Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2015 - 32

of Irish and German immigrants
steadily streamed into northwestern
Virginia, bumping against the English settlers who had ventured west
from the coastal Tidewater region.
Geographic and socioeconomic differences between eastern and western Virginia grew deeper over time.
* A voting system that favored Virginia's eastern counties.
The relatively small size of Virginia's eastern counties meant
that the Tidewater region wielded
a disproportionate amount of political power.
"The western discontent with
Richmond begins right after the
[American] revolution in some
ways," says Ken Fones-Wolf, a
history professor at West Virginia
University. "The dividing line really becomes the Shenandoah Val-

ley. The Tidewater area was very
heavily slave-plantation culture,
and it had a disproportionate
share of power. The Valley region had much less and then the
mountain region had far less."
The discontent built after the
War of 1812 before finally culminating in two different constitutional conventions, in 1829-30 and
again in 1850, that ultimately gave
more political representation to the
west while effectively capping the
tax rate on slaves, pleasing eastern
plantation owners.
* Railroads and public projects that
linked the Shenandoah Valley and
Southwest Virginia to Richmond.
In the mid-1800s, the Virginia
General Assembly began to invest
in significant capital improvements
that changed the economies of the

The relatively small size of Virginia's
eastern counties meant that the Tidewater
region wielded a disproportionate amount
of political power.
32 BlueRidgeCountry.com

Shenandoah Valley and Southwest
Virginia, expanding slavery and
tying them more tightly to eastern
Virginia.
"In the 1850s, the Valley of
Virginia started voting more and
more with the east," says John
Stealey, recently retired professor
of history at Shepherd University. "First, Virginia was spending
internal improvement money in
the Valley of Virginia. It spent a
lot of it, and it didn't go any further than that. Second, the Valley
of Virginia had areas with a good
bit of slavery, where the west did
not. That was the unifying issue
as far as eastern Virginia and portions of western Virginia."
In 1847, after several failed
attempts, Virginia legislators
created the Virginia & Tennessee railroad, running west
from Lynchburg to Salem and
then southwest to what is now Bristol. Passing the bill to create the
railroad required some last-minute
heroics from Del. Thomas Tate of
Smyth County, who pretended to
faint on the House floor to delay a
key vote and buy pro-railroad legislators some extra time to find more
support. Tate's "faint" involved
more than just falling down, as
several doctors who were present
rushed forward and began to bleed
Tate, a common medical treatment
at the time.
The V&T railroad brought new
economic opportunities to southwest Virginia even as it linked the
region to the rest of the state with
an iron bond, Noe says. Farmers
and business owners who took advantage of the new transportation
link were able to get ahead of their
neighbors, ultimately leading to
a greater gap between rich and
poor and the rapid growth of
slavery in southwest Virginia in
the 1850s.
* Railroads linking northwest
Virginia to Ohio, Pennsylvania and
Maryland.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran from Maryland across

http://www.BlueRidgeCountry.com

Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2015