How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [117]
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN1
In the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, Francis H. Pierpont stands commemorated in marble as “the Father of West Virginia.” Yet, technically, he never lived in West Virginia until five years after it became a state. “Technically,” however, is no small matter in this instance. It is what gave birth to West Virginia: a technicality discovered, and put to use, by Francis Pierpont.
West Virginia became a state in the midst of the Civil War. Previously, it had been part of Virginia, which encompassed the Tidewater region (its flat coastal lands), the Piedmont (its rolling hills leading west to the Blue Ridge mountains), the Shenandoah Valley (between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies), and western Virginia (the Alleghenies and the land beyond to the Ohio River).
One could say that after Virginia seceded from the Union, western Virginia seceded from Virginia. Legally, that was precisely what it did not do. Since the federal government considered it illegal to secede from the Union, it would have also considered it illegal for western Virginia to secede from Virginia. Thus, for western Virginia to secede from Virginia, it had to devise an approach rooted in the illegality of secession.
Francis H. Pierpont (1814-1899) (photo credit 34.1)
Virginia at the onset of the Civil War
But why would western Virginia have wanted to secede from the revered and influential Old Dominion? The short answer is that the region opposed slavery, but there was more to it than that. Most of its residents did oppose slavery, though their righteousness was likely buttressed by the fact that most could not afford them. The region’s mountainous topography was poorly suited to agriculture. Its mountains, moreover, were ideally suited for escape.
But western Virginia’s wish to secede resulted more directly from an issue at one remove from the slavery conflict. Slaves in Virginia were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in the state legislature (though, of course, slaves could not vote). This formula reflected that which had been used in the U.S. Constitution, and it resulted in slave regions having greater representation than nonslave regions. Western Virginians repeatedly sought to abolish the use of that formula in the Virginia state constitution.
Disproportionate representation was made even more disproportionate by the fact that the authors of Virginia’s constitution (among them, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason) had embedded a property-value requirement for voting in the document. Because many western Virginians barely eked out a livelihood in their hardscrabble terrain, this requirement created a further disparity in representation.
The anger of western Virginians would have been among Francis Pierpont’s earliest memories. As far back as 1817, when he was a three-year-old on the family farm and tannery, the region’s discontent was surfacing in newspapers. Washington, DC’s National Advocate quoted one of the region’s residents: “Western Virginia is ruled with a rod of iron; and unless … we can obtain a change in some manner, our castigation will be so severe that we shall not be able to bear it. We are treated … as a deserted step-child, instead of the legitimate offspring of Virginia.”
Virginians who supported the property requirement for voting feared that giving voting representation to those without a certain level of wealth would “transfer power into entirely new hands,” resulting in “many evils and inflict crying injustice.”2 In 1830, however, the mounting discontent in western Virginia over the issue of representation caused the state to hold a new constitutional convention. Ironically, the property requirement for voting resulted in western Virginians being as underrepresented at the convention as they had been in the legislature. As a result, only marginal changes were made in the 1830 constitution,