he other a fair chance in the common life.

Nor was it different in Virginia. There the small counties of the east,
with a minority of the white population, controlled both houses of the
assembly, the governorship, the courts, and the majority of the State's
representatives in Congress. This advantage, as in North Carolina, had
been guaranteed by the constitution of 1776. The motive for this
one-sided arrangement was the protection of slave property which, it
must be said, paid the larger share of the taxes. In western Virginia,
extending then to the Ohio River, there was a teeming population whose
ablest leaders constantly resisted this system and demanded their
rights. As elsewhere in the West the program was manhood suffrage, equal
representation, and the popular election of important state officials.

After twenty-five years of agitation, a constitutional convention met in
Richmond in the autumn of 1829. Reformers everywhere looked to this body
in the hope that something might be done to "put slavery in a way to
final extinction." Madison, Monroe, Chief Justice Marshall, and John
Randolph were members. All of these favored eastern Virginia and
defended the privileged minority. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of
Jefferson, Philip Doddridge, and Alexander Campbell represented the
western section of the State and democracy. After months of debate
which covered every subject in government, and especially slavery and
its possible abolition, the convention decided, in the face of serious
threats of secession on the part of the up country, to grant to the more
populous section only a slight increase in the number of
representatives. The power of property in government was once again
confirmed, and so hopeless was the outlook that prominent anti-slavery
men deserted their own cause and joined the other side during the next
decades.

It was not an easy thing for John Randolph, and the other champions of
the eastern Virginia oligarchy to commit their cause to the democratic
party of the Mississippi Valley, whose leader was the "lawless" Jackson.
Yet this is what they did. Nowhere outside of South Carolina was the
influence of Calhoun more effective than in Virginia, and it must have
been this which turned the balance in favor of "the General."

From northern Virginia, even from eastern Maryland, to middle Georgia
the case of democracy seemed doomed. John Randolph had denounced it as a
monstrous "tyranny of King Numbers