Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided Read Free Page A

Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike with the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. Another, the Beverly and Fairmont Road, connected the Northwestern and Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpikes by 1850.
     
    The new roads had a dramatic effect on commerce. Wagons of all descriptions creaked along their routes. Rumbling stage-coaches—often called “shake guts”—brought weary travelers to bustling taverns. Large droves of cattle and sheep filled the roads as they were herded to market. 11
     
    But the heyday of turnpikes was short-lived. Track for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a brainchild of Maryland businessmen, had been laid to Wheeling by 1852. Three-quarters of its route lay across northern Virginia. The Baltimore and Ohio was an engineering marvel, traversing the most rugged terrain yet faced by railroad builders in America. For a time it was the only rail link to the nation's capital. A branch line, the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, reached Parkersburg in 1857, connecting that Ohio River town to the main line at Grafton. The railroad spawned a new era of development. Virginians touched by it were bound into closer social and political union with the Northern states. 12
     

    As population and commerce grew in the trans-Allegheny region, so did sectional differences with eastern Virginia. The Allegheny crests marked a boundary of contrasting economies. To the east lay fertile soils and a climate suitable for the production of staple crops on large plantations, requiring the labor of slaves. Rugged terrain and variable climate precluded a plantation economy in much of the west. Hardscrabble subsistence farms dotted the western landscape; diverse natural resources encouraged industrial development with less need for slavery.
     
    The people were of different stock. German, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh settlers were drawn to the trans-Allegheny region. Most shared an egalitarian culture quite unlike the English Piedmont and Tidewater aristocrats of eastern Virginia.
     
    By 1860, the forty-eight counties that would become Western Virginia contained 376,677 residents, about one-quarter of Virginia's population. The region was mostly rural, with some mountainous areas completely uninhabited. Only seven towns had populations of one thousand or more. Wheeling, the largest by far with fourteen thousand residents, was a major industrial and trading center on the Ohio River, strongly linked to northern interests by geography. Parkersburg, also on the Ohio (1860 population: 2,493), had been the scene of a frenetic oil boom in 1859 and was the western terminus of the Northwestern Turnpike, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, and the Northwestern Virginia Railroad. Charleston (1860 population: 1,520), the economic hub of the Kanawha Valley, had no railroad, but maintained trade with Cincinnati and Louisville via the Great Kanawha River, while the James River and Kanawha Turnpike gave it stronger ties to eastern Virginia. Railroad and turnpike communities such as Grafton, Fairmont, Weston, Beverly, Lewisburg, and Harpers Ferry were mere villages. 13
     
    Virginia was also divided by slavery. The first African slaves arrived at Jamestown in 1619—a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. By 1860, there were 490,865 slaves in the Commonwealth. Few westerners owned them. The 18,371 slaves residing in forty-eight western counties that year made up less than4 percent of Virginia's total. The slave population in Western Virginia actually decreased in the decade leading to the Civil War—portals to a growing “Underground Railroad” were enticingly near. 14
     
    Virginia's constitution, adopted in 1776, strongly favored the east. Voting rights were limited to white male “freeholders” (property owners). The General Assembly and courts appointed state and county officials. Each county was given two delegates to the General Assembly, regardless of size or population. Western Virginia received only four of the twenty-four state senatorial