The Slaveholders' War: The Secession Crisis in Kanawha County, Western Virginia, 1860-1861

Abstract

est Virginia's historians have tended to minimize importance of slavery in state's formation. With fewer than fifteen thou- sand slaves in forty-eight counties that formed state in 1863, scarcity of institution appeared to have had little hold over region. Charles Ambler and George E. Moore contrasted slave-based planta- tion economy of eastern Virginia with that of free labor-based small farms and factories in west to explain state's formation. Richard Orr Curry's revisionist work shared this view. The slavery issue, he argued, arose only during debates on emancipation at statehood conventions, not before. Since then, scholars have placed individual counties under microscope to examine sectional loyalties at local level. First, James H. Cook's study of Harrison County argued that Unionists consisting of former Whigs and some Democrats tried to thwart secessionist forces led by local elites. They succeeded by only ten votes. Second, John W. Shaffer's study of remote Barbour County argued that personal issues like marriage and kin- ship mattered more than wealth or community in choosing sides. 1 Third, Ken Fones-Wolf revealed how threat of free-labor ideology added to strong kinship and community ties among small number of Wheeling secessionists. These studies have identified many new issues that divided western Virginians on issue of secession except one: slavery. The time has come to bring slavery into debate on how West Virginians chose sides in Civil War. With over two thousand slaves, one-sixth of total in forty-eight counties, Kanawha County pro- vides a useful example to show how slavery affected political, social, and economic relations among its residents. While salt furnaces substituted for cotton plantations there, local slaveholders exhibited many of same traits as their eastern counterparts. The institution affected whites as much as slaves. As Eugene Genovese has pointed out, the paternalism of planters towards their slaves was reinforced by semi-paternal relation-