How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [118]
Ten years later, the 1840 census introduced a new element into the equation—one that riveted the attention of the nation’s antislavery movement. The Liberator reported in March 1842:
The recent census develops the fact that a majority of the white population [of Virginia] lies west of the Blue Ridge, in the free labor part of the State. Yet the eastern counties have nearly three-fourths of the political power by the amended constitution.… The subject is now before the legislature, and the [antislavery] Richmond Whig advises the Western Virginians to demand either concession to their demands or the formation of a new State, bounded east by the Blue Ridge.
Though the abolitionist press focused exclusively on the slavery aspect of the dispute, underrepresentation continued to spark complaints among western Virginians regarding inequitable schools, roads, and railroads.3
Pierpont was, by this time, a successful attorney in western Virginia. With only intermittent months of education available at a local one-room school, his parents had encouraged him to read what books they had and to seek a college education. But no college existed in western Virginia until after Pierpont had entered Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania. After graduating with honors, he became a schoolteacher near his home in Fairmont. Many Americans were migrating westward at the time, and Pierpont too chose to relocate. He, however, went south, becoming a teacher in Pontotoc, Mississippi, for reasons no longer known. Whatever the reasons, the choice displayed a recurring pattern in Pierpont’s life: his willingness to embark with others on a major move, yet moving in his own direction.
During his years as a teacher, Pierpont was also learning law. After returning home in 1841, he became a licensed attorney. His keen legal mind won him the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad as a client, representing its interests in nearby counties. After the Virginia legislature yielded in granting the B&O permission to lay track in western Virginia, the railroad’s main line ended up passing through Fairmont, near to which he opened a coal mine. By the early 1850s he was a wealthy and prominent man, married to a well-bred, abolitionist wife from the North.
Also by the early 1850s, the next census had shown that over 10,000 more whites now lived in western Virginia than in the rest of the state. At the same time, the conflict between western Virginia and the rest of the state regarding slavery had also grown by leaps and bounds (as it did nationwide following the tumultuous Compromise of 1850). In 1851 presidential aspirant Daniel Webster cast his strongly pro-Union gaze on western Virginia, in a speech closely followed nationwide. “Ye men of Western Virginia … what course do you propose to yourselves by disunion? If you secede, what do you secede from, and what do you secede to?” Webster asked, imploring the people of the region to consider that their economy was more connected to the nation’s hinterland than to the rest of Virginia. “Do you look for the current of the Ohio to change, and bring you and your commerce to the tide-waters of eastern rivers? What man in his senses can suppose that you will remain part and parcel of Virginia a month after Virginia should have ceased to be part and parcel of the United States?”4
Four months later, Virginia sought to consolidate the loyalty of its western residents by ratifying yet another constitution, this one extending voting rights to all white male residents over twenty-one, regardless of whether or not they owned any property. But it was too late. Though it resolved the conflict over representation, the conflict over slavery now dominated the political landscape, and the new constitution did not move that mountain.
The equation changed yet again on November 6, 1860, the day Lincoln was elected