“This Bastard New Virginia”: Slavery, West Virginia Exceptionalism, and the Secession Crisis

In March 1858, occasioned by the dedication of a new monument to George Washington in Richmond, the Wellsburg Herald complained to its readers in western Virginia about the “insufferable insolence” of the “high toned hospitality of the Eastern Virginians.” One of the speakers at the dedication was Tidewater Virginian Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett, a member of Congress and nephew of Southern rights Democratic Senator Robert M. T. Hunter. In 1850, Garnett had published a pro-secession tract, The Union, Past and Future: How It Works and How to Save It, and during the decade before the Civil War he remained an inveterate supporter of South Carolina-style radicalism. During the celebration honoring Washington, Garnett offered a toast. Just as Virginia had resisted the aggression of England during the Revolution, he said, the Old Dominion should now oppose encroachments by the North. No state except for Virginia, no region except the South, could claim Washington’s mantle. “The South first, the South last,” Garnett concluded, “and the South at all times.”¹

Located in the northern panhandle, between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the town of Wellsburg in the 1850s was a center of hostility toward eastern Virginia. The Herald’s correspondent offered a starkly different interpretation of slaveholding, power, politics, and about the structure of the political system. Much of this resentment manifested itself during the constitutional crisis of 1850–1851, when a state constitutional convention deadlocked over power sharing between nonslaveholders and slaveholders. Soon after convening, the convention remained stalemated over legislative apportionment, with competing “white basis” (which would apportion entirely on white population) and “mixed basis” (which would retain the traditional practice of weighting representation based on slaveholding). The constitutional crisis of 1850–1851 yielded a compromise in which the lower house was apportioned by white basis and the upper house by mixed basis, but a deep-seated division among Virginians remained. The Wellsburg Herald expressed this resentment and often documented easterners’ slaveholding arrogance. Despite an obsession with a culture of honor, easterners had violated their own exalted political and civic values. This was, the reporter wrote, a “humiliating spectacle—Virginia had invited men from all parts of the Union to be present on a great national occasion.” Those “strangers and guests” who listened to Garnett’s speech left Virginia profoundly insulted because he had diminished the national identification of George Washington. Such was “the repudiation which the ‘fire-eating’ disunionism gave to the old fashioned hospitality of the old Dominion.”²

The Wellsburg Herald provides one of the better examples of an emerging northwest Virginia mentality—and what became a West Virginia exceptionalism. Purchasing the newspaper at the age of twenty-three, editor John G. Jacobs was openly contemptuous of eastern Virginians’ hatred of anti-slavery politicians, including those in the new Republican Party. The Wellsburg Herald was “under no obligation to any party,” disinclined “to ask for favors from anyone,” and indifferent toward those accusing it of abolitionism. Jacobs believed that it was absurd for every Virginia magistrate, “every cross-roads Postmaster,” to become a “vigilance committee” to judge what was incendiary.³ But the Herald’s commentary suggested something further—that there were momentous changes occurring in late antebellum Virginia. On one level, the same narrative of sectional conflict leading to secession and Civil War was playing out in Virginia, the South’s most populous state and home to the largest number of slaves in the Union. Eventually, in April 1861, after South Carolina’s assault on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s organization of an invasion force, Virginians would secede and join the Confederacy.

On another level, however, this narrative becomes more complicated. In the late antebellum years an active struggle was waged in the commonwealth for the meaning of the republic, a struggle that centered on the role and appropriate power of slaveholders and slavery. To some extent, this went far beyond the intrastate sectionalism existing in most of the states of the Union in the Civil War Era. Uniquely, Virginia became the only state in American history to implode and to break apart through internal secession. That...