e Eastern and older section of the
State. The men of the West were hardy frontiersmen, a majority of
them soldiers of the Revolution and their immediate descendants,
without estates, with little but the honorable record of patriotic
service and their own strong arms, for their fortunes. They had
few slaves. They had their land patents, which were certificates
of patriotic service in the Revolutionary war, and they depended
upon their own labor for a new home in the wilderness. A population
thus originating, a community thus founded, were naturally uncongenial
to the aristocratic element of the Old Dominion. They had no trade
relations, no social intercourse, with the tide-water section of
the State. Formidable mountain ranges separated the two sections,
and the inhabitants saw little of each other. The business interests
of the Western region led the people to the Valley of the Ohio and
not to the shores of the Chesapeake. The waters of the Monongahela
connected them with Pennsylvania and carried them to Pittsburg.
All the rivers of the western slope flowed into the Ohio and gave
to the people the markets of Cincinnati and Louisville. Their
commercial intercourse depended on the navigation of Western waters,
and a far larger number had visited St. Louis and New Orleans than
had ever seen Richmond or Norfolk. The West-Virginians were aware
of the splendid resources of their section and were constantly
irritated by the neglect of the parent State to aid in their
development. They enjoyed a climate as genial as that of the
Italians who dwell on the slopes of the Apennines; they had forests
more valuable than those that skirt the upper Rhine; they had
mineral wealth as great as that which has given England her precedence
in the manufacturing progress of the world. They were anxious for
self-government. Their trustworthy senator, Waitman T. Willey,
declared that the people west of the Alleghany range had for sixty
years "desired separation." The two sections, he said, had been
time and again on the eve of an outbreak and the Western people
could with difficulty be held back from insurrection. Criminations
and recriminations had been exchanged at every session of the
Legislature for forty years and threats of violence had been hurled
by one section at the other.

The opportunity for a new State had now come. Its organization
and admission to the Union would complete the chain of loyal
Commonwealths on the so