The Slaveholders' War: The Secession Crisis in Kanawha County, Western Virginia, 1860-1861

West Virginia's historians have tended to minimize the importance of slavery in the state's formation. With fewer than fifteen thousand slaves in the forty-eight counties that formed the state in 1863, the scarcity of the institution appeared to have had little hold over the region. Charles Ambler and George E. Moore contrasted the slave-based plantation economy of eastern Virginia with that of the free labor-based small farms and factories in the west to explain the state's formation. Richard Orr Curry's revisionist work shared this view. The slavery issue, he argued, arose only during debates on emancipation at the statehood conventions, not before. Since then, scholars have placed individual counties under the microscope to examine sectional loyalties at the local level. First, James H. Cook's study of Harrison County argued that Unionists consisting of former Whigs and some Democrats tried to thwart secessionist forces led by local elites. They succeeded by only ten votes. Second, John W. Shaffer's study of remote Barbour County argued that personal issues like marriage and kinship mattered more than wealth or community in choosing sides.¹ Third, Ken Fones-Wolf revealed how the threat of free-labor ideology added to the strong kinship and community ties among the small number of Wheeling secessionists. These studies have identified many new issues that divided western Virginians on the issue of secession except one: slavery.

The time has come to bring slavery into the debate on how West Virginians chose sides in the Civil War. With over two thousand slaves, one-sixth of the total in the forty-eight counties, Kanawha County provides a useful example to show how slavery affected political, social, and economic relations among its residents. While salt furnaces substituted for cotton plantations there, local slaveholders exhibited many of the same traits as their eastern counterparts. The institution affected whites as much as slaves. As Eugene Genovese has pointed out, "the paternalism of the planters towards their slaves was reinforced by the semi-paternal relationship between the planters and their neighbors" that made the planters "the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic."² Other studies of Appalachia during this time place slaveholding as a major influence on allegiances. Peter Wallenstein on East Tennessee, Jonathan Sarris on north Georgia, and Martin Crawford on Ashe County in North Carolina each revealed how concentrations of wealth, especially of slaves, split the population into secessionists and cooperationists in 1860-1861.³ This essay argues that slavery and slaveholding exerted a powerful influence on sectional allegiances in western Virginia. It first explains how slaveholders dominated the county's economy and its politics before the war. It then examines their use of pro-slavery arguments to win over the majority to support secession. Finally, a detailed comparison of Union and Confederate military records reveals the political, social, and economic differences between the two sides.

The salt business brought slavery to Kanawha County. Natural brine (salt water) deposits made the area one of the largest salt producers in the antebellum United States. Boiling the brine in large kettles separated the powder. Workers packed the powder into barrels, and loaded them on to steamboats for shipment down the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. Kanawha's furnaces trebled their production between 1829 and 1849, but declined to 1.2 million by 1857, the last year on record.⁴ This process employed a majority of the county's free labor force, directly or indirectly. Of 3,424 white, free black, and mulatto workers listed in the 1860 census, 464, or 14 percent worked in the salt industry. Their jobs included coopers, well borers, engineers, sales agents, and inspectors. Miners and lumbermen dug coal and chopped wood for the furnaces, and flat-boat pilots and waggoners transported the barrels down the river to market. A further one third of the county's labor force consisted of laborers possibly employed in the salt business. Those indirectly employed by the salt business included lawyers and clerks who handled bureaucratic issues, and merchants who delivered goods to...