Rogue State (2 page)

Delegates from the Shenandoah Valley and other western regions of the state convened local conventions in Staunton in 1816to address east-west differences. Although these failed to produce any long-term answers to the area's problems, they were symptomatic of long-standing differences between east and west. Following the 1816 convention, the Virginia General Assembly passed a number of acts for the benefit of western Virginia. New reapportionment of the Virginia State Senate based on white population gave western regions somewhat greater representation. Prior to that, representation had been based on the total population, including slaves [like the United States Constitution allowed for representation to the U.S. House].
¹

Due to the large s lave population of eastern Virginia and the general absence of slaves in western Virginia, representation in the General Assembly traditionally favored the east. Responding to western interests, complaints, and pressure, pressure, the General Assembly also created a Board of Public Works to legislate internal improvements, offered future development of more roads and canals in the west, and established the first state banks in western Virginia at Wheeling and Winchester. But despite some changes in 1816, representation, and political power remained weighted in favor of the eastern region of the state.

In response to a referendum, another convention gathered in Richmond on October 5, 1829. It was attended by such prominent Virginians as James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, and John Tyler. Its goal was to develop a new constitution. Eastern Virginian conservatives, advocates of the
status quo
,
²
defeated every major reform, including all of the most significant issues-granting the vote to all white men regardless of whether they owned land, and the direct election of the governor and judges by the people.
³

Statewide, the new constitution was approved by a margin of 26,055 to 15,566. However, voters in the counties of present-day West Virginia rejected it 8,365 to 1,383.
⁴
Calls for secession of western counties from the Old Dominion began immediately, led by newspapers such as the Kanawha
Republican
. Over the next twenty years, the Virginia General Assembly eased some of this sectional tension by organizing nineteen new counties in the west. This resulted in greater representation in the General Assembly for the west. Also, state funded internal improvements were continued in the west to aid economic development there.

The issue of slavery came to the forefront following Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The revolt resulted in the deaths of sixty-one whites in Southampton County, Virginia. Hundreds of African-Americans, including women and children, died during the revolt and the retribution that followed in its aftermath. Also in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publication of
The Liberator
.

The establishment of this paper marked the beginning of an organized national movement called abolitionism to end slavery. Most abolitionists disapproved of slavery on a moral basis. Others, however, including prominent western Virginia political leaders, supported abolition not because they sought to elevate the slaves to freedom, but rather because they felt black slaves were performing jobs white laborers should be paid to do and that slavery gave eastern slaveholders undue political power in Richmond.

The most significant outcome of the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion was the decision by the Virginia General Assembly to decline proposals for gradual abolition in the state. The issue was under discussion in 1831 when the Nat Turner revolt occurred. However, it never was raised again in the Virginia General Assembly or in any other southern state after that.

The U.S. Congress adopted extensive compromises in 1850 to ease growing tensions between North and South. Following passage of the Compromise of 1850, Virginia delegates once again met in Richmond to settle problems between eastern and western areas of the state. In the face of increased pressure from westerners, conservatives finally acquiesced on many major issues remaining from the 1829 convention. All white males over the age of twenty-one were given the right to vote regardless of whether they owned property.

The 1850-1851 state convention also approved election of the governor and judges by the people. However, although delegates agreed to a provision allowing for property to be taxed at its total value, an exception remained for slaves, who would be valued at rates well below their actual worth. That allowed many eastern Virginia slaveholders to pay less in property taxes than before, placing a greater burden on the western counties.
⁵

At this so-called Reform Convention of 1850-1851, western interests were represented by an entirely new group of delegates who had not participated in the 1816 or 1829 conventions. New political leaders such as Joseph Johnson (the first Virginia governor from trans-Allegheny Virginia), Charles J. Faulkner, Gideon D. Camden, John Janney, John S. Carlile, Waitman T. Willey, Benjamin Smith, and George W. Summers were among the delegates to the Reform Convention. Those men later rose to political prominence in the new state of West Virginia. But despite some changes, the essential imbalance of political and economic power in the state still weighed heavily in favor of the eastern counties.
⁶

Serious divisions between western and eastern sections of Virginia had persisted for two centuries prior to the U.S. Civil War. Debates, discussions, publications, newspaper articles, and correspondence relevant to the 1829 Virginia Constitutional Convention and the 1831-1832 debate over the emancipation, colonization, and/or deportation of blacks both illustrated longstanding differences between eastern and western regions of the Old Dominion. Those divisions and issues remained after the 1851 revisions to the state constitution.

Few in either section were abolitionist or sympathetic to the plight, condition, or future of the enslaved. Each sought political influence, leverage, or domination of the Commonwealth for the men and interests of its own section. That salient fact was reprised in 1861-1863, with pro-Union feelings followed by anti-slavery sentiments in support, not in advance, of forces in favor of western separation from the Tidewater and Piedmont sections of the Old Dominion.

Several plans for division or dismemberment of Virginia actually appeared in the years between the 1829 convention and Virginia's act of secession in 1861. The white population in the western counties was growing. And it grew at a faster rate in that period than it had prior to 1829. By 1850, western counties contained fifty five percent of the state's white population but only secured about 42% of House and Senate seats in the General Assembly. That eastern disposed legislature also elected the state's governors and judges prior to 1851. Easterners, richer and more powerful, but fewer in number than western Virginians, controlled the state, its key offices, its institutions, its policies, and its political power.
⁷

Additionally, those western Virginians were developing economically along lines different than the plantation and slavery dominated Tidewater. And, they were becoming more politically aggressive. Typical of the ‘haves,' eastern leaders were committed to the
status quo
. That included eastern preeminence in state politics, including control of the state legislature and most crucial state offices. Westerners saw the east declining economically, with the waning of plantation agriculture and transformation of slavery into an industry of human propagation producing slaves for export to the burgeoning agricultural cotton states to the southwest. But easterners had the political leverage and power, and they were unwilling to grant too many concessions to the non-slaveholding western counties of Virginia.

In 1851, the Virginia Reform Convention recognized that the white population of the western part of the state outnumbered that of the east, and it made significant changes in the state's political calculus. Universal white suffrage was granted and the governor was elected by direct popular vote. But not everything changed. Although the lower house was apportioned strictly based on population, it still counted slaves by the old three-fifths formula. Thus, legislative representation, which determined the key axes of power in the Commonwealth, continued to use a system of apportionment that combined population and property in determining electoral districts and representation. That, despite some systemic changes, in turn sustained traditional eastern dominance.
⁸

The changes wrought in 1851 were not sufficient to satisfy all western grievances or end eastern political dominance. After the ordinance was passed by the 1851 convention, Chester T. Hub bard wrote to Waitman Willey: “I should like to show those traitors at Richmond ... that we are not to be transformed like the cattle on the hills or the slaves on their plantations, without our knowledge or consent.”
⁹

Most western grievances had nothing to do with anti-slavery principles or humanitarian concerns related to slavery. Their issues centered on eastern legislative representation [disproportionately based on representation formulae that included counting slaves in the population for purposes of apportionment] and the share of taxes and state revenues allocated between east and west. Thus, the issues were related to slavery, but much more in the way slavery impacted the political priorities, economies, and power structures of the state, not a concern for the slaves themselves or the institution
per se
.

Ironically, Virginia's eastern leaders justified their dominance because of their dependence on slaves, “the possession of which could be guaranteed and secured only by giving to masters a voice in the government adequate to the protection of their interests…Talk about Northern oppression, talk about our rights being stolen from us by the North; it's all stuff, and dwindles into nothing when compared, to our situation in Western Virginia. The truth is the slavery oligarchy, are impudent boastful and tyrannical. It is the nature of the institution to make men so; and tho [sic] I am far from being an abolitionist, yet if they persist, in their course, the day may come, when all Western Virginia will rise up, in her might and throw off the Shackles, which thro this very Divine institution, as they call it, has been pressing us down.
¹⁰

Fighting the slaveholding interests and their political dominance in the state was the principal issue in the western region, not emancipation or humanitarian concern. Many Western Virginians intended for the creation of a new state to free them from historic domination by the Tidewater and slave owning interests in Virginia, not to help restore the integrity of the Union following 1861, and not to emancipate slaves from their masters.

During the 1850's, the state government in Richmond once more tried to gain support from western counties by promising or completing various internal improvements. However, progress was limited, far below western expectations. Moreover, in the western view, the projects required disproportionately high taxes on their region in deference to the political domination of the east.

The Panic of 1857 and the nationwide economic downturn and financial depression that followed ended most federal and state subsidies for internal improvements, and thus ended most projects and efforts to improve the western Virginia economy through infrastructure development. [Republicans took up the challenge of federally funded internal improvements in the 1860's]. Reflecting problems caused by the Panic of 1857 in the North and Midwest, to which the western Virginia economy was increasingly tied [by the Ohio River, canals, and the emerging railroads], the Panic forced many businesses, banks, mills, factories, and some farms throughout the area of present-day West Virginia to close. Superficially, the new 1851 Constitution appeared to tie eastern and western Virginians closer. But essential economic, social, political, and cultural differences remained and became deeper.

By 1859 there were still strong sectional tensions at work within the state of Virginia as well as nationwide. Additionally, by that date, the western region of Virginia itself was increasingly divided between north and south portions of that region of the state on economic, social, and political issues. Some of the issues mirrored the larger national differences between North and South in the United States. Reflecting the state in general, western Virginia's south-most citizens, less tied to the Ohio Valley and the Midwest, were generally satisfied with changes made in 1851. They were less threatened by slavery, which was more evident there than in the northwest part of the state and the Ohio Valley area. Their social and economic outlooks were more similar to those in the east.

However, citizens in the north and northwest sections of the state, around the Wheeling area, complained that they were treated as the vassals of eastern politicians. They believed their taxes were levied and increased for the benefit of easterners. Internal improvements, such as canals and railroads to connect western areas to eastern markets or as links to the Ohio Valley and Western states, were always a divisive issue and usually more important to the west. The improvements remained more planned, promised, and largely un-built than realized or actual. Moreover, property valuation for purposes of taxation remained a divisive issue. For tax purposes, slaves were usually valued around $300. But by the decade of the 1850's, a prime field hand typically brought four to five times that amount at sale. The east continued to dominate politically.

Regarding population, by the 1850's, despite eastern cities such as Richmond, Alexandria, and Norfolk, the western areas of Virginia had 135,000 more whites than the eastern part. Yet the east still controlled the State Senate by virtue of apportionment criteria that linked property to the allocation of State Senate seats. In the United States House of Representatives, application of the
‘three-fifths' rule
resulted in only five of Virginia's thirteen representatives coming from western districts.