Forming a Middle Class: The Civil War in Kanawha County, West(ern) Virginia 1861–1865

West Virginians today are scarcely aware of how much the Civil War transformed their society. Its historians have only recently questioned the notion of the state’s people as a homogenous and united population. In Sectionalism in Virginia, Charles Ambler contrasts the free, hardworking westerners with the wealthy slaveholders of eastern Virginian. His students Festus Summers and George Ellis Moore maintained the thesis in their works. Richard Orr Curry rebuts this argument by proving the existence of widespread Confederate support in the west and loyal opposition to statehood in A House Divided. The book does not, however, discuss economic differences within the region. The last two generations of scholars have revealed significant social variances in the region but dispute their significance. In “The New Dominion and the Old,” John A. Williams reveals the continued influence prewar agrarian elites had on the new state over the industrial-based state makers.¹ In another work, West Virginia: A History, he urges care when using a triptych of observations by future president Rutherford B. Hayes that “the secessionists in this region are the wealthy and educated, who do nothing openly, and the vagabonds, criminals, and ignorant barbarians of the country. The Union men are the middle classes, the law-and-order, well-behaved folks.”² The more recent county-level studies disagree on the importance of class. James H. Cook’s study of Harrison County and John W. Shaffer’s work on Barbour County, respectively, point toward political partisanship and Virginia nativity as the bases for support for secession, not class. On the other hand, Ken Fones-Wolf argues in “Traitors in Wheeling” that fears of class strife from the Republican Party’s free labor ideology motivated that city’s small disunionist cadre. In “The Slaveholder’s War,” I myself conclude that those tied to Kanawha County’s connections to slavery compelled its wealthy elites and those tied to its salt industry to support secession. The debate is far from over.³

This discussion lacks a key element: change over time. All but Shaffer’s work either generalize about West Virginia society or encompass a narrow time frame that excludes the issue entirely. Additionally, most works study multiple counties. Even Williams’s analysis of Hayes’s comments uses sources from several counties. The diversity in West Virginia means that what was true in one county is not necessarily true of any another. This essay builds upon community studies of Appalachia and other parts of the South to see how a single jurisdiction changed over the course of the war. It uses the example of Kanawha County, located around the current state capital at Charleston, to demonstrate how the war changed social relations amongst its population. Its industrial economy created a stratified and stable society of rich whites, poor whites, and enslaved persons, living in urban and rural environments, much as Hayes indicated above. When war came, the classes responded in different ways. Four years of savage conflict, including within the county itself, brought about a new self-assertive Unionist middle class. This essay first examines Kanawha County’s prewar society and economy and then the wartime politics that compelled the social changes within its borders. These changes are some of the lasting consequences of the Civil War in Kanawha County.⁴

The salt business shaped social relations in Kanawha society. From the start of white settlement in the 1790s, the economy revolved around the production and transportation of salt. Numerous independent furnaces sprung up along the Kanawha River. These outfits boiled brine to extract salt powder and then packed the salt into barrels and transported them by river to the meatpacking industries of Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. Many firms later merged into larger companies. Agriculture ranked as the second most important economic activity, though many farmers also worked in the salt business. The furnaces employed large numbers of free and enslaved African American and white workers. The almost all-white free population quadrupled from 3,541 in 1810 to 13,966 by the start of the Civil War. The numbers of...