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C h a p t e r 1 Republican Professions, an Undemocratic Reality When various academic and other writers attempt to explain the basic reasons for western Virginia’s estrangement with eastern Virginia and the eventual formation of a separate state, they invariably emphasize sectionalism in its various manifestations as the underlying cause. The obvious importance of sectionalism as a reality in the commonwealth cannot be dismissed, but geographical sectionalism in itself was not constitutional or political destiny for Virginians. The actuality does not account for the outcome in 1863. Something more fundamental and discordant prowled antebellum Virginia. Other original states such as Pennsylvania, Maryland , and North Carolina possessed at times in their history a disaffected west or upcountry, yet they never experienced the rupture that Virginia did. Something was different in Virginia.1 For various reasons, Virginia did not constitutionally and politically adjust to the growth of the west within its borders. It never ensured the full sharing of political power among all adult, white, male citizens in the commonwealth. Its governance was never inclusive. Virginia’s first constitution of 1776, like those in other states, limited both the franchise and representation. Over time, while reluctantly adapting to the rise of democracy in an increasingly egalitarian age, the state never yielded before the Civil War on the issue of equal representation on the white basis in both legislative houses and on certain electoral procedures. Virginia sustained a distorted tax structure that favored slaveholders and an electoral system based on viva voce voting. This latter system favored a slaveholding elite, even in western counties, that often controlled county politics and its statewide reflection and tended to maintain incumbents in office. In the final analysis, by 1861, Virginia had not adopted to the main currents of American democracy to the degree that other states had. National events then intruded and provided the opportunity, stimulated by the commonwealth’s own constitutional responses, for disaffected westerners to seek solutions to long existing constitutional and political problems.2 25 26 West Virginia’s Civil War–Era Constitution This interpretation of the antebellum outcome of Virginia constitutional history significantly differs from that of Fletcher Melvin Green, the leading historian of constitutional development in the South Atlantic states including Virginia. Green contended that the jaundiced view of the course of democratic reform in Virginia and other South Atlantic states arose from the contemporary appraisal of Northern abolitionists who saw slavery “as the absolute negation of liberty and equality” and who viewed non-slaveholding whites as being without intelligence and enterprise to demand their rights. Green then argued that Southern states from 1776 to 1860 progressively expanded democratic precepts in their constitutions and had shorn the aristocrats of their political power to control the masses. While conceding that absolute political equality and democracy did not exist in the area, he maintained thatin1860these Southernstate constitutionswereasdemocratic asthoseof Northern states. Not to oversimplify Professor Green’s quest for Southern normality and progressivism, one can differ in regard to degree of reform in Virginia and the allpervasive constitutional impact of slavery. Green deemphasized the importance of thechattelinstitution.Perhapstheaccursedabolitionistswereontosomething:itwas protection of slavery at all constitutional costs that motivated regressive Virginians. The question of whether aristocrats actually lost power or effectively adapted to the altered order in Virginia arises from Green’s work. The constitutionally protected viva voce voting system, and other procedural devices such as plural voting (until 1851), aided those who possessed political power and wished to maintain it.3 Events in Virginia in 1861 contradict the claim of constitutional equilibrium and progressivism. Indeed, within the context of extraordinary national events, six decades of constitutional and political discord exploded into a statehood movement in the west. This survey, eschewing a comprehensive review of the many political and policy differences as they emerged since the commonwealth’s formation in 1776, concentrates on the single dimension of constitutional principles that eastern Virginia maintained and that western Virginia developed and advocated to alter organic law. Generalization does not suggest that the constant presence over decades of a rigid, staticpoliticalandterritorialboundaryexistedbetweenamonolithiceastandwestin the commonwealth. The tides of political change over the half-dozen decades before 1862 ebbed and flowed in Virginia’s geographical sections, especially west of the Blue Ridge. Nevertheless, the constitutional result of West Virginia’s creation during war stands as testimony to a Virginia constitutional dynamic that actually defied characterization , even by contemporaries, as progressive and politically accommodating. Natural population growth and its expansion beyond the Blue Ridge into the Allegheny Mountains and...

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