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Chapter 10: Conflict with Eastern Virginia
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Conflict with EasternVirginia The Seeds of Diversity. The dramatic separation of West Virginia from Virginia during the Civil War sprang from no sudden impulse but from an accumulation of differences and grievances. Physiographically, economically, and culturally, the Eastern Panhandle was an integral part of the upper Potomac Valley and, like adjacent parts of Virginia and Maryland, a hinterland of coastal areas with an Atlantic orientation. On the other hand, the Allegheny Plateau, which encompassed nearly eighty percent of West Virginia, was dominated by rugged, mountainous terrain that precluded the plantation economy common in parts of the Eastern Panhandle as well as in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia. Hill country farms, which combined a diversityof crops with animal husbandry, prevailed in the plateau area. There, too, abundant timber, coal, salt, oil, natural gas, iron, and silica resources pointed toward an industrial rather than an agricultural way of life. Virginia land policies accentuated differences created by natural conditions . The requirement that Valley of Virginia speculators recruit settlers from outside Virginia drew large numbers of Germans and Scotch-Irish and sprinklings of Welsh, Dutch, and other nationalities to the Valley and upper Potomac regions. From the great post-Revolutionary migrations, trans-Allegheny West Virginia drew thousands of settlers from Pennsylania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, as well as from the British Isles. Most of the new immigrants had no prior ties to Virginia and no ingrained loyalties to the Old Dominion. Too much can be made of differences between eastern and western Virginia . Diversityof background and resources may indeed add strength to a state, and wiser leaders with more enlightened policies might have welded the East and Westtogether. Unfortunately,many Virginialeaders did not bring to bear on state problems the same statesmanship that they mustered in dealing with national issues. Nor did impatient Westerners always appreciate the mounting economic difficulties of eastern Virginia as the nineteenth century advanced. Internal improvements, land policies, taxes, education, and political rights and aspirations became increasingly divisive issues, and few government officials had the vision or political support to deal with them effectively. Conflicts and tensions repeatedly threatened the unity of the state and finally broke the Old Dominion asunder during the Civil War. Conflictwith EastmVirginia 91 PditkalkwakeningoftheWest. Throughout the fist half of the nineteenth century western discontent focused on political issues such as voting rights, representation in the General Assembly, and methods of choosing state and local officials. Like most Americans, West Virginians believed that political power held the key to the solution of most problems and to the advancement of society. Their own political weakness vis-a-vis that of the planter aristocracy was a continuing source of frustration. The constitution of Virginia, adopted in 1776 under the stress of wartime necessity, was a bulwark of eastern power. It incorporated a property qualification for voting, allotted each county, irrespective of population, two seats in the House of Delegates, and provided an undemocratic system of county government . It created twenty-four state senatorial districts but allowed the trans-Blue Ridge country only four of them. Actually, western counties suffered no discrimination in representation, in respect to their population, but by 1829 an estimated 31,000 out of 76,000 men of voting age in Virginia were disfranchised , with the western proportion increasing. The first West Virginian to speak out in the legislature for reform of the state constitution was John G. Jackson, who in 1798won election to the House of Delegates from Harrison County. In one of his first actions, the twenty-oneyear -old Jackson presented a petition from his county calling for amendments to the constitution, particularly sections relating to suffrage and representation in the General Assembly, but the legislature rejected the memorial. Writing in the Richmond Examiner under the pseudonym of "A Mountaineer " in 1803, Jackson set forth arguments on which Westerners thereafter rested the case for reform. He contended that the property qualification for voting violated the Virginia Bill of Rights, which declared that "all men having sufficientevidence of permanent interest with, and attachment to the cornrnunity have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed ordeprived of their propertyfor public uses, without their own consent, or that of their Representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not in like manner, assented for the public good. " Those who paid taxes on property other than real estate and were denied the right to vote, he maintained, were taxed without their consent and denied a right guaranteed them. Jackson branded...