By 1830, Western Virginia was no longer the domain of frontiersman and backcountry farmers. Particularly around the regional capital of Wheeling, Western Virginia was growing more populous, more educated, and richer. The Ohio River, the National Road, and later, the B&O Railroad were becoming vital avenues of trade for the booming United States, and they all ran through Western Virginia. Westerners were also more swept up in the Second Great Awakening than their Eastern neighbors, which stoked their desire for social reform. Revival preachers and temperance speakers drew large crowds. Westerners founded religious-affiliated colleges and seminaries. Frustrated by Eastern Virginia’s refusal to create a state-wide public school system, Wheeling instituted its own city-wide public schooling in 1849. In short, this new Western Virginian culture embraced a strain of White egalitarianism largely absent in Eastern Virginia’s staid planter society. Other states had regional cultures that influenced their politics, but only Virginia’s so cleanly correlated to the growing national conflict between slave societies and White free labor societies.
There was no public, organized abolitionist sentiment among White people in Western Virginia, although there was a local Underground Railroad maintained by a small number of free Black residents. It is critical to remember that Western reformers were only opposed to Eastern slaveholders’ grip on government, not to slavery or racial supremacy. In fact, many of the Western politicians who fought for White egalitarian reform owned enslaved servants. Their opposition to slaveholders was an opposition to an elite class who had created structural advantages for themselves in Virginia’s government. But the west was overwhelmingly White, and enslaved labor was not the primary work force as it was in the east. Western reformers wanted to make citizenship universal and equal among White men, not attack slavery where it existed.
Eastern and Western Virginia were in bitter disagreement on whether slavery should structure their shared society and politics. When the secession crisis began in 1860, Virginia held a convention to determine whether it should join the Confederate rebellion. For the third time in thirty years, Virginia’s political class gathered in Richmond to discuss momentous changes to the state’s government. Easterners sympathized with the slaveholders’ rebellion but hoped for reconciliation on pro-slavery terms. Unsurprisingly, Westerners tended to be strongly opposed to the Confederacy. They had not found Eastern Virginia’s slaveholding elite to be committed partners in building Virginia’s democracy. In the Confederacy, they feared a national government that would similarly espouse democratic rhetoric without embracing the full principle. At the secession convention, Westerners cited the tax code that set a cap on taxing enslaved property at the value of $300, even though enslaved people were routinely sold for $1,000 or more. Enslaved children (who also performed labor) were exempt from taxation entirely. Between the mixed basis that gave large slaveholders control of the Senate, and a tax code that sheltered enslaved wealth, Westerners argued that the Eastern elite had warped Virginia’s government for their own interests. They would not join the Confederacy, which they understood as a slaveholders’ oligarchy masquerading as a defender of White democracy.