Why didn't the Blue Ridge and Appalachian areas secede from Virginia?

Factual Questions
1

Today I drove most of the length of I-81 in Virginia, which follows the rolling open space between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian ranges. As I looked at mountains all around me, I reflected that West Virginia had not the slave economy that the rest of Virginia had, and lacking enough of a common feeling with the Confederacy, opted for the Union.

One feature of WV geography that really stands out is the entire state is mountainous, with the exception of one flat county, Jefferson, in the extreme northeast. I forgot what was the reason for Jefferson County going with WV, does anyone know?

Since the western part of (post-1863) Virginia is dominated by three parallel mountain ranges, the Blue Ridge, Appalachian, and Allegheny, seeing how mountainous it is made me wonder how these counties decided to stay with the Confederacy. There’s nowhere to put any big plantations in those hills. It looked to me more like West Virginia, except that in WV the topography is less linear and more fragmented. If WV’s topography kept out a slave economy, which put WV back in the Union, what kept the Blue Ridge and Appalachian areas from joining WV?

2

There’s a difference between “non-slaveholding” and “anti-slaveholding”. It’s possible those areas simply didn’t care enough either way to make an extraordinary gesture like seceding from Virginia. Also given the difficulty of travel in that area at that time, it’s quite likely most of the people up in the mountains didn’t even know there was anything unusual going on until long after it was over.

3

In one name, the answer to your question is “Thomas Jackson.”

The northwest of pre-Civil War Virginia including the Kanawha Valley were (1) largely “nationalist” as opposed to “statist” in their allegiance (and notice that I’m there subverting the normal meanings of two words to represent conflicting stances), and (2) largely firmly under the control of the Union Army. The Great Valley of Virginia (Shenandoah, New River, Upper Roanoke, and Holston Valleys in sequence) had a populace that largely paid allegiance to Virginia as opposed to the U.S., and were defended during much of the war by the corps commanded by Gen. Jackson. It therefore was able to “remain loyal to Virginia” – which is how a consensus of its residents would have regarded it at the time.

It might be noted that contrary to our modern impression, the underlying causes of the Civil War were not predominantly pro- vs. anti-slavery, however much that may have provided a proximate cause and however much that was a lasting significance to the conflict.

The state I live in, North Carolina, was a slave state and firmly Southern in its convictions. But it declined to secede from the Union until finally called upon to levy troops in the Union cause, which flipped a moderate group over from pro-Union to secessionist.

It’s always been more than a little intriguing to me how we who grew up during the Civil Rights struggle period tend to do a bit of “Whig historiography” – reading back the ethics of our own time into the conflict of a past time. While there was a strong Abolitionist movement and a Northern tendency to sympathize with the issue they raised prior to 1860, the typical person of the time would have viewed the conflict not in, quite literally, black vs. white terms, but rather as conflicting views of patriotic loyalty – to state vs. to national union.

4

The WV-VA boundary wasn’t so much a matter of citizen choice as a matter of where Northern troops could gain control. The two weren’t completely unrelated–one reason the North found it so easy to occupy western WV was because they were welcomed by the citizenry. But they couldn’t push control too deep into the mountains, even into areas where they may have had majority support.

Eastern Tennessee, where a majority of the inhabitants were Unionists, was unable to secede from Tennessee for the same reason–Northern troops couldn’t get there to provide support for a counter-secession movement.

As for the eastern panhandle (Jefferson County), it was included as an afterthought because of Harpers Ferry and the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. Virginia tried to recover those counties after the war, but they lost.

5

As I understand it, West (by God!) Virginia broke off on a county-by-county basis. As a result, the border with the Lesser Virginia is not defined by geology (and in fact is ill-defined by geography). The West Virginia legislature met at Wheeling on the Ohio River, and at least for that reason, one flat county is in WVA.
Does that ramble answer the question in any way at all?

6

When South Carolina seceded from the Union, they clearly stated that states rights was an issue. However, they stated they were opposed to states rights - they specifically wrote that they were leaving the United States because the national government refused to enact and enforce national laws protecting slavery in the states that didn’t want it. So South Carolina and the other seceding states decided to form their own country with a national government that wouldn’t allow any state to decide on its own if it wanted slavery or not. When the issue came up if what the Confederate policy would be if states in the mid-west (which were economically dependent on the Mississippi) decided to secede from the United States and sought to join the Confederacy, it was decided that they wouldn’t be allowed to join - only slave-holding states could be part of the CSA.

7

The northeastern part of the Appalachians went with WV, while the southwestern part stayed with VA. Part of the boundary is defined by the crest of the Appalachian system, and elsewhere the Allegheny crest forms part of the boundary.

Poly, I guessed that Jackson had something to do with that.

8

Well as someone who grew up in Virginia and had to take an entire year of Virginia history as a lad I know the answer to this pretty well.

First, this wasn’t over slavery. In the grand scheme of things, the ACW et cetera, I don’t want to get into that. The Virginia/West Virginia split was not about slavery per se. The western Virginia counties did not profit immensely from slavery, but there also was not any great moral outcry against slavery either (in fact the first West Virginia constitution did not prohibit slavery.)

Physiclaly the two areas were divided pretty seriously by the mountains. If (like the OP) you’ve driven around the Virginia/West Virginia border much you will find yourself having to take tunnels under the mountains to get from one state to the other, and the area’s interstates are literally carved right out of the mountains resulting in sheer cliffs towering over you on both sides.

There were many differences between the residents of both parts of Virginia.

Virginia helped settled the western counties but in large part Virginians weren’t the ones who moved in. Several Virginia governor’s sponsored explorations throughout the western area and George Washington even surveyed extensively in modern day West Virginia. But by and large the people who were moving into the western counties were not Virginians, but other groups coming from the north through Pennsylvania. A lot of them were Scots-Irish and German, which set them quite apart from the predominantly English Virginians to the east.

Geographically West Virginia wasn’t suitable to plantations, so they just never came up there. West Virginia’s industries were salt mining in the early days and eventually coal (although the famed coal mining really didn’t start until after the split.)

During the Revolutionary war the west already was wanting to break away from Virginia, and there were efforts to establish a new colony there but it never gained any serious support from the rest of the colonies.

As the years progressed in the young republic the animosity between east and west grew. The eastern counties had more people in them than the western counties. However, that difference was reduced significantly when you factored out all of the slaves who could not vote.

To make sure their interests were maintained the eastern plantation owners more or less entrenched their power within the state. In 1829 after years of bickering between the two sides a new constitution was drawn up for the state.

In it the eastern counties more or less cemented their rule. They introduced a property qualification for voting in state elections, immediately disenfranchising many western Virginians. On top of that they insured that slaves continued being counted for the purposes of apportionment. The eastern plantation owners reduced the number of eligible voters in the west and also gave the west disproportionately small representation in the legislature.

Up until the civil war the constitution of 1829 kept the west under control, it had no effective means to protest politically. The western counties had a lot of valid complaints. They were paying state taxes but the government to the east gave out funding to thewest in disproportionately low amounts. While the west was unable to politically thwart the east, resentment grew.

When Virginia seceded in 1861 the western counties acted swiftly (the vast majority had rejected secession, which was meaningless since the western counties were politically castrated by the constitution of 1829) and formed a convention in Wheeling. The first convention waffled since Virginia had yet to officially secede, and they agreed to meet again once it had become fact. Once Virginia was truly out of the union there was a second Wheeling convention. It was declared the the Secession Convention had acted without the authority of the people, and all officials who had supported secession had vacated their offices. New officials were elected in Wheeling and Francis Pierpont was chosen as the governor of Virginia (the Commonwealth does not recognize him in the line of governor’s, for obvious reasons.) So effectively there was now a mini-civil war inside the bigger one, one state was divided just as the nation itself was. On one side there was a Virginia government loyal to the union and on the other there was one loyal to the confederacy.

The decision of the western counties comprising all of modern day WV except the eastern panhandle to break away is without much question. Via overwhelming majority these counties voted to break away from Virginia. What is now the eastern panhandle of West Virginia is a different story. The eastern panhandle mirrors an important transportation route both sides wanted during the war. There weren’t any serious contests over it, but there were small-scale movements throughout Virginia/West Virginia to secure strategic areas. Some small west virginia towns changed hands dozens of times during the war. The “loyal” government of Virginia eventually split away to form a whole new state. This is not legal without the consent of the legislature of the original state. Technically the official legislature of Virginia was no longer recognized as being in Richmond but in Wheeling.

When West Virginia officially petitioned for existence in 1862, the counties east of the mountains were favorable to the matter. However, in large part that is because the vast majority of the population of those counties that remained were those loyal to the union. More than likely had the confederates (soldiers off on campaign and civilians who fled south) still been there the numbers would have been different. As someone else has already mentioned Virginia later objected to these counties being given to WV. More than likely the SCOTUS ruled against Virginia in large part because the federal government was still pretty anti-South and anti-former confederates at that time, and that was reflected even in the courts.

West Virginia has actually won its land disputes with all states who have ever challenged it. At one point Maryland challenged for parts of the eastern panhandle and was defeated, Virginia challenged for the eastern panhandle and was defeated, and disagreements between Ohio and West Virginia ultimately resulted in the entirety of the Ohio river along the Ohio/West Virginia border being placed in West Virginia.

9

Thanks for the detailed answer, Martin Hyde.

Now it’s Northern Virginia – small in area but big in population and economy – whose taxes finance the rest of the state. There have even been secessionist rumblings heard up here because of the sense that we’re getting ripped off. The Fairfax County Parkway sat around unfinished for like 10 years because we got back so little of the revenue we sent to Richmond.

Politically, there are three blue spots in this very red state. A little one in Charlottesville and bigger ones in Richmond and NoVa. The NoVa blue area has recently been expanding. Loudoun County used to be heavily red, but now it’s starting to go blue. They just elected a Democratic state senator by a huge margin!

Call me cynical, but I suspect political ideology has less to do with people’s ultimate choices than the bottom line. The liberals in NoVa want to give welfare to the poor, but the government in Richmond seeming like nothing but a pipeline to remove wealth from NoVa doesn’t go over so well. Meanwhile, conservatives are supposed to be against welfare, they believe in pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, but it seems they’re not averse to helping themselves to pork supplied by the liberals up here. Go figure.

10

what i’ve always wondered was: why didn’t they come up with a nifty name for the new state? couldn’t anyone think of anything more exciting than west virginia?

i’ve also pondered over the dakotas and carolinas. come on people, mix it up some, and stay away from “m” names.

11

I think there was a move to call it “Kanawha” but it didn’t go over too well with the majority of West Virginians who didn’t live on the Kanawha river.

12

now that shows a bit of originality… there could be a bit of confusion with canada though.