Editor's Note: "Countdown to Statehood" is a weekly series highlighting the historical events that eventually led to West Virginia becoming a state on June 20, 1863. This article is the third in the series.
The long road to West Virginia's statehood, believed by most to have been started during the American Civil War, took on a totally different meaning when the first constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia was signed on June 12, 1776.
The constitution was mostly penned by George Mason. It was ratified by the Constitutional Convention delegates and, as in many of the country's new colonies, was not subject to the approval of voters across the state.
An absolutely critical portion of that first state constitution, as far as those who lived in the western part of the state were concerned, was the provision that gave voting rights to persons who owned at least 25 acres of improved or 50 acres of unimproved land. The Constitution states it this way officially: "that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage." This law created discrimination and lesser representation in the western Virginia counties.
The people who lived in western Virginia tended to own smaller plots of land and therefore couldn't vote. Western Virginia's land mass (24,000 square miles) made up only about a third of Virginia's total of 66,000 square miles at the time. Much of the western Virginia acreage was wild, difficult to be tilled and farmed, or in mountainous areas. The terms "planters" versus "mountaineers" emerged from those contrasting lifestyles.
Eastern Virginia always maintained a huge majority in population of potentially eligible voters. Western Virginia's representatives to the state's General Assembly never had enough votes on their own to affect the legislation they needed. Their pleas of equal representation fell on the deaf ears of the legislative majority.
Thomas Jefferson had noted the constitution's seeming tendency to concentrate arbitrary power in the legislature and ignoring the minority's wishes (the minority being western Virginia). In his Notes on Virginia written in 1784, Jefferson addressed the issue as follows: The concentration of government power in the general assembly "is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots (the number of the Virginia legislators) would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice - as little will it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves. An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of the government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
That first Constitution created a fissure between the eastern and western portions of the state. That division never was repaired.