Читать книгу West Virginia - Otis K. Rice - Страница 12

A New Immigrant Wave. With the end of the Revolutionary War, Americans, long since grown mobile by habit, resumed their course westward in search of new lands in trans-Allegheny West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Old Northwest. Each year thousands of immigrants gathered at Wheeling and Pittsburgh for the journey down the Ohio. Others followed the Valley of Virginia southward to headstreams of the Cumberland and Tennessee. In 1790 about 125,000 Virginians lived west of the Appalachians. More than 70,000 of them were in Kentucky, which experienced a dramatic population upsurge of nearly six hundred percent between 1783 and 1790.

West Virginia had a less spectacular growth. In 1790 her total population was 55,873, but only about 20,000 lived west of the mountains. Yet her subsequent increase was by no means inconsequential. Between 1790 and 1830 it reached 317 percent, compared with a 354 percent growth for the nation as a whole. Much of the expansion occurred in the Monongahela, upper Ohio, and Kanawha valleys. Her population density of 7.3 persons per square mile compared with 7.4 percent for the nation. The population, however, was not evenly distributed, and much of the state remained a mountainous and forested frontier.

County and Local Governments. Expansion of settlement necessitated the organization of additional counties and towns. Only two of West Virginia's fifty-five counties, Hampshire and Berkeley, formed in 1754 and 1772, respectively, existed at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. The remainer of the state was included in Fincastle County, which embraced the territory south of the New and Kanawha rivers; in Botetourt and Augusta counties, which extended across most of the northcentral section to the Ohio River; and the ill-defined District of West Augusta, created in 1773 to assert the authority of Virginia over the Forks of the Ohio region and provide an administrative shelter for its residents and those of the extreme northern parts of West Virginia.

Further county reorganization occurred during the Revolutionary War. In 1776 the General Assembly divided the District of West Augusta into Yohogania, Monongalia, and Ohio counties. It split Fincastle County into Kentucky, Washington, and Montgomery counties, the last of which included the part of West Virginia south of the New and Kanawha rivers. In 1778 the trans-Allegheny portion of Botetourt County became Greenbrier County.

Continued population increases resulted in the formation of additional counties. By 1800 the General Assembly had created Brooke, Hardy, Harrison, Kanawha, Monroe, Pendleton, Randolph, and Wood. The establishment of Cabell, Jefferson, Lewis, Logan, Mason, Morgan, Nicholas, Pocahontas, and Tyler brought the number of counties in West Virginia to twenty-two in 1830. Even then, the creation of new counties failed to keep pace with the expanding population. Moreover, some new counties were so large and their inhabitants were so isolated that their governments could not adequately meet the needs of the people.

The General Assembly also authorized the establishment of numerous towns. It formally established Shepherdstown and Romney in 1762. Berkeley Springs (originally known as Bath), Lewisburg, Martinsburg, and Moorefield were created by the end of the Revolutionary War. Among other new towns established before the end of the century were Beverly, Bolivar, Charleston, Charles Town, Clarksburg, Darkesville, Franklin, Frankfort, Middletown (later renamed Fairmont), Morgantown, Point Pleasant, Salem, Smithfield (Berkeley County), Smithfield (Harrison County), Union, Vienna, Watson, Wellsburg (first known as Charlestown), and West Liberty.

The Continuing Indian Menace. One of the most serious deterrents to the growth of trans-Allegheny West Virginia was the danger from Indians, which did not abate after the Revolutionary War. Between 1785 and 1787 British agents, including Sir John Johnson, Joseph Butler, and Joseph Brant, urged a confederation of tribes in the Northwest. Frontier leaders such as George Clendenin of Kanawha County, Hezekiah Davisson of Harrison County, and John Stuart of Greenbrier County, declared that West Virginia settlers were in greater danger than ever before and that there was likely to be no peace as long as the British retained trading posts in the Northwest, contrary to the Treaty of Paris of 1783.

For scores of families the Indian menace was etched in sad and bitter memories. Two examples suffice to illustrate their suffering and heartbreak. At Wheeling Indians killed young Andrew Zane and captured Isaac, his nine-year-old brother. Isaac grew up among the Indians, married the daughter of a Wyandot chief, and became the father of eight children. He chose never to return to his family. Another captive, Mary Kinnan, settled with her husband near Elkwater, on the Tygart Valley River. In 1791 Indians killed her husband and young daughter and carried the unfortunate woman to their towns in Ohio. Later they took her to the Detroit area, where she became a slave of an old Delaware squaw. After more than two years, she managed to communicate with relatives in New Jersey, and her brother, with the aid of friends, arranged her release.

The Federal Constitution. Indian dangers dominated the thoughts of many of the sixteen West Virginians elected to the Virginia convention, which met in Richmond from June 2 through June 25, 1788, to consider ratification of the federal Constitution. Although they were but a small proportion of the 170 delegates, their importance exceeded their numbers. At the time of their election, eighty-five delegates were Federalists, who gave strong support to the Constitution. Sixty-six were chosen as Antifederalists. Of the remaining nineteen, three had not made up their minds at the time of their election, and the views of the other sixteen were unknown. Four of the latter were from trans-Allegheny West Virginia.

Leaders of both Federalists and Antifederalists exerted pressure upon wavering delegates and those representing frontier counties. Antifederalists, led by Patrick Henry, argued that a strong central government would have the power to bargain away navigation of the Mississippi River, a vital concern to many residents of the trans-Appalachian region. They also contended that a strong government might jeopardize the rights of persons who had acquired lands from the sequestered Fairfax estate. West Virginians, however, found Federalist arguments more compelling. The Federalist leaders, including George Washington, James Madison, George Wythe, Edmund Randolph, and Edmund Pendleton, held that a strong central authority would be more likely to secure navigation of the Mississippi and derided the idea that Virginia might not be able to protect her citizens who had obtained tracts from the Fairfax proprietary.

Although Charles A. Beard and other historians have stressed a close correlation between personal holdings, such as slaves and continental or state securities, and support of the Constitution, it is clear that the dominant consideration of West Virginia delegates was their belief that the new government might deal more effectively with the continuing Indian menace. Of the sixteen West Virginians, eleven had at some time actively engaged in frontier defense, and all had witnessed the horrors of Indian depredations. Fourteen of them voted for ratification. John Evans of Monongalia County, for reasons not known, opposed the Constitution, and Ebenezer Zane of Ohio County did not vote. Given the narrow margin, eighty-nine to seventy-nine, by which Virginia ratified the Constitution, it is clear that the West Virginia vote was of critical importance.

The Seeds of Nationalism. The new government of the United States, which was launched in 1789 with Washington as president, quickly fulfilled the hopes that westerners entertained for it. After disastrous expeditions into the Indian country under Josiah Harmar in 1790 and Arthur St. Clair in 1791, the Washington administration dispatched General Anthony Wayne westward in 1794. Wayne centered his efforts around Fort Miami, on the southwestern shores of Lake Erie, which the British had built for the protection of Detroit. He attacked about two thousand Indians at Fallen Timbers and dealt them a decisive defeat.

Wayne's victory and the Treaty of Greenville, by which the Indians gave up their claims to most of Ohio, ended the threat to West Virginia. Such seasoned frontier leaders as George Clendenin and William Morris, members of the House of Delegates from Kanawha County, informed Governor Henry Lee that the defeat of the Indians had been so complete that one militia company could defend the Kanawha and Greenbrier settlements.

Largely as a result of Wayne's achievement, the federal government won two diplomatic victories that had important effects on West Virginia. Jay's Treaty with the British in November 1794 contained a provision whereby England agreed to vacate the Northwest posts by June 1,1796, a move that left her no longer in a position to incite Indian attacks upon the frontiers. Less than a year later, in October 1795, Spain agreed, in Pinckney's Treaty, to open the Mississippi River to American navigation and to provide a place of deposit at New Orleans or some other suitable location for goods shipped downstream. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave the United States possession of both sides of the Mississippi River for most of its course and further cemented the ties of West Virginians to the federal government.

The Whiskey Rebellion. The importance that West Virginians attached to efforts of the federal government to pacify the Indians, more than anything else, explains their failure to give general support to the Whiskey Rebellion. The disturbance erupted in the late summer of 1794, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton put into effect an excise tax on whiskey. A revenue measure, the tax was also intended to demonstrate the power of the federal government to act directly upon the individual. Trans-Allegheny farmers, who marketed grains in the form of whiskey, regarded the tax as highly discriminatory and calculated to drain the western country of its already scarce specie.

Discontent centered in the Monongahela Valley sections of western Pennsylvania, particularly Washington County, where irate farmers defied federal authority. In Ohio County, in present West Virginia, opponents of the excise tax attacked Zacheus Biggs, the revenue officer, and forced distillers to ignore the law. About thirty men, with blackened faces, called at the home of the officer in Monongalia County and threatened him with destruction of his property and bodily harm. The collector speedily resigned his commission and fled.

Most West Virginians backed away from open defiance of the federal government. Only in Ohio County did opponents of the tax elect representatives to a meeting at Parkinson's Ferry on August 14, at which Pennsylvania leaders sought to concert action against the measure. The Ohio County delegates—William McKinley, William Sutherland, and Robert Stephenson—however, were among those who later met with federal commissioners and agreed to accept the tax in return for guarantees of general amnesty for paticipants in the uprising. McKinley stated that he had no desire to oppose the tax except “in a Constitutional way.” Neither he nor most West Virginians were ready to engage in armed resistance at a time when Wayne's army was advancing into the Indian country.¹

The Partisan Spirit in National Politics. The political cleavages engendered by the excise tax deepened in succeeding months. George Jackson of Clarksburg won election to Congress in 1795 partly with the support of anti-excise men in Monongalia, Ohio, and Harrison counties. McKinley and Sutherland achieved positions of trust after their fight against the tax. On the other hand, Daniel Morgan and James Machir, who had supported Hamilton's moves, were elected to Congress from the Eastern Panhandle in 1797.

Political lines hardened following the enactment of the Alien and Sedition acts in 1798. The partisan character of the acts, which aimed at curbing Republican strength and unrestrained criticisms of the Federalist administration, angered Republicans. The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures adopted resolutions charging the administration of Federalist John Adams with violation of its constitutional powers. The resolutions, based on a compact theory of government, asserted the right of the states to take steps leading to repeal of the acts.

West Virginia members of the General Assembly divided in their votes on the Virginia Resolutions. Ten delegates supported the resolutions, and five opposed them. Two opponents, Magnus Tate and John Dixon, both of Berkeley County, contended that the federal government was the “result of a compact, not between the States, but between the People of the United States, and as such not under the control of the State Legislatures, but of the people themselves.”² One of the staunchest defenders of the resolutions, young John G. Jackson, the son of Congressman George Jackson and a delegate from Harrison County, later referred to them as “the great cause I espoused in 1798 & of which I have never ceased to be the zealous advocate.”³

Sentiment among the people was equally divided. The Greenbrier County court was so incensed over attacks on the Adams administration that it destroyed copies of the Virginia Resolutions and of Madison's Report, which contained replies to arguments against the resolutions. “A True Republican,” writing in the Martinsburg Potomak Guardian, the only newspaper then published in West Virginia, condemned the Sedition Act as a “dreadful law” that struck at constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press.⁴

Republicans laid careful plans designed to place Thomas Jefferson in the White House in 1800. They established organizations in all counties and set up a central committee in Richmond. In West Virginia, however, much residual Federalist strength remained. Richard Claiborne, a member of the Monongalia County committee, attributed it to “the personal influence of a few old Residents , grown into the character of Federalists by habit or premeditation” and to a lack of understanding by others.⁵ The Republicans, nevertheless, swept Virginia, and Jefferson carried the state with a majority of 13,363 in a total of 20,797 votes.

The Jefferson Era. After the centralization of authority under the Federalist administrations, many West Virginians welcomed the more strict construction of the Constitution during the Jefferson era. Their wholehearted approval of the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, however, demonstrated that they did not object to a powerful central government when it appeared to serve their interests. The acquisition not only promised economic advantages, but it also fanned the flames of patriotism and nationalism by offering seemingly unlimited prospects for future expansion.

West Virginians gave additional evidence of their support for the Jefferson administration during the Aaron Burr conspiracy. When he tied Jefferson for the presidency in the electoral college in 1801, Burr allowed his political ambitions to draw him into a bitter contest in the House of Representatives, which deprived him of much of his influence in the Republican Party. The duel in 1804 in which he killed Alexander Hamilton cost him most of his remaining support in the eastern states and ruined his chances of ever becoming president. His popularity generally remained intact in the West, where Hamilton was held in low esteem. Burr turned to that region to rebuild his shattered career.

The precise nature of Burr's plans remains obscure, but he evidently intended to create a new empire in the Southwest. Presumably it would have included parts of the Spanish possessions west of the Mississippi River and possibly sections of the United States south of the Ohio. In 1805 he made a journey into the southwestern part of the United States, where leaders, most of them unaware of his intentions, received him with warmth and hospitality.

Among those upon whom Burr called was Harman Blennerhassett, who resided on an island in the Ohio River near the mouth of the Little Kanawha. Born into the Irish gentry, Blennerhassett attended Trinity College, Dublin, and studied law at King's Inn, London. He migrated to the United States under some social ostracism arising from his marriage to his niece, Margaret Agnew. On his Ohio River island he built a mansion, provided with elegant furnishings and wings for a library and scientific laboratory and surrounded by handsome gardens. The Blennerhassetts were gracious and welcomed as visitors many of the distinguished travelers on the Ohio River.

Burr's visit ended their idyllic life. Flattered by Burr's attentions, tiring of his isolated life, eager to replenish his dwindling fortune, and dazzled by visions of a high position in some new government, Blennerhassett readily succumbed to Burr's nebulous schemes. Following a second visit by Burr in August 1806, he contracted with a business partner in Marietta for supplies and arranged for the construction of boats, which he assembled at Blennerhassett Island. As “Querist,” he published a series of articles in the Marietta Ohio Gazette in September in which he emphasized exploitation of the agricultural West by the commercial East and suggested secession of western areas from the Union.

When reports of the Burr conspiracy began to circulate, cordiality toward Blennerhassett and his wife turned to suspicion and scorn. While they were in Lexington, Kentucky, residents in a mass meeting called by Federalist Alexander Henderson condemned their actions, pledged support to President Jefferson, and laid plans to raise a corps of militiamen in case of an emergency. Almost oblivious to public concern, Blennerhassett returned and continued to oversee preparations for the move down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Upon orders of Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio, Judge Return Jonathan Meigs and General Joseph Buell seized ten boats and confiscated others at boatyards on the Muskingum River. In danger of arrest, Blennerhassett and his associates hurriedly left the island on December 10 aboard four of the boats that they had acquired. The following day Colonel Hugh Phelps and Wood County militia arrived at the island. Despite the entreaties of Mrs. Blennerhassett, they did considerable damage to the property.

Blennerhassett reached the Mississippi Territory, where his wife soon joined him. Later he was arrested in Lexington, Kentucky, and sent to Richmond to stand trial with Burr, who had by then been apprehended. The court, over which Chief Justice John Marshall presided, acquitted Burr, who was not at Blennerhassett Island, where the overt act of treason with which he was charged allegedly occurred. After it acquitted Burr, the court declined to proceed with the indictment against Blennerhassett. Unrealistic to the end, Blennerhassett returned to the island estate, only to behold the destruction and wreckage left by the militia and by looters who had carried away nearly everything of value.

After futile efforts to recoup his fortune as a cotton planter in Mississippi, as an attorney in Montreal, and through literary endeavors by his wife, Blennerhassett returned to the Isle of Jersey, in England, where he died in 1831 of a paralytic stroke. Mrs. Blennerhassett later returned to New York to care for an invalid son and to seek compensation from Congress for the destruction of the island property. She, too, died without relief from the destitute circumstances into which the family had fallen. Many years before, in 1811, the mansion had burned. Sorrowful as was the plight of the family, West Virginians extended them no sympathy.

The War of 1812. The people of West Virginia gave further evidences of their attachment to the federal government in the troubles with England in the Napoleonic era. Federalists, still strong in the Eastern Panhandle and some other parts of the state, criticized policies of the Jefferson and Madison administrations as anti-British, but Republicans, by then the majority in most sections, loyally upheld the government. Congressmen from trans-Allegheny districts generally condemned impressment of American seamen and attacks upon American vessels during the years before the War of 1812 and clamored for defense of the nation's rights and honor. They supported the Embargo, the Non-Intercourse Bill, and Macon's Bill No. 2.

No Congressman was a stouter defender of the Republican administrations than John G. Jackson of Clarksburg. A brother-in-law of James Madison, for whom he often acted as spokesman in the House of Representatives, he excoriated Federalist critics. A clash with highly partisan Federalist Congressman Joseph Pearson of North Carolina, in which Pearson impugned the wisdom and integrity of Jefferson and Madison, resulted in a duel between Jackson and Pearson in 1809. Pearson dealt Jackson a wound that forced him to resign his seat and left him lame for the rest of his life. Had Jackson remained in Congress, he almost certainly would have ranked with Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Felix Grundy, and other western and southern War Hawks who entered the House in 1810.

Such was the patriotic spirit in West Virginia that militia captains in the War of 1812 usually filled their companies with ease. Captains Nimrod Saunders and James Laidley from the Parkersburg area expressed the feeling of many members of the fifty-two companies raised wholly or in part in West Virginia, when they wrote Governor James Barbour that they and their men were “members of the Great Union” and would devote their lives to “the security of the whole.”⁶More than a thousand men, under General Joel Leftwich, joined William Henry Harrison in northern Ohio after the surrender of Detroit by General William Hull in August 1812. Western forces also hastened to the defense of eastern Virginia when the British invaded the state in 1814.

Land Problems. The federal government had little authority over land questions that lay at the root of many problems in West Virginia during the early nineteenth century and that continued to plague the state. Pioneers who occupied the triangle bounded roughly by the Ohio and Little Kanawha rivers and the Laurel Ridge of the Allegheny Mountains encountered the claims of the Indiana Company. Following the collapse of the Vandalia scheme, the company endeavored to win recognition of its claims by the Virginia legislature. On June 3, 1779, however, the House of Delegates rejected the Indiana claim by a vote of fifty to twenty-eight. Three days later the Senate refused even to hear the plea of the company. No more fruitful was the appeal of the company to Congress, which understandably was unwilling to offend Virginia at a time when her support was of critical importance.

In 1802 the Indiana Company resurrected its claims, threatening the rights of twenty to thirty thousand residents of northern West Virginia. Scores of persons facing the loss of their property signed petitions, which circulated in Monongalia, Harrison, Randolph, Wood, and Ohio counties, asking the legislature to appropriate funds for their defense in suits brought by the company. George Jackson, a former congressman, declared that the settlers had won their lands from the Indians, occupied them for nearly thirty years, and paid taxes on them. The legislature declined to underwrite the expenses incurred by residents in the dispute, but it reaffirmed its rejection of the Indiana claims.

Blackwater Falls is typical of the rugged scenery of West Virginia. West Virginia Division of Archives and History (unless noted otherwise, all succeeding illustrations are from this source)

Harpers Ferry, the lowest point in the state. West Virginia Travel Development Division

Left, Cornstalk, leader of the Shawnees at Point Pleasant. Frost, Indian Wars of the United States

Below, Battle of Point Pleasant. Atkinson, History of Kanawha County

Bottom, Grave Creek Mound, Moundsville. Historic Preservation Unit, West Virginia Division of Archives and History

Left, Alexander Campbell, educator and founder of the Disciples of Christ. Courtesy of Bethany Press

Below, Jacob Westfall's fort, built in 1774 at the mouth of Files Creek, Beverly

Bottom, Rehoboth Methodist Church, near Union, built in 1786 and said to be the oldest existing church building west of the Alleghenies. Historic Preservation Unit, West Virginia Division of Archives and History

Harman Blennerhassett Mansion, on Blennerhassett Island, near Parkersburg. After Blennerhassett became involved in the western schemes of Aaron Burr, angry neighbors sacked the mansion, which burned in 1811. Blennerhassett Historical Park Commission

“Harewood,” home of Samuel Washington, near Charles Town. Here James and Dolley Madison were married.

John Brown defending the fire-engine house at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry

Kanawha Salt Works scene about 1845. Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia

Above, Philippi, site of what has often been called “the first land battle of the Civil War,” in a contemporary sketch by Lafayette Keller

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, a native of Clarksburg and West Virginia's greatest Civil War general. Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson

Francis H. Pierpont, governor in the Reorganized Government of Virginia and “Father of West Virginia”

Below, Independence Hall, site of the Second Wheeling Convention and capitol of the Reorganized Government of Virginia. Preservation Unit, West Virginia Division of Archives and History

Above, John S. Carlile, an insistent advocate of the separation of West Virginia from Virginia

Waitman T. Willey, a leader in the West Virginia statehood movement and a major architect of the postwar Republican party in the new state

Even greater troubles for West Virginians grew out of the Virginia Land Law of 1779. The legislation created a land office and provided methods for adjudicating claims to unpatented western lands. It allowed settlers who had taken up lands prior to January 1, 1778, preemption rights to four hundred acres and the option of acquiring an additional one thousand acres at prevailing prices. On the other hand, it disappointed many settlers by recognizing the rights of the Greenbrier and Loyal companies. The politics involved in land questions, however, appeared in the failure of the law to validate the claims of the Ohio Company, on the ground that its surveyors had not been accredited by county surveyors as required by earlier laws.

The most pernicious effects of the Virginia Land Law of 1779 lay in provisions making preemption rights and claims based upon military and treasury warrants transferable. The provisions enabled speculators to acquire millions of acres of land in West Virginia, often for mere pittances. By 1805 some 250 persons or groups, often in interlocking combinations, each acquired ten thousand acres or more. Five of the grantees received princely domains in excess of five hundred thousand acres. They included Henry Banks, a Richmond merchant; Wilson Cary Nicholas, whose land dealings contributed to serious financial troubles for his friend Thomas Jefferson; Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier; James Welch; and James K. Taylor. Also prominent among speculators were merchants of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and other eastern cities, as well as those in West Virginia towns; several members of Congress; at least fifty-two members of the Virginia legislature; and other persons of local importance.⁷

The traffic in lands left much of West Virginia in the hands of absentee owners, who often had more interest in exploitation of their resources than in the region itself. Moreover, since Virginia law did not require surveys of tracts in accordance with the sphericity of the earth, nonresident speculators, as well as others, plastered West Virginia with successive layers of claims, many of them overlapping and ill-defined. The system made land titles highly insecure and kept lawyers busy for decades.

Settlers, faced with the loss of their lands, looked to the legislature for relief. Nicholas County petitioners voiced a typical condemnation of a land system that, “after expelling a man from what he fondly hoped was his freehold and his home, consigns to his tardy but successful rival, and often to the merciless speculator, a property acquiring its chief value from the sweat of his brow, and the labour of his hands, without remuneration or recompense to the sufferer for that labour and industry.”⁸ On the other hand, many speculators found that after they recognized prior settlement rights, they had little useful land left. Nor was all the land of speculators desirable land. Levi Hollingsworth of Philadelphia was told by his local agent that his 13,245 acres in Pendleton County had little value, “inasmuch as no Stage rout approached nearer than 40 miles of this place & the balance of the journey must be made on horseback or in a balloon.”⁹

All West Virginia residents, whether or not their own lands were in dispute, suffered from the land system. Speculators often lacked or were unwilling to spend resources to develop their holdings and waited for the state government to provide roads, canals, and other improvements. Much of their land, however, was classified as wild and taxed at abysmally low rates that yielded little money for internal improvements, schools, or other services. The vicious cycle continued when speculators, unable to realize any immediate returns on their investments, failed to pay taxes and allowed their property to revert to the Literary Fund, a condition that afforded the state only tracts of land providing no taxable income at all.

The chaotic land system deprived West Virginia of thousands of desirable immigrants and retarded its economic growth. Although many worthy men and women settled in the state and fought valiantly for its improvement, others preferred the rich farmlands and secure titles of lands farther west to the relatively scarce bottomlands and uncertain prospects south of the Ohio River.

In the long view of history, the land system must be regarded as one of the most unfortunate influences upon the development of West Virginia. Hundreds of tracts acquired by post-Revolutionary War speculators subsequently changed hands, but the patterns of absentee ownership, external control of land and natural resources, and arrested economic development long remained and imposed a colonial economy upon the state. The farseeing statesmanship that Virginians gave the nation in its early days, unfortunately, did not always extend to the state's own internal affairs. As a result the land magnates, the economic royalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, gained an advantage that they have never relinquished.

¹William McKinley to [James] Ross, [Jasper] Yeates, and [William] Bradford, August 23, 1794, John George Jackson Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

²Martinsburg Potomak Guardian, January 2, 1799.

³Quoted in Stephen W. Brown, Voice of the New West: John G. jackson, His Life and Times (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), 18.

⁴Martinsburg Potomak Guardian, January 24, 1799.

⁵W.P. Palmer and others, eds., Calendar of Virginia Stare Papers and Other Manuscripts, 11 vols. (Richmond, 1875-1893; New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1968), vol. 9, 111-12.

⁶Saunders and Laidley to Barbour, May 23,1812, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 10, 147.

⁷A general account of Virginia land policies and their effects is in Otis K. Rice, The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia Beginnings, 1730-1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 118-49.

⁸Kanawha County Legislative Petition, December 17,1817, Virginia State Library, Richmond. Most petitioners lived in Nicholas County, then part of Kanawha.

⁹'Quoted in Rice, Allegheny Frontier, 143.