by Steven Stoll
Another way of saying this is that Alexander Hamilton and the monopolists performed Act One in the drama of extracting value from the mountains: taxation and speculation. A new generation of capitalists performed Act Two: full-scale industrialization. The timeline worked this way: Land purchases to gain hold of resources began as early as the 1840s and intensified after 1865. The state of West Virginia was founded in 1863. Its governors, legislators, and members of Congress all acted to attract industry. Railroad lines extended across the state between the 1850s and 1870s, the Baltimore and Ohio in the north and the Chesapeake and Ohio in the south. By 1880, close to 56,500 stationary steam engines operated in the United States, all of them needing coal.
But mining was not the only or even the primary form of extraction. Felling the forest affected a much larger area. A great many counties had no coal. All of them had trees. Commercial logging began in the 1870s, but the two industries functioned simultaneously, often undertaken by the same companies, dependent on the same railroad infrastructure, and employing the same workers. For as profoundly transformative as coal mining proved to be, it would have left most households in place. Clear-cutting the woods changed everything.9
And yet, mountaineer makeshift was fading for its own reasons. The arrival of corporations with designs on the minerals underlying fields of rye and glades of glistening spring ramps coincided with a faltering agrarian economy. Even before the onslaught began, a rising population pinched the extent and robustness of the commons. Everything happened at once. Declining returns from subsistence and exchange made them vulnerable at the same time that capital shifted its modus operandi from passive speculation to active extraction. Coal companies moved to evict the plain folk at the same time that railroads created a mechanical conduit for dismantling the ecological base. But something else happened first, something that formed the political and legal framework necessary to everything that followed: the founding of West Virginia.
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THE VIRGINIA ABOVE ONE THOUSAND FEET declared its independence from the Virginia below. In his inaugural address, Arthur I. Boreman, the first governor, gave a lecture in political ecology. “West Virginia should long since have had a separate State existence. The East has always looked upon that portion of the State west of the mountains, as a sort of outside appendage—a territory in a state of pupilage.” He explained, “The rivers rise in the mountains and run towards the Northwest,” resulting in two peoples with “little intercourse between them, either social or commercial.” He was right. The parallel watersheds of the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah Valley separate west from east, and the rivers of the Plateau point trade and communication toward Ohio. The two provinces developed different forms of agriculture and were settled by different families.
Slavery also differed on either side of the Blue Ridge. In the oft-told tale about West Virginia’s founding, slaveholding and plantations had no foothold. Freedom-loving mountaineers hated the practice, and this gave them different interests from the cotton planters down country. The topography made great plantations impossible anyway. In order to escape the dominance of planters, their influence bloated by the Constitution’s “three-fifths” clause, the mountaineers broke away in 1863. They expressed their audaciousness in a motto, Montani semper liberi.10
What is true about the oft-told tale is exaggerated. Eighteen percent of Appalachian households owned slaves the year the Civil War began, compared to about 30 percent for the entire South. The Virginia counties that eventually composed the state of West Virginia included the fewest number of African-Americans in the region. Around 6 percent of households in these counties owned at least one person in 1860. But the major slave owners were also major landowners and significant capitalists. They financed the salt and iron mines and other early examples of extractive industry. Some of them moved into commercial cattle production. William Dickerson, the richest planter in West Virginia, owned one hundred slaves. He harvested 2,500 bushels of corn a year and ran 117 head of livestock on his plantation in Kanawha County. It’s true that the majority of households in the mountain counties owned no slaves, but that fact explains almost nothing about the origins of West Virginia.11
The friction between Virginia’s western counties and its planter class had more to do with speculation in land than with slavery. Recall that wilderness grantees owned almost all the arable land west of the Blue Ridge. But speculation is a subtle sport. On one hand, the grantees awaited an increase in value that would make all that inert real estate pay off. On the other hand, they conspired with their allies in the General Assembly to keep mountain counties politically disorganized and underdeveloped. They prevented any public money from flowing uphill as improvements because although roads and schools would have increased the value of land, they would have also caused higher property taxes. This behavior might seem self-defeating. But speculators understood that modest improvements would not have resulted in the boom they dreamed of. So even as population surged on the Plateau, Virginia’s patrician class continued to regard the mountains as their private tax shelter.12
The commercial and political class of the western counties mostly lived in Wheeling. Its location in the panhandle wedged between Ohio and Pennsylvania gave its merchants closer ties to Pittsburgh than any place south or east of Morgantown. Cotton planters must have felt far distant to the people of Wheeling, and yet planters controlled the Commonwealth of Virginia, with designs on the industrial development of the western counties. Since the 1820s, planters had established foundries, forges, and ironworks, some operated by hundreds of slaves. Slaves mined salt and iron. In 1837, Virginia’s General Assembly established a joint-stock company capitalized at $500,000 to explore 100,000 acres embracing the upland counties of Nicholas, Kanawha, and Braxton. The planters gazed upon unimaginable wealth in timber and coal. At some point, Wheeling’s merchants decided that they wanted this frontier for themselves. They wanted authority over courts, tax collection, and the formation of joint-stock companies. Securing all that meant taking administrative control from the planter-dominated General Assembly. They had no hope of winning an electoral victory or of outnumbering the planters. They needed their own state.13
Virginia seceded from the United States in May 1861. Of the nearly fifty-four thousand residents of the western counties, 64 percent voted in a statewide referendum to remain in the Union. Their unwilling part in bringing on the Civil War and the important role Virginia played in the Confederate States of America (Richmond was its capital) drove them to launch a secession movement of their own. The founders of West Virginia included a miller, an industrialist, the owner of a coal mine and brickyard, several general merchants, a cattle dealer, lawyers, and a minister. They did not unanimously agree about the Confederacy or the role of West Virginia in the Civil War, but the northern tilt of their interests resulted in an application to Congress, which admitted the new state to the Union.
Yet the founding was more of a conspiracy than a mass movement. The panhandle voted in favor of the issue by 70 percent. But the middle tier voted it down by 70 percent. And the southernmost tier, consisting of one-third of the new state, including the counties with the richest coal deposits, didn’t vote for it at all. The Wheeling merchants might have written off the plain folk as politically irrelevant. Or they might have known that many of them—perhaps a majority—would have voted to fight the Union rather than join it. (One correspondent, writing from Wheeling, said, “The whole country south and east of us is abandoned to the southern Confederacy.”) It wasn’t that mountaineers had no interest in politics, but the avenue of influence they most pursued led to the courthouse, not the statehouse. Even if word traveled to them through hundreds of valleys, residents of the southern counties tended to pay more attention to the welfare of those related to them, on whom they most relied.14
Subsistence societies have strong bonds within and between groups of related people. By themselves, households cannot endure all sorts of stressors and threats. In fa
mine or violence—when lords, enemy tribes, or central governments threatened—survival required alliances, escape, and retrenchment. In the southern mountains of the nineteenth century, a kin group or clan consisted of linked households. These sprawling hierarchies included unrelated people united by proximity, common political interests, and financial dependency. Where few institutions existed for individual expression, family membership facilitated social and political life. That inspired loyalty and insularity. A patronage system emerged, in which one’s influence in the county depended on one’s well-placed relatives and allies. Certain offices bounced around among the members of certain groups. Two researchers explain it this way: “Personal ties and connections became the foundation on which public politics was transacted and antagonisms from economic life easily spilled over into public policies and governance.” This also meant that if one clan endured humiliation or diminished influence due to the actions of another, a larger conflict might ensue.15
Feuding cannot be reduced to the political wounds of patronage. It erupted from disputes internal to communities. It had something to do with a culture of male honor within a vacuum of police authority. But it mostly had to do with the environmental and social changes going on in the mountains, the subject of this chapter. No matter the immediate or circumstantial reasons that they fought each other, families did so against a backdrop of declining opportunities for profit and the looming imperative of wage work. I will have more to say about feuding, including the one between the Hatfields and McCoys. For now, the point is that these conflicts should no longer be maligned as bloody acts of revenge over archaic bonds of kinship. They emerged from the changes taking place in the mountains, changes connected to the scramble for Appalachia and the founding of West Virginia. Yet it is also true that kin groups and households tended not to engage in state or national politics, and that left them vulnerable to be acted upon at a crucial moment.16
The founders of West Virginia had no interest in the democratic engagement of citizens. They wanted to wield without opposition all the power vested in governing institutions and offices. Liquidating the forests and mineral deposits depended on legally constituted authority. Governments claim dominion over economic activity within their borders. They decide what is permissible on private property. They can charter corporations, thus granting these organizations legal permission to do certain things in certain places. The legislature chartered 150 corporations in 1866 alone, including the Sand Hill and Mud Lick Oil Company, the Marrowbone Oil and Mining Company, the Great Kanawha Petroleum Coal and Lumber Company, and the Hartford Oil and Mining Company. Here we link back to where this book began, with the contradiction between capitalists drawing up maps of their anticipated domains and the occupants of that land. The Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley depicts this conflict in cartographic form, and it raises an extraordinary question: What made politicians and investors think that they could do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted?
The divide between the merchant-founders and the farmer-hunters resembles that between peasants and the political elite of developing countries today. Malian peasants, for example, don’t need the nation-state in order to live, but then the government might proceed with its plans without regard to their interests. Officials perceive peasants as politically irrelevant because the latter more often act through village councils than bureaucratic ministries. (We will look more closely at a story from Mali in the last chapter.) In much the same way, the political leadership of West Virginia in the 1860s employed its power to charter corporations in order to sell off its resources, enriching the merchant elite with little communication with the people most affected by these deals. Had the leadership spoken honestly about it and on the record, they might have said that West Virginia would never join the industrializing world if it allowed its peasantry to stand in the way.
What if investors bought stock in a coal mine, amounting to millions of dollars, only to have it shut down or its gains taxed by a county or town? This is why corporations sought legal protection from local statutes. They also wanted to limit the number of their political clients, thus freeing them from the perplexing and unseemly task of placating every notable citizen. An obscure piece of jurisprudence allowed state legislatures to sanction corporate activities without gaining the consent of anyone whose life might be interrupted. It was called Dillon’s Rule.17
The rule came from John Forrest Dillon. In 1868, as justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, Dillon promulgated a diminished conception of local sovereignty: “Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy.” The idea that a state could close down one of the towns within its borders sounds perfectly crazy, but Dillon said that municipalities existed as “the mere tenants at will of the legislature,” regardless of the fact that towns in some parts of the country existed for a century before states formed around them. Dillon made these comments in a decision about whether a railroad had the right to lay tracks down a city street. The city objected. Judge Dillon averred that only a state could stop a railroad. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld Dillon’s Rule in 1891.18
One effect of Dillon’s Rule was to streamline access to natural resources. A corporation only needed to sway a governor or a fistful of legislators in order to condemn land, restructure tax laws, defeat striking workers, and otherwise extract where they pleased. Critics spoke up at the time, especially J. Allen Smith of the University of Washington. “The corporate interests engaged in the exploitation of municipal franchises are securely entrenched behind a series of constitutional and legal checks on the majority,” Smith wrote in 1907. By shifting power over local environments from towns and counties to state governments, Dillon’s Rule contributed to a new kind of powerlessness, one essential to the scramble for Appalachia.19
But industrialists didn’t really need Dillon’s Rule. A revised constitution seemed to clear the way for their greater influence. West Virginia Democrats never accepted Republican influence over the founding of the state. In 1872, they held a second convention to make an instrument of government more to their liking. The new version magnified the power of county judges, elevating them from legal adjudicators with significant authority to government administrators who performed almost every role. They superintended the police and approved all matters of county finance, including roads, bridges, and mills. The effect narrowed the number of influential officials and enhanced their power. To the extent that judges could be bought off or swayed toward corporate interests, the new constitution fed the scramble. The same document loosened laws of title, making purchases easier for investors.20
The scramble also required allies in Congress. One of the principal characters here was Johnson Camden. He was born in western Virginia and started his own oil company during the 1860s. When Standard Oil absorbed the Camden Consolidated Oil Company in 1875, Camden instantly became a major stockholder and John D. Rockefeller’s representative in the Ohio Valley. Camden made sure that all the oil produced in West Virginia ended up in Standard’s Baltimore refineries. He did even more for Rockefeller after 1881 when he was elected to the United States Senate. Senator Camden assembled a consortium of investors who funded a railroad along the Ohio River from Wheeling to Huntington that circumvented the sluggish barges that carried the oil of Standard’s rivals. It only overstates things a little to say that Camden didn’t represent West Virginia at all. He answered to just one constituent: John D. Rockefeller.21
Camden’s friend and partner was Henry Davis, whose own empire consisted of the Potomac and Piedmont Coal and Railway Company and the Davis Coal and Coke Company, which he operated with his son-in-law, Stephen Elkins. Davis was elected to the United States Senate in 1871. For two years of his two terms, he and Camden composed West Virginia’s senatorial delegation. They embodied astounding conflicts of interest, acting as
lobbyists for their own companies while occupying positions that allowed them to direct law and policy. Elkins’s career of graft and corruption began in New Mexico. There he was implicated in a scheme to evict settlers from the Maxwell Land Grant and transfer ownership to himself and other members of the Santa Fe Ring. Later, he served as secretary of war in the Benjamin Harrison administration. After that, he took his turn as U.S. senator from West Virginia. None of the three came to their positions in order to legislate for farmers or miners or any other citizens. Their careers remind us that it was not always outsiders who exploited the mountains but that corporations needed accomplices among a mountain-born elite.22
From all this, we might assume that the courts, too, acted for corporations in every instance. But they didn’t, at least not before about 1890. West Virginia’s second constitution bore a strong resemblance to Virginia’s, and Virginia privileged its landholding classes. Planters wanted most political power to reside in the counties, and they wanted laws that protected their land in disputes with creditors. West Virginia inherited these principles, and the plain folk benefited. For about thirty years, judges often upheld mountain deeds. But this changed in a single year. In 1890, a judicial revolution brought a new generation of judges to the state supreme court. They reoriented the judiciary toward the interests of industry. For example, where Virginia judges routinely held railroads liable for the fires they caused and the cattle they killed, West Virginia judges forced plaintiffs to prove negligence. It was another step toward eliminating local control.23
