Early Black Migration and the Post-emancipation Black Community in Cabell County, West Virginia, 1865–1871

Abstract

West Virginia's formation divided many groups within the new state. Grievances born of secession inflamed questions of taxation, political repre - sentation, and constitutional change, and greatly complicated black aspira- tions during the state's formative years. It must be remembered that in 1860 the black population in the Virginia counties comprising the current state of West Virginia totaled only 5.9 percent of the general population, with most found in the western Virginia mountain region. 1 Moreover, long-standing attitudes on race and slavery held great sway throughout Appalachia. As historian John C. Inscoe notes, mountaineers were first and foremost southerners and they viewed slavery and race not unlike those of their yeoman or even slaveholding counterparts elsewhere in the South. 2 Thus, the quest by the state's black residents to achieve the full measure of freedom in the immediate post-Civil War years faced formidable challenges. This essay builds upon the voluminous works studying the historic movement of black people in immediate post-emancipation America, and focuses on southern West Virginia where the state's largest contingent of black residents resided among the state's largest contingent of former slave owners and southern sympathizers. 3 To meet the mandates for statehood recognition established by President Lincoln, the state's legislators were forced to rectify a particularly troublesome conundrum: how to grant citi- zenship to the state's black residents as well as to its former Confederates. While both populations eventually garnered the rights of citizenship, the fact that a significant number of southern West Virginia's black residents departed the region suggests that the political gains granted to them were not enough to stem the tide of out-migration during the state's formative years, from 1863 to 1870. In the mid-1860s, Collis P. Huntington's decision to construct the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from Richmond, Virginia, through the