SECTIONALISM IN VIRGINIA FROM 1776 TO 1861

Introduction to the Second Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION The birth of the state of West Virginia, as the only territorial adjustment to come because of the Civil War, is unique to the nation and poses the question of whether there would ever have been a West Virginia without that dark passage of 1861–65. From the perspective of historian Charles H. Ambler, almost certainly there would have been a rending of Virginia no matter the war. His thesis holds that an aristocratic minority in Virginia resisted democratic pressures for so long that when western economic might coalesced with sectional crisis the state could not hold itself together. Deadly dull studies of the West Virginia statehood conventions of 1861–62 and the state’s rejection of slavery once were the lynchpins of eighth grade West Virginia history classes, and often these perspectives dominated college study as well. This approach, however, tended to overlook the real genesis of the new state movement. West Virginia statehood was long in the making and had its start in politics driven by economic interests, not abolition. Dr. Ambler’s 1910 study of sectionalism in Virginia clearly shows how the East and West of Virginia were always destined to separate. His work underpinned state history for more than sixty years until the mid 1960s and 1970s, when the study of the topic expanded to include the full array of social class relations, distribution of resources, and legislated economic revii SECTIONALISM IN VIRGINIA, 1776–1861 VIII alities. Historians of new inclinations targeted these aspects of West Virginia history. Neo-colonialists, Marxists, Cultural Determinists, and contrarians all weighed in on West Virginia, largely leaving behind the statehood movement to look at the state’s misery and sorrow during the early twentieth century. Nearly all of these new historians had one thing in common. To a soul, each of them had read and digested Dr. Ambler’s Sectionalism in Virginia, 1776–1861. Skeptical of the Cultural Determinism that the local color writers injected into the history of West Virginia during the early twentieth century; many of these new historians followed Ambler’s lead and turned their attentions to the political causes of the state and regional economic difficulties. From Ambler’s perspective, West Virginia statehood was the final blow to a weakening aristocracy’s eightyfive year long unsuccessful effort to preserve itself in the face of powerful economic and political demands from a boisterous western democracy flush with resources sufficient to a kingdom. From another perspective, frustrated middle class western leaders fomented their own rebellion in the style of Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution, wherein a sitting government thwarts an able and ambitious middle class, fails to collect taxes, and sees its own authority erode.1 Both perspectives boded ill for the Tidewater planter class that looked with great trepidation at the growing population and economic potentials of the West. They surely saw and noted the nascent, but growing, cities of 1 Crane Brinton, Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 65. INTRODUCTION TO THE 2ND EDITION IX Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, toward which western Virginia’s rivers flowed. They also must have seen the early winter frosts and rugged terrain that largely precluded tobacco, and therefore plantations. Instead, there was salt, iron, coal, whisky, hogs, apples, lumber, and pottery, and north or west flowing rivers to carry it all out of Virginia. Relatively few slaves toiled along side their farmer masters, however industrial slaves contributed to the production of salt, iron, and coal. Try as they might to legislate against this potential, the aristocrats were only temporarily successful. West Virginia, as a political entity with a coherent agenda, gained its identity in the 1818 debate over the nation’s tariff. From that early date, Virginia’s leaders were so protective of slavery that they ignored the pleas of iron makers and salt makers in Virginia’s West who sought a tariff that would protect their fledgling industries from British competition after the conclusion of the War of 1812.2 Virginia, at this time, was a place of many places, a culture of many cultures. Professor Ambler’s study of the political behavior of the many sections of the state has become a mainstay in the study of West Virginia history as well as Virginia history. Still pertinent one hundred years after it was written, this work is now being re-issued by the West Virginia University...