Early Black Migration and the Post-emancipation Black Community in Cabell County, West Virginia, 1865–1871

West Virginia’s formation divided many groups within the new state. Grievances born of secession inflamed questions of taxation, political representation, and constitutional change, and greatly complicated black aspirations during the state’s formative years. It must be remembered that in 1860 the black population in the Virginia counties comprising the current state of West Virginia totaled only 5.9 percent of the general population, with most found in the western Virginia mountain region.¹ Moreover, long-standing attitudes on race and slavery held great sway throughout Appalachia. As historian John C. Inscoe notes, “southern mountaineers were first and foremost southerners and they viewed slavery and race not unlike those of their yeoman or even slaveholding counterparts elsewhere in the South.”² Thus, the quest by the state’s black residents to achieve the full measure of freedom in the immediate post-Civil War years faced formidable challenges.

This essay builds upon the voluminous works studying the historic movement of black people in immediate post-emancipation America, and focuses on southern West Virginia where the state’s largest contingent of black residents resided among the state’s largest contingent of former slave owners and southern sympathizers.³ To meet the mandates for statehood recognition established by President Lincoln, the state’s legislators were forced to rectify a particularly troublesome conundrum: how to grant citizenship to the state’s black residents as well as to its former Confederates. While both populations eventually garnered the rights of citizenship, the fact that a significant number of southern West Virginia’s black residents departed the region suggests that the political gains granted to them were not enough to stem the tide of out-migration during the state’s formative years, from 1863 to 1870.

In the mid-1860s, Collis P. Huntington’s decision to construct the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from Richmond, Virginia, through the New River Valley to Cabell County, West Virginia, helped reverse black out-migration in the region. Attracted by the promise of wage-labor employment with the upstart railroad, thousands of workers, many of them black, poured into the valley, initiating the first phase of industrial capitalism in southern West Virginia. In 1871, Huntington founded a town that took his name and became the western transshipment station for the railroad, encouraging a black influx into Cabell County. Those arriving in Cabell County, and eventually Huntington, settled among a small black residential population of farmers and agricultural workers who were too few, too dispersed, and too poor to witness much change in their lives beyond the fact that they were all now free. In the process, these migrants irrevocably transformed the nature of life and commerce in the region.

Cabell County was as far removed from Richmond and the Tidewater region as any county in Virginia, situated adjacent to the Ohio River and the western frontier. Named for William H. Cabell, the former Virginia governor from 1805–1808, the county was formed in 1809 out of Kanawha County. At first it encompassed 1,750 square miles, including all or parts of Lincoln, Wayne, Logan, Boone, Putnam, and Wyoming Counties. In subsequent years the county’s political boundaries shrank.⁴ By 1867, five districts encompassing 282 square miles in the southwestern corner of the state comprised the county.

Initially drawn by its strategic location adjacent to the Ohio River near southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky and cognizant of the county’s cheap, arable land, plentiful timber, and abundant navigable waterways, slaveholders increasingly settled in the county throughout the early to mid-1800s. Frequently accompanying them were their slaves.⁵ By the mid-1800s, the county’s two main towns, Guyandotte and Barboursville, were vibrant villages. By the early 1830s, Guyandotte was hosting many river travelers as well as benefiting from the construction of a road which connected it with the James River and Kanawha Turnpike at Barboursville, the county seat.⁶ During its prime in the 1830s, the turnpike’s importance as an east/west artery for all manner of travel and commerce was second only to the National Road.^7...