CHAPTER II.

INTERNAL ELEMENTS OF DISRUPTION.

A HALF CENTURY OF HEARTBURNINGS.

The discontent in the Virginia household which resulted in the separation in 1863 was not of recent origin nor due to ephemeral causes. It was a case of natural incompatibility, and of other incompatibility increasing with time and growth. Dissensions, growing with the development of the West, and unwise and oppressive policies on the part of the dominant East, had long been preparing the soil and sowing the seed for the crop which was finally reaped.

THE PROTEST OF NATURE.

Mountain barriers had been reared by nature between the two sections. On one side of them the waters flowed toward the old world of vested privilege; on the other toward the new, the free, the possibilities of the future and the unknown. Commerce divides with the water-sheds and flows with the streams. The interests and purposes of men follow commercial lines. Political abstractions may at times seem the most influential spring of action; but business advantage has the strong and steady pull which in the end shapes the destinies of States.

Policies supposed to be suited to the east side of these mountains were ill adapted to the other. Under the measures enforced by the East, at the instance of an institution repugnant to the people in the West, the latter could only grow more and more discontented and alienated as time and material growth made the Eastern rule the more oppressive. The connection was an unnatural one from the first. It grew to be a union of force which only awaited its opportunity to be broken.

THE PRIMITIVE WEST.

The earliest settlements west of the mountains were made by the more adventurous east of them, who had little of property or anything else to attach them to the soil they grew on and sought the freer life of what were then the Western wilds. Later, as the country became cleared, a more substantial class followed with their slaves in pursuit of agriculture. This inflow across the mountains was met by currents of a different kind of people flowing in from the northern and western borders. In the decades between 1840 and 1860, under the demand for slave labor in the Gulf States, the bulk of the slave population in the West went to the market.

NO UNITY OF INTEREST.

As commercial and industrial interests developed there, they found their outlets west and south, through channels prepared by nature. There was little intercourse of any kind and even less commerce-with Eastern Virginia. A single railroad reaching only the northern section carried traffic to tidewater beyond the State. None

of it went to Eastern Virginia. Attempts were made to connect the southern section of the West with the East by railroad, but had not been successful down to the opening of the war. Less than half a million had been expended in grading the western section of the Covington and Ohio Railroad, though between four and five millions had been spent in trying to tunnel the mountain in Tazewell County; and some meager improvements had been made in navigation on Coal, Kanawha and Guyandotte Riversfragments of that costly but fruitless system of Virginia public works described by Governor Wise in 1857 as "beginning everywhere and ending nowhere." If Eastern Virginia and Western had been separate commonwealths, there could hardly have been less of business and social intercourse than there was. The political bond which united. them was always galling to the West; and for more than fifty years there were bickerings and strifes so bitter that they sometimes threatened violence. The differences were of a kind that might be borne but could never be reconciled. The matter of separation was only one of time and opportunity. The mills of God grind slow, but patience brings the last grist to its turn.

WALPOLE'S WESTERN VIRGINIA COLONY.

A curious chapter on the status in early colonial times of the territory now embraced in West Virginia was related by Hon. George W. Summers in an address in the old court-house at Wheeling, in August, 1863. West Virginia was then less than two months old. Mr. Summers had come out of his retirement to make some explanations

in palliation of his course following his return from the first session of the Richmond convention to the Kanawha Valley. The new State having achieved success without his help, he had become its ardent friend; and he closed this speech with some gratulatory remarks about the erection of West Virginia. The following passage is now deciphered from the short-hand notes taken at the time:

I suppose we have all been thinking we have done some new thing in making a State here between the Alleghenies and the Ohio River. I tell you, my friends, it was in contemplation, and was within an ace of accomplishment, within four years of a hundred years ago.

After the treaty of Paris, in 1763, by which England acquired the Canadas from France-all the claims of France to this Western country-Walpole and others applied for a charter for a colony "back of Virginia," to begin opposite the mouth of the Scioto River, running back to the Allegheny ridge, thence up to somewhere about Pittsburgh, including all the lands between the ridges of the Allegheny and the Ohio River. At that time, the bounds of Virginia were not conceded to go beyond the head springs of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic. All beyond was claimed at one time by France, who placed her monuments at the mouths of many of our rivers-one at the mouth of the Kanawha and one at the mouth of the Muskingum, I remember, in 1749.

This conception of Walpole and others proceeded so far that in 1769 a charter was made out for this colony by Hillsborough, then foreign secretary; who wrote a letter on the subject, which I have had access to and read, to the Governor and Council of Virginia, proposing this new colony and asking their views on the subject. There is a letter extant written by Mr. Nelson, President of the Council, in which he tells his Lordship he had received his letter and laid it before the Council; that it did not become the Council to advise His Majesty on such a subject, but that when the country should become sufficiently populated for a colony "back of Virginia"-not claiming it as Virginia at all-they could well concede it would be proper to do so.

The charter was prepared and was ready for signature of the Crown officer; when the events of the Revolution thickening upon them, it was suspended and cut off. It only escaped becoming a separate and independent colony from the Allegheny to the Ohio River by that chance.

I do not mention it as showing that it was not a part and parcel of Virginia, because by subsequent events and the recognition of the boundaries of the State, it might be regarded as a settled question. Although for one who has a mind to look into antique discussions it is a very curious fact that when Virginia was bargaining with Congress about the cession of her Northwestern domain-the lands northwest of the Ohio-she made it a uniform condition of her grant of these lands that Congress should guarantee to her the lands east of the Ohio River—that is, the lands between the Ohio and the Allegheny Mountains; which Congress uniformly refused to do. During that discussion, Madison, then member of Congress, wrote to Jefferson to furnish him the proofs of the right of Virginia to the lands west of the Allegheny: and they never were furnished by Mr. Jefferson; and finally the cession was made without this guaranty.

In this speech Mr. Summers claimed that twenty-five years before he had advocated the division of Virginia and had "perhaps done more to familiarize the public mind with the idea of such division than any man in the State." All the more pity that he did not keep to that faith when time and event had ripened the fruit!

WEBSTER PREDICTS DIVISION.

The character of the tie that bound Western Virginia to Eastern was recognized by intelligent men outside the State as well as within. Daniel Webster took notice of it in his speech on the occasion of the laying of the cornerstone of the addition to the National Capitol, in 1851, when he warned the people of Virginia against the disunion issue which had been raised by Calhoun: