John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[138] absorbed political power, and selfishly laid and expended taxes to her local advantage, so that West Virginia was made to stand in the relation of a tributary province, rather than an integral and equally favored part of the commonwealth.

So too grew up essential differences in social tradition and aspiration. The tide-water population developed family estates, pretentious manor-homes, aristocratic exclusiveness, ancestral pride-peculiarities which could not thrive in hunters' camps, or the shanties of miners and lumbermen. The whole world over, and in all ages, mountain and forest life has bred a spirit of self-reliance, of personal independence, of the recognition of individual equality, and rights of simple manhood.

More than anything else, however, the system of slavery antagonized the two sections of the State. By the census of 1860, East Virginia contained 472,494 slaves; while West Virginia, with half as much free population, embraced a total of only 18,371 slaves. It is therefore not surprising that secessionism was rampant in the east, and that unionism prevailed in the west. Of the 55 final votes against the secret Ordinance of Secession in the Virginia Convention, 32 were cast by the West Virginia delegates, 14 others were contributed from other mountain counties; the populous plains and lowlands of the east supplied only 9. As in other parts of the South, the fungus of treason grew rankest in the hotbeds of the heavy slave counties; the poison of conspiracy infected the centres of accumulated wealth, of inherited family pride, of over-fattened political ambition; it was the Tylers, the Wises, the Floyds, the Masons, who, stuffed to repletion with political benefits, turned with ungrateful hearts to destroy the temple of government, wherein as selfish and hypocritical priests they had conducted a dissembling and perverted worship.