religious history, this study examines contact and conflict between white settlers and neighboring Indians and underlines the importance of this encounter in shaping both the physical/spatial and mental world of white immigrants. It looks at how the insularity bred by the frontier played out in gender relations, sectarian conflict, the ambiguous relationships between masters and slaves, and neighborhood rivalries. It explores the social and economic impact of the Revolutionary War and looks at how class and neighborhood differences affected wartime allegiance. It reassesses the importance of land speculators both before and after the war from the local perspective. It also takes a long look at the Great Revival of 1802, moving beyond its impact on the local church and deep into its language and ritual structure, exploring the broader cultural context of its peculiar kind of somatic piety and the links between religious experience and generational change.