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
3
DESIGNS FOR DIVISION AND DISMEMBERMENT
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.
4
PRECIPITATION: THE CRITICAL EVENTS OF 1859 AND 1860
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 w
ere 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.
However, those areas contained more than half of Virginia’s white population. Westerners resented counting slaves in apportionment at both the state and federal level. But it had essentially nothing to do with regional anti-slavery feeling per se.
Rather, people in the western regions possessed few slaves, and had little compassion for the slaves themselves. Leaders in western Virginia typically considered slavery not as an immoral and inhuman institution, but as an obstacle to their political leverage and control of Virginia politics. However, they also saw slavery as a highly effective means of racial control, as did virtually all white Southerners, whether slaveholders or not. Thus, western Virginians simply wanted to reduce the political domination of the eastern slaveholders. They were hardly of an abolitionist persuasion.
In Virginia’s 1859 gubernatorial elections, western disenchantment with both political parties was evident in newspaper articles and public discourse. Effectively, politics in the region focused only on Democrats. Just a few voters claimed a Whig affiliation. After 1854, the new Republican Party was barely a factor in the region’s politics.11 Historically, politicians of both the Whig and Democratic parties routinely had seemed to ignore western concerns. It was a traditional response for the east and standard grievance in the west. However, in the 1850’s in Virginia, including its western areas, both the Democratic Party and the remaining southern Whigs all pressed pro-slavery arguments.
While the few antislavery Whigs in the western areas of Virginia had begun to gravitate toward the Republican Party after 1854, in the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln received just 2,000 votes from the western panhandle. Their Whig ideas were more economic, harkening back to Henry Clay’s American System. And their economy was tied to and based on the area’s commercial ties to the Ohio Valley. Western Virginians hardly appeared concerned with restricting slavery in the western territories of the U.S. as much as simply disallowing slavery as a factor in Virginia state politics.
In October, 1859, darker storm clouds appeared on the horizon. John Brown and a handful of followers attacked the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Beginning in Virginia, Brown hoped to attract slaves to his banner, establish a colony for runaway slaves in Virginia, and use it as a base from which to march south along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. His goals were to free and arm more slaves, overthrow state governments in the slave states, reconstruct them, and eventually impose a new Constitution on the United States. The impact of the raid was momentous.
Brown and his men succeeded in seizing the Harpers Ferry Armory. But news of the raid resulted in townspeople resisting Brown’s assault and a summons to U.S. government officials in Washington. [Brown and his men failed to cut all the telegraph lines!]. The federal government responded to the raid by sending Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee to defeat the John Brown insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. Brown and his band were forced Rogue State 15 to withdraw to an engine house at the arsenal, where surviving members were captured. They were subsequently indicted and tried at Charles Town, Virginia.
John Brown’s infamous raid brought national attention to the emotional divisions concerning slavery to a crescendo. In Virginia itself, the affair also served as a reminder of the continued east-west rift over the institution of slavery in the state, as well as the broader national issues of slavery, slavery expansion, free soil, and abolition. When John Brown was hung on December 2, 1859, he was mourned as a martyr by many in the North. Southerners, however, including most Virginians, were outraged by his actions. Nationally, John Brown’s raid brought emotions over slavery to a fever pitch. It clearly was one of the key events that led to secession in 1860-1861 and the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in April 1861.
But between John Brown’s raid and the secession of the first seven Southern states in late 1860 and early 1861, politics also played a role in the deepening national divide over slavery. John Brown’s raid 1859 on Harpers Ferry brought the debate over slavery and its westward expansion to the forefront of the nation’s political agenda and debate as never before. The differences were palpable, and the consequences for the nation of the political decisions and actions of 1860 were crucial.
In 1860, the Republican Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery [but did not advocate abolition], nominated a moderate, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery but pledged not to interfere with the institution where it existed. To Southerners, however, Lincoln’s views were tantamount to barely disguised abolitionism. They didn’t believe him or any other Republicans.
By that time, to Southerners, free soil views were tantamount to abolitionism in the eyes of most Southerners. Southerners feared that Lincoln’s election would lead to the decline and demise of slavery and the South itself. As a result, Southern fire-eaters vowed to leave the Union if Lincoln was elected, a result that many anticipated from reading the 1856 electoral math and continuing growth of Republican Party strength in the North since then.
The Democratic Party split during its April 1860 national convention. The Southern delegation walked out in protest against the party’s failure to endorse a federal slave code for the western territories. Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore later that summer. They nominated another moderate, Stephen A. Douglas.
Douglas, like Lincoln, also was from Illinois. The Southern faction of the Democratic Party that had bolted the original convention refused to attend the Baltimore conclave. It held its own convention in Richmond and nominated the sitting Democratic Vice President of the U.S., John Breckinridge, for president. The Democratic split virtually guaranteed a Republican victory in the Electoral College in 1860.
A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, was another moderate party composed primarily of former Whigs, remnants of the American [Know-Nothing] Party, and other unattached groups. It drew its strength principally from the border states of the South. The Constitutional Union Party was organized just before the election of 1860, principally as a last ditch effort to bridge the gap between North and South.
The Constitutional Union Party had no greater purpose than continuing to paper over the widening crack in the Union caused by slavery. It had no substantive platform other than maintaining national unity through continued compromise [the time for which had definitely ceased for many in the North and especially the South]. The Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell of Tennessee. It had little chance in the national canvas and took no effective position on slavery. Although it did fairly well in Virginia and a few other border states, it never stood a chance to capture the presidency, and nationally both pro and anti-slave advocates saw it as inconsequential. It disappeared thereafter.
Reflecting divisions in the state of Virginia over the issues of slavery and disunion, Bell carried Virginia overall [as well as the border stat es of Tennessee and Kentucky]. Representing hard core status quo, secessionist, renegad
e Democrats, Breckinridge ironically won most of his Virginia votes in the western areas of the Old Dominion.12 Lincoln won the national election without carrying a single Southern state. The limited support he received in Virginia came almost exclusively in the Northern Panhandle around and north of Wheeling. And it was minor.
It is difficult to understand the apparent anomaly of western Virginians favoring the most ardently pro-Southern and pro-slavery candidate of the four in 1860, or even why some western Virginians would have favored Lincoln over the Southern moderate in the race, John Bell. Be that as it may, almost immediately following Lincoln’s election, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, Southern states began the process of seceding from the Union. Those actions set the stage for civil war and eventual creation of the new state of West Virginia.
5
THE FIRST ACT OF SECESSION: VIRGINIA
Virginia seceded from the Union in May1861. That action set the stage for the eventual creation of West Virginia. The latter would not have occurred without the first action.
On November 15, 1860, Virginia Governor John Letcher called the General Assembly into an extra session scheduled to begin on January 7, 1861.However, although Abraham Lincoln had been elected, he was not yet inaugurated. And South Carolina had not yet seceded when Letcher issued the call. The Palmetto State passed its ordinance of secession on December 20, 1860.
Clearly, despite remaining officially in the Union until May 1861, there were leaders in Virginia who were moving toward secession long before it actually became reality. In response to the governor’s request, the Virginia General Assembly in January 1861 subsequently called for a state convention to determine Virginia’s course in the crisis.
One hundred fifty-two Virginia convention delegates were elected. They convened in Richmond on February 13, 1861. During the first two months of the convention, moderate sentiment prevailed and the general mood of many of the delegates appeared to be against secession. However, on April 13, 1861, Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces. Within days, President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteer troops to put down the Southern rebellion. That changed everything among the populace in Virginia and much of the border South.
Rogue State Page 2
