West Virginia

Like Kentucky, West Virginia was once a part of Virginia. Unlike Kentucky, however, West Virginia departed from Virginia in a somewhat circuitous route. (Virginia had seceded from the US at the time its northwestern counties sought separation, muddying the separation process, which, constitutionally, required permission from the mother state. Later, eleven southwest counties were included in the petition for statehood.) These northwestern counties occupied the most mountainous regions of the Old Dominion, land that was not favorable to plantations as were found in the Piedmont and coastal regions. Slavery, therefore, was not widespread in what would become West Virginia.

Slavery was not the only political divide between east and west Virginians. West Virginians always resented the eastern part of the state, feeling they were not properly or fairly represented in the matter of taxes. Though western Virginia had more white males, that region was underrepresented in the state legislature at Richmond. When it came to taxes, the ruling elite in the east managed to pay as little on their valuable slaves as western yeoman farmers paid on their far less valuable land.

The counties that would become West Virginia were intensely loyal, and Lincoln and the North wanted to reward that, but during a war that was being fought to preserve the Union — being fought against the secession of eleven states — the federal government could be seen as harboring a double standard when accepting a new state that was itself born of secession. However, when Richmond established a rebel government, those Virginians who remained loyal (mostly in the northwest) argued that they were the true government of Virginia (known as the Restored Government of Virginia, seated at Wheeling); as such, they needed no one’s permission but their own and, of course, the consent of the federal government. The Lincoln administration tended to agree, but it would only accept West Virginia as a new state if it came in as a free state. Gradual emancipation was codified in the state’s new constitution, and West Virginia entered the Union on June 20, 1863.

West Virginia’s divorce, however, was not final. After the war, returning ex-Confederates gained control of the West Virginia legislature and claimed, with incredible cheek, that the division was illegal since only a small minority voted for it. Virginia tried to woo her wayward counties back into the fold, but West Virginia was having none of it. An offer by Virginia to pay West Virginia’s share of Virginia’s debt prior to separation was angrily retracted, and thus began a decades-long battle to settle the debt question between the two states. Virginia also wanted returned to her the counties of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle — Berkeley and Jefferson — who very much wanted reunification. The awkward inclusion of these two counties in West Virginia, by the way, was said to be at the maneuvering of B&O President John Garrett, who wanted to keep his railroad out of rebel (Virginia) territory. The unruly behavior of ex-rebel congressmen and agitation in the eastern panhandle were effectively silenced by the Supreme Court decision in 1871 that declared Berkeley and Jefferson counties belonged to West Virginia. That both Virginia and the Supreme Court referred to the defendant as West Virginia gave tacit legitimacy of the new state.

The last act in the West Virginia drama came in 1911, when the Supreme Court decided in Virginia’s favor the debt question. Virginia insisted that when a part of the Old Dominion, the western counties had helped to incur debt for internal improvements (canals, railroads, county roads, ports, etc.). The new state of West Virginia comprised one-third of the old state territory and so should assume one-third of the debt as of the date of Virginia’s secession from the Union. West Virginia argued, as it had long before it became a state, that geographically West Virginia had been one-third of Virginia but it had never enjoyed a proportionate amount of the benefits of the internal improvements. Most of these improvements, in fact, lay outside of West Virginia’s new boundaries. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in Virginia’s favor, and the divorce was final in 1911, fifty years after the first convention in Wheeling first considered the idea of separation.