Charles Ambler’s Sectionalism in Virginia: An Appreciation

The birth of the state of West Virginia, the only territorial adjustment to come out 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 1861–1865. 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 1861–1862 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 realities. 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 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 attention 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 eighty-five-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 potential of the West. They surely saw and noted the nascent, but growing, cities of 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 alongside 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...