David Shanet Clark, M.Ed. Online Journal ... scribners.org
David Shanet Clark	Seceding from Secession: Geographic Factors in the Political History of West Virginia By David Shanet Clark Upland West Virginia, with her contemporary and fantastic Appalachian Mountain region forest vistas, wild and wonderful Dolly Sods' area own surrealistic vegetation, her unusual Blackwater Falls and Seneca Rock Allegheny topographic regions, with her native Black Bear, Bobcat, Beaver and Fox wildlife habitat populations; her Shenandoah, Greenbrier and Potomac River colonial refuges, all these aspects show that West Virginia is today a living relic of the great colonial, federal and victorian eras' American frontier region. Along the high Allegheny ridgeline some rare old growth forests stand as they did six, eight, ten generations ago, a formidable force.  Many of the rural people still resist the encroachments of modernity and urbanization. West Virginia’s annals of geographic and geologic history, the study of Greater Virginia geography since the seventeenth century, reveal to us the importance of the Allegheny Mountain Ridge to American history. The history of West Virginia has been examined by capable writers, and the nineteenth century view of the new State stressed the theme of loyal citizens, showing loyalty to the Union. Western Virginia occupied the center of the national demographic map for the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it was a central part of the American frontier from the 1700s through the late antebellum era. The most contested U.S. domestic issue in early nineteenth century was the internal improvements debate. In 1817 President James Madison found Federal investment in post and military roads to be constitutional. The National Road that Congress chartered stretched from Cumberland, Maryland to the Ohio River and passed through present-day West Virginia. This extension of the settlers’ westbound Potomac River route formed a strategic and developmental mainway from the Federal capital city inland to the Ohio River System, the Old Northwest Territory and the Mississippi Valley. Forty-five years later, when West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia to join the Union, the Federal government gained the strategic defense of the National Road, the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along a parallel route, the Potomac River itself and the western Shenandoah waters at the west of the Allegheny Ridge. With West Virginia, the Union firmed up the Ohio, Maryland and Kentucky area’s strategic security -- and helped clear the Ohio River from Pittsburg to Kentucky. The Ohio River linked the Union and West Virginia completed the bloc of loyal Border States. Students of geopolitics should familiarize themselves with the High Allegheny continental watershed and the relationship of this massif to events in Native American, French, and British eighteenth century history -- as well as to the nineteenth century Union vs. Confederacy strategic realities. George Washington knew the crucial importance of the old Virginia frontier, in 1785 the Potomac Company incorporated to build a canal to connect the Potomac River with the Cheat River and the James River Company was incorporated to construct a canal to connect the James River with the Great Kanawha. George Washington was made President of both chartered groups. The National Road was completed from Cumberland, Md. to Wheeling, Va. in 1818, while the first commercial steamboat on the Ohio River dates to 1817. The Staunton to Parkersburg road from the Great Valley to the Ohio River was established between 1823-1847. The Winchester to Parkersburg Road was completed in the 1830s. With settlements established, almost all after 1790, by Germans, Scots, Irish and various pioneers who had migrated southwest from Baltimore, Philadelphia or New England, western Virginia had little of the Anglican tobacco plantation interests. Good roads pushed through the interior hollows in the Clay-Jackson period and they developed and improved the economy. It is significant that the United States Census of 1820, 1830, 1840 and 1850 show the center of U.S. population moving west over time -- across present day West Virginia, like a slow wagon of popular political weight moving west out of the old colonial Atlantic area into the Ohio Valley and by 1860 into Ohio and the old northwest territories. The completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway in the winter of 1852-1853 brought a quickening of market prosperity for the mixed agricultural families -- now less dependent on game. As hard pioneer conditions abated in much of western Virginia, due to steam-powered river transport, wood and coal fired railroads, new roads and bridges, then the region’s cultural and political establishment reached new heights. West Virginia was both made and unmade by the war. The New River, the Kanawha River and other rivers in the Ohio-Mississippi-Gulf system; the Cheat River, the Guyandotte, the Elk River, the Gauley River and the Greenbrier River are all interesting for their effects on important trade, development and political boundary decisions. When Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1861, the people of these western river valleys mobilized immediately for resistance and Union statehood. Western Virginia political leaders were recognized by the Lincoln Administration, and sat in the wartime House and Senate as loyalists, or Reformed Virginia representatives. By 1863 a series of conventions and lop-sided elections had established the new state, West Virginia. Marked by its sprawling, irregular shape and mountainous terrain, West Virginia is poorly understood by many 19th century and civil war historians, probably because no great armies ever fought there. Strategically, however, the severance of the Northwest half of Virginia had great impact on the Confederacy -- and the Union. This minor general theater of campaign, West Virginia, had one major railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the river systems mentioned above. As John Shaffer states: "Federal success in Western Virginia gave the north its most important victory of the first year of the war. A third of Virginia had been won to the Union, territory from which its Armies could be launched deep into the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862 the U.S. high command launched a 2-pronged attack into the Shenandoah Valley from Western Virginia." A few battles and countless skirmishes by Gen. McClellan cemented the new border, which carefully followed the high ridge of the Allegheny Mountains, and for many miles the border shares its identity with the actual watershed between the Ohio River or Mississippi Gulf-bound tributary waters -- and the Chesapeake Bay / James River and Atlantic Ocean bound mountain headwaters. Here in the less populated cold and rugged hinterlands, both the Union and the Confederacy could tacitly utilize the high defensive wall of the Allegheny Ridge to their mutual tactical and strategic advantage, or stalemate. The Union gained the Ohio River system, the Potomac River, the route of the old National Road and the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the northern panhandle of old Virginia near Pittsburg, plus Harpers’ Ferry (strategic river/rail confluence) and the old buffalo cattle trail road across the mountains from Lewisburg to the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, the Midland Trail. By November 1863 U.S.A. General William A. Averell defeated the Confederates at Droop Mountain and ended rebel control of the Greenbrier River Valley. This “produced a considerable degree of congruity between territory within the boundaries of the new state of West Virginia and that actually under the control of its authorities.” The Old National Road through Cumberland, Maryland to the Ohio Valley by-passed western Virginia and propelled settlers to points west, north and south of the trans-Allegheny Virginia hinterland region. This is the central historic impact of the Allegheny High Ridge on U.S. history in the antebellum and colonial contact periods. Indeed, there were trails and a cattle road into the trans-Allegheny, or today’s West Virginia. The Native American Midland Trail linked Staunton, in Augusta County Virginia in the southern Shenandoah Valley, with the Greenbrier and Kanawha River systems in West Virginia. Between the Blue Ridge Valley and the farmland near Kanawha Falls lay nearly impenetrable ravines, forested escarpments, the New River Gorge -- and the wildest Gauley River rapids. Only animal trails, widened by cattle traders, carried frontier farmers through the southeast section of today’s West Virginia, until road building began in earnest in the 1830’s and 1840’s. Another rugged 19th century road led from Monterey to Beverly, but these were little more than trails until circa 1830. George Washington recognized the importance of linking the settled parts of Virginia to the Ohio Valley in the late eighteenth century, “I aver, most seriously, that I wd not give my tract of 10,990 acres on the Kanawha for 50,000 acres back of it, and adjoining thereto, nor for any 50,000 acres of the common land of the country, which I have seen, back from the water and in one body.” Washington understood his river bottoms to be “Extremely valuable” and worth five times the inland tracts. Washington stated that common western Virginia land values in the Adams administration to be “half a dollar or less per acre.” Washington also owned large tracts of land in the Great Bend of the Ohio River -- and his family was prominent in the Harpers Ferry and Berkeley Springs part of what later would become West Virginia. With the completion of the National Road, then the James and Kanawha Turnpike and finally the Staunton to Parkersburg Road the ‘west’ was settled -- but a series of constitutional conventions show that the western denizens of Virginia held bitter feelings for the Richmond government long before the Confederacy crisis of 1861. Poll taxes discriminated against the low income Westerners and the tax on property included a bias in favor of slave-holding interests. With state government offices and banks centered in Richmond the people of the West felt the sting of poor government services and high travel expenses, on top of tax and representation imbalances. The high remote hinterlands, a band of counties along and in the Allegheny highlands, sharply divided political opinion in the period before secession. In the wartime partition of Virginia into Union and Confederate halves, a constitutional contract formed between the Union government and the political leadership of the Trans-Allegheny region. The contract extended to an area that the West Virginians could lead into statehood against the Old Dominion’s Richmond government. The Union negotiated with the seceding anti-secessionists, who conducted overwhelming polls against Richmond. With the results in hand, they Wheeling Union loyalists met with an enthusiastic reception in wartime Washington. Benjamin Wade squired a Statehood Bill through the House, and Cabinet members William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edwin Stanton advised Lincoln to sign it. Francis Pierpont, Governor of Reformed Virginia and U.S. Senator Waitman T. Willey were West Virginia’s native founders. Union arms had secured the bulk of the state to the Union militarily, and by June 23, 1863 the new State had full status in the Federal Union. (continued below)       Hayes House Garrardstown, W.Va. Photo - Iron Furnace Shenandoah Valley West Virginia 1844 35mm 1959 Agfa 2004 Photo by Shanet Clark    (Text -- continued)     The Trans-Allegheny region was joined to a secure corridor of eastern counties and a smaller northbound salient. The Eastern Panhandle of the new state secured the Potomac River and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, while the Northern Panhandle protected the industrialized ironworks at Wheeling and the Union’s southbound Ohio River. So both the eastern and northern irregularities are explained.  The 20th century French historians Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch understood that long duration geographic factors might in some ways dominate human industry, culture and political behavior. George Washington, Peter Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson were cartographic surveyors, and the history of the colonial and federal (eastern) frontier is one of land claims and jurisdictional issues in which accurate knowledge of space, terrain and remote topography were of central importance. Human agency is restrained by physical factors in the environment. Floating down a river is easy, but climbing over a mountain is much more difficult. Braudel’s theory of la longue duree is a good approach to the history of the trans-Allegheny region. Time passes in different cycles in the rural mountains, between rural small towns and the coal and chemical producing cities, and geologic destiners drive political events. The event horizons of recent history are formed by a longer pattern, the Olympian view of the old frontier can show high mountain ridges and their swift river systems impacting history -- and dividing colonial and Federal era frontier people more or less neatly. Human agency is determined in some degree by forbidding or compelling geographic realities. The importance of the watershed over the long term cannot be underestimated. The Shawnee and the Cherokee are known to have used the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia as a buffer zone in the first contact period. Happy Hunting Land was here. When the Proclamation Line of 1763 was promulgated by George III to end westward frontier expansion into the freshly conquered French northwest territories, the line followed the high ridge of the Alleghenies, from the southwest to the northeast, incorporating nearly the present border of West Virginia and Virginia. The Southern Methodists’ break from the Northern Methodists in 1844 also followed this line. The French, following LaSalle’s expedition, laid claim to the Ohio tributaries from the River to the highest sources, i.e. the French claimed the west Virginia part of old Virginia in the 18th century until 1763. One of the oldest and most simple maps of this region labels West Virginia and Kentucky simply as Florida, showing a primitive Spanish claim. French, English and Spanish border conflicts were quite fluid in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Ohio River is a very plain demarcation, but the high ridge is less manifest to the eye. Confronting the Allegheny massif, a forbidding front broken by gaps, western explorers were steered around present day West Virginia. The Warrior Road became the Great (Shenandoah) Valley Road and it trailed off to the southwest to pass through the Cumberland Gap as the Wilderness Road to the Bluegrass; here Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone carved a route that led rustic Virginians out of old Virginia, and into the Ohio Valley. The Shenandoah Valley, with its slaves enduring General Stonewall Jackson’s campaign theater, was not enrolled in the new state in 1863; the Valley, east of the high Allegheny watershed ridge, but west of the mighty Blue Ridge, remained within the Confederacy and the Old Dominion, within its geographic and Atlantic-bound rivers’ region. Just as the southwesterly Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap the Allegheny massif propelled all but the hardiest explorers and frontier families to go north, through Cumberland, Maryland and then north to Pittsburgh, where the mighty Ohio River carried them south and west through the Ohio Valley, again bypassing western Virginia -- unless they disembarked on the left bank before reaching Kentucky... The Cumberland Gap and Wilderness Road route worked in the other direction as well. During the Lewis and Clark expedition an envoy of Osage Indians led by Peter Choteau went “eastward from St. Louis to Vincennes, Louisville, Frankfort, Lexington, through the Cumberland Gap and then [north] down the Shenandoah to Winchester, and on to Shepherdstown, Maryland, Harpers Ferry and Frederick [Md.] to Washington.” The Potomac River was the original corridor into the ‘west,’ and by 1818 the National Road ran from Baltimore along the Potomac to Cumberland, Maryland and on to Wheeling on the Ohio -- in present day West Virginia. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached the same spot by 1853, along a similar route. The B&O Railroad and the National Road  are seen as wartime strategic corridors, essential to the Union’s transportation needs. The Ohio River, the Potomac River and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were all secured by the new arrangement of loyal and confederate counties in old Virginia. Marked by a few high mountain gaps, the new border formed a defensive wall, amenable to the south, and formed a defensive wall for the Union forces in West Virginia, as well. As a strategic conquest, the West Virginia 'counter-secession' must rank with C.S.A. General Joseph E. Johnson’s precipitous retreat from northern Virginia as an early strategic transfer. Numerous historians have noted that the fate of the border states decided the war, and this new border state of West Virginia marked a significant strategic conquest on the part of the Union, as the State secured the Ohio River, its Virginia tributaries, the iron works at Wheeling, much of the Potomac River system and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Vulnerable bridges and towns along the B&O were raided and West Virginia towns such as Martinsburg and Romney; and Harpers Ferry changed hands repeatedly, but the borders held to the Union’s advantage as the fighting came to center more on points south after the battle of Gettysburg. When the highest Ridges were linked to encompass the Ohio River waters into the new state, this political boundary line marked the watershed of Atlantic versus Gulf runoffs --- south of the line rainwater runs through the Greater James and Rappahannock systems, while north of the line, the New River and the Kanawha waters rolled down the Ohio to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, the politically stable Atlantic Northeast was joined to massive inland ‘western’ power. The Northeast and Old Northwest Territory states enrolled the south bank of the Ohio (West Virginia and Kentucky) into its Union and Republican government. I find it very interesting that radically dissenting political forces, in the heat of an unprecedented civil war, decided upon the watershed at the high Allegheny dividing ridge to be the ultimate extent of the new Union state. County by county, the Union power was strongest along the Ohio River and was contested more convincingly inland. The new state’s founders rejected counties lying now in Virginia, the tiers of counties along the border and the Shenandoah Valley. The founders knew that secession interest was stronger in these counties -- closer to Richmond -- and the number of slaves and free blacks in these Great Valley counties were also at issue. Waitman T. Willey and the other founders limited the state to western Virginia counties with strong white majorities. Lincoln’s government sent the State bill back to the convention and demanded an emancipation clause in the new West Virginia Constitution, which was added before the final vote which led to Lincoln’s signature in June 1863. Ultimately, geography determines political junctures because of strategic imperatives inherent in the topography. By late 1862 the Union did in fact lay military claim to the high ridge of the Alleghenies, and the differences in settlement patterns, labor and crop approaches, informed by the terrain, reached their conclusion in the new State. As Dr. Shaffer shows clearly, the west Virginians of 1861-1863 who joined the Confederacy as individuals had a high proportion of Virginia native parents and grandparents, while Unionists had more Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northeast born ancestors. The unique shape of West Virginia, its geometrically irregular and sprawling non-compact form actually follows from common sense geographic principles. Strategically the new State aided the Union by: securing the defense of Washington D.C. and the Potomac River; in the defense of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the National Road and the Chesapeake and Ohio canals along the old Virginia-Maryland border; cleared the Ohio from North of Pittsburg to South Point Ohio, firmed up Southern Ohio and Southern Pennsylvania’s situation relative to Maryland and Kentucky, the true border states, and this meant the loss of Weirton and the Pittsburg area north Virginia salient to the Confederacy. The southern border provided a wall of defense. The three concepts of rivers, high watersheds and strategic corridors can explain the panhandles and ‘teapot’ shape of W.VA. Armed with geographic, climate, elevation, rail, road and river topographic facts, the political and social events leading up to counter-secession and West Virginia statehood can be understood.  Works Cited:   Ambler, Charles Henry. Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776-1881. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910. Ambler, Charles Henry. West Virginia, The Mountain State, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire In British North America. New York: Publisher, 2000.  Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Atlas of World History. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Blow, Michael. History of the Thirteen Colonies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Braudel, Fernand. Memory and the Mediterranean. Callahan, James Morton. History of West Virginia: Old and New. Chicago: 1923. Colton, Calvin. The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay. Boston: Frederick Parker, 1856. Craf, John A. Economic Development Of The United States. New York: McGraw Hill, 1952.  Crofts, Daniel.  Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill UNC 1989. Faulkner, Harold. American Economic History 8th Edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Geiger, Joseph. Correpondence. Guyandotte, W.Va. (grave monuments' texts) Hall, Granville D. The Rending of Virginia. Chicago: 1901.   Hogan, Roseann R. “Buffaloes in the Corn: James Wade’s Account of Pioneer Kentucky” The Register of The Kentucky Historical Society. Vol. 89, #1 Winter 1991. Holmberg, James, ed. Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hull, Forrest. A Forrest Hull Sampler. Richwood W.Va.: Jim Comstock 1960. Martineau, Harriet. Society in America London. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837. McCardell, John. The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism 1830-1860. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Rice, Otis. A West Virginia History. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980.   Shaffer, John. Clash of Loyalties: A Border County In the Civil War. Morgantown: WVU Press, 2003. Stealey, John E. The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.   Stephenson, Richard W. and Marianne M. McKee. Virginia In Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth and Development. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000. Twohig, Dorothy, ed. Letters of George Washington, Retirement Series. Charlottesville: UVA Press, 1998. Von Glahn, Richard and Paul Jakov Smith, eds. The Song Yuan Ming Transition in Chinese History: Imagining Pre-Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. West Virginia, Atlas and Gazetteer: Detailed Topographic Maps. New York: DeLorme, 2001. Willcox, Cornelius DeWitt. A French English Military Technical Dictionary. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917. Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration. West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. Washington: WPA and Oxford University Press, 1941. Georgia State University; Atlanta, Ga. The Shenandoah Valley Berkeley County West Virginia 35mm    1959 Agfa    2002 Photo By Shanet Clark "The politically stable Atlantic Northeast had joined with the massive inland power of the Mississippi and Ohio. And this process occurred because of continental, geographic factors of long duration. Braudel's Long Duree of geographic reality played out as strategic political reality in the case of West Virginia." Traditional Colonial Stone Home Gerrardstown West Virginia. Circa 1760 35mm 1959 Agfa 2004 Photo by Shanet Clark John Brown's Trial: A Watershed Event In U.S. History In October of 1859 John Brown a notoriously violent abolitionist, led eighteen armed men, both black and white, on a raid of the little railroad town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His goal was to seize the Federal arsenal there and then lead a slave insurrection across the south. After a two-day standoff with local militia and Federal troops, in which ten of his men were shot or killed, John Brown was captured and put on trial in Virginia state court. He was found guilty and hanged. John Brown’s activities in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October of 1859 caused an unprecedented uproar in the United States and generated an immense volume of editorial analysis, comment and interpretation.1 The original Court Records of the case have been lost or scattered.2 They were partially restored in the 1930’s.3 The most complete records can be found in the Jefferson County (W.Va.) County Records Manuscripts Common Law Order Books #6 and #12 and Will Book #16.4 My analysis of the trial is based on a contemporary work that reports the entire trial in objective terms, and I will refer to this source as the “consensus” account.5 This corresponds to the Senate Report and Testimony in many particulars and presents no particular agenda.6 The insurrection and trial of John Brown spawned a complex historiography.7 Many of the works are strongly Pro-Brown, bordering on hagiography.8 Two examples show the extent of the apologia commonly expressed by militant abolitionists concerning John Brown. James Redpath entitled his chapters on the trial and execution “Among the Philistines” and “Victory over Death.” In addition, F.B. Sanborn dedicated his book to John Brown’s family.9 It is useful in understanding the period to compare these militant abolitionists’ editorial content to the public record of the Senate and the “consensus” account. John Brown’s trial is filled with unusual circumstances. After seizing hostages and a Federal Armory on October the 16th and 17th John Brown was tried in Virginia State Circuit Court for treason, multiple first-degree murders and inciting an insurrection among Virginia slaves.10 The defense counsels were appointed by the court and expressed strong misgivings.11 The trial was definitely rushed, due to the recent insurrection and hysteria in the community.12 Brown attended the trial prone upon a cot, since he had suffered multiple saber wounds when captured.13 The appointed defense counsel admitted the fact of the crimes, shared in the outrage of the community, and apologized for defending Brown.14 The pace, presentation and mood of the court was unusual. Many legitimate objections were over-ruled in haste.15 The judgment would almost certainly be thrown out on appeal in today’s judicial system. The trial took place in Charlestown, the county seat of Jefferson County, Virginia, the county where Harpers Ferry was located. Charlestown is now located in the extreme eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and is not to be confused with Charleston, W.Va., the State Capitol in central Kanawha County. Charlestown was named after Charles Washington, a relative of the President, and the trial courthouse is still standing.16 James Redpath’s pro-Brown account includes an inflammatory charge to the jurors by the judge, and this is not included in the “consensus” account. Since the direct quotes in Redpath usually correspond with quotations in the “consensus” and Senate accounts, we can reasonably credit Judge Richard Parker with these words: I will not permit myself to give expression to any of those feelings which at once spring up in every breast when reflecting on the enormity of the guilt in which those are involved who invade by force a peaceful, unsuspecting portion of our common country, raise the standard of insurrection amongst us, and shoot down without mercy Virginia citizens defending Virginia soil against their invasion.17 The trial took just over a week, starting on Tuesday, 25 October 1859 and concluding on Wednesday, 2 November 1859. The jury took only forty-five minutes in finding John Brown guilty. Brown was executed within a month of conviction.18 The central witness in the trial was Colonel Lewis Washington, of President Washington’s family, who had been kidnapped out of his home and held hostage near the Federal Armory.19 His slaves were militarily “impressed” by Brown, but they took no active part in the insurrection. Other local witnesses testified to the seizure of the Federal Armory, the appearance of Virginia militia groups, and shootings on the railroad bridge. Other evidence described the U.S. Marines’ raid on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad engine house occupied by Brown and his men. U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee and cavalry officer J.E.B Stuart led the Marine raid, and it freed the hostages and ended the standoff. Lee filed an affadavit to the court with his account of the Marine’s raid.20 The manuscript evidence was of particular interest to the judge and jury. Voluminous documents were found on the Maryland farm rented by John Brown under the alias Isaac Smith.21 These documents included a provisional constitution, which Brown and his officers had signed. These documents clinched the treason and pre-meditation charges against John Brown.22 Lawson Botts, a prominent Virginia attorney, was appointed to be the lead defense counsel, and George H. Hoyt, who arrived a few days later from Massachusetts, took a hesitant role in the closing days of the trial. Hoyt was hired to defend Brown by John W. Le Barnes, one of the so-called “Secret Six”--abolitionists who had given money to Brown in the past.23 Charles J. Faulkner and Charlestown mayor Thomas C. Green were also appointed to be defense counsels by Judge Parker, but they stepped down after John Brown expressed “no confidence” in them in open court.24 The defense had a difficult task, since Brown and his men had planned and carried out an insurrection, signed the provisional government charters, fired upon local, state and federal forces and caused five deaths.25 The defense’s stronger points are quite amplified in the apologia of Redpath, but are clear enough even in the “consensus” account. The defense first attacked the multiple count indictment and called for severance of the separate counts within this ‘all or nothing’ indictment.26 The defense repeatedly asked for more time to prepare a defense. Brown himself asked for a few days to recover from his wounds. Time was requested again when George Hoyt arrived. All these motions were denied.27 Unable to slow the trial on (appropriate) procedural grounds, and unable to get the unusual indictment thrown out, the defense stressed jurisdictional ambiguities and extenuating circumstances. The defense claimed that the Harpers Ferry Federal Armory was not on Virginia property, but since the murdered townspeople had died in the streets outside the perimeter of the Federal facility, this carried little weight with the jury. John Brown’s lack of official citizenship in Virginia was presented as a defense against treason against the State. The judge dispatched this claim by reference to “rights and responsibilities” and the overlapping citizenship requirements between the Federal union and the various states. John Brown, as a U.S. citizen, could be found guilty of treason against Virginia on the basis of his temporary residence there during the days of the insurrection.28 Three other substantive defense tactics failed. One claimed that since the insurrection was aimed at the U.S. government it could not be proved treason against Virginia. Since Brown and his men had fired upon Virginia troops, this point was mooted. Another defense claim must have pained John Brown upon his cot. His lawyers explained that since no slaves had joined the insurrection, the charge of leading a slave insurrection should be thrown out. The jury apparently did not favor this claim, either. Extenuating circumstances were claimed by the defense when they stressed that Colonel Washington and the other hostages were not harmed and were in fact protected by Brown during the siege. This claim was not persuasive as Colonel Washington had seen men die of gunshot wounds and had been confined for days. The final plea by the defense team for mercy concerned the circumstances surrounding the death of two of John Brown’s men, who were apparently fired upon and killed by the Virginia militia while under a flag of truce. The armed community surrounding the Arsenal did not hold their fire when Brown’s men emerged to parley. This incident is given great weight in Redpath, the militant abolitionist hagiography. It is not highlighted in the “consensus” account, but the incident is noticeable upon a close reading of the published testimony. If rebels under a flag of truce were fired upon, it was not a major issue to the judge and jury.29 Redpath, in his pro-abolitionist account of the trial, emphasizes one other event, which sheds light on the insurrection and the mob mentality of the beleaguered Harpers Ferry citizens’ militia. It seems that the Mayor of Harpers Ferry, Mr. Fontaine Beckham, had stood unarmed within sight of both the Arsenal’s rebels and the local militia. Brown or Brown’s men shot the Mayor in cold blood, and the crowd responded in a singular way. The citizen militia had captured William Thompson, one of Brown’s “privates,” earlier in the day, and upon Mayor Beckham’s murder this William Thompson was in turn murdered by Henry Hunter and thrown off of the Potomac River railroad bridge.30 Hunter admits this in the “consensus” account, and it is conveyed in considerably more detail in the Redpath account.31 The raid on Harpers Ferry and the subsequent trial of John Brown was a watershed event in American history. Brown was unrepentant, he gloried in his martyrdom and he was supported in his zeal by many abolitionists.32 The record shows a hurried, somewhat callous approach to the niceties and technicalities of jurisprudence. The judge repeatedly excuses the speed and severity of the trial, on the grounds that the Circuit session would soon end.33 No real attempt was made to put forth an insanity plea, although a letter to that effect was read in open court on the second day, and many people believed that congenital insanity was claimed as a defense. John Brown did not co-operate in this effort to claim an insanity defense, he said, “I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext . . . I view it with contempt . . . I reject, so far as possible, any attempt to interfere in my behalf on that score.”34 John Brown was hanged on 2 December 1859, at high noon. In his desire to be both a martyr and a prophet he predicted civil war in this final hand-written note that he passed to a supporter on his way out to the heavily protected field gallows: Charlestown, Va. 2nd December, 1859. I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. The raid on Harpers Ferry foreshadows the Civil War in some counter-intuitive ways, and there is much irony in the subsequent events that took place in the region. In 1861, the South would present the provisional constitution, not the abolitionists of the North. The patriarchal, feudal militarism of Brown’s family and his “Army” was illustrative of the Southern slaveholders’ attitudes. The North was afraid of people like Brown, men of zeal who would entertain secession and rebellion for a political cause. Harpers Ferry and the larger nearby towns of Martinsburg and Winchester would change hands many, many times between the Confederacy and the Union.35 West Virginia would secede from the Confederacy, and take Jefferson County out of Virginia’s jurisdiction forever. Battles at Harpers Ferry would seriously obstruct R.E. Lee’s attempts to invade the North in both the Antietam and the Gettysburg campaigns. The area along the Shenandoah Valley would become the staging grounds for another religious and steely-eyed commander, Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.36 Spies and treachery would rock the area throughout the war and Belle Boyd would become famous as a provocative double agent in the region, as a Civil War Matahari. Both Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart would resign their commissions in the U.S. Army in order to fight for a secessionist government of Virginia.37 Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise embodies these ironies and strange reversals. One of Brown’s most vocal and visible accusers during the trial and immediate aftermath, Wise had described Brown’s provisional force as “murderers, traitors, robbers, insurrectionists . . . wandering, malicious, unprovoked, felons,” and he pushed for the rapid trial and sentencing of Brown and his accomplices.38 Eighteen months later, on 17 April 1861 Henry Wise reported to the Virginia Secession Convention, “(Virginian) armed forces are now moving upon Harpers Ferry to capture the arms there in the Arsenal for the public defense, and there will be a fight or a foot-race between volunteers of Virginia and Federal troops before the sun sets.” On 1 June 1861 Wise would tell people in Richmond “Get a spear, a lance. Take a lesson from John Brown, manufacture your blades from old iron.”39 The raid on Harpers Ferry and the trial of John Brown is a fascinating series of events. The high emotions, the gore, the righteousness claimed by both sides, all these are highly compelling. By sacrificing his own (and other innocent people’s) lives to the cause of slave emancipation in the pivotal year of 1859, John Brown would align himself in segments of the public mind with Presidents Lincoln and Grant. By leading an irregular rebellion and forming a provisional government he foreshadows the Confederate American experience as well. The trial of John Brown in Virginia’s state court system in 1859 shows us a man who perceived himself to be above the law being hastily prosecuted by a community inflamed by ideological, racial and territorial conflicts. 1740 Hayes House Top View Gerrardstown, West Virginia 35mm 1959 Agfa 2004 Photo by Shanet Clark “Seceding From Secession, Strategic and Geographic Factors in West Virginia History.” Conference lecture as delivered at UGA, GSU, Va. Tech, the OAH, FCA and at the New England Historical Association. By David Shanet Clark DeKalb County Historic Preservation Commission: Vice Chairman E.I. Woodruff Fellow Southern History, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia.     "We will be considering the wartime partition of Virginia in 1863. The Western counties of Virginia had harbored resentments against the Richmond government since before the Revolution. The “no-settlers” Line of 1763 had roughly followed the present boundary, which left the west Virginians with no political or military support along the frontier. In the Federal era West Virginia grew slowly, with few slave-owners settling in the forested hollows beyond the Allegheny Ridge. With the three-fifths clause giving representation to 60% of Virginia’s slaves in Congress, the sparsely settled interior counties were restive, and efforts at political separation were begun in the 1820’s. Resentment over the distances the westerners had to travel to get to Richmond was costly and a feeling of second-class participation in the distribution of services was building up west of the Alleghenies. When the civil war started and Virginia joined the confederacy in 1861, there was strong support for separation in the western counties. Twelve hundred civic leaders met in Clarksburg, then Wheeling became the center of the effort, and a state wide referendum led to recognition of statehood in June 1863. In the late 1800’s the capitol was moved from Wheeling to Charleston, near the center of the new state. The West Virginia statehood process can be seen as a contract between the leadership of the Trans-Allegheny Virginia counties and the federal government of Abraham Lincoln. The two parties negotiated secession from the confederacy, secession from secession, and this wartime process has some obvious strategic aspects, based on the unique geography of West Virginia. Two majors routes west had been available to settlers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Wilderness Road, also known as the Great Wagon Road, ran southwest from Winchester to Roanoke, then nearly due west to the Cumberland Gap, where Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee meet. This is the route of Daniel Boone’s group, Virginians who settled in the bluegrass farm country of Kentucky. The Wilderness or Great Valley road ran along the Shenandoah River, (which flows north to the Potomac) through the famous Valley of Virginia. The “Valley” lies between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains. The other historical route west in these latitudes was the National Road, which ran closely parallel to the Potomac River. The Potomac River is the border between Maryland and Virginia and it flows almost due east. The builders of the National Road and the Baltimore followed the Potomac River and Ohio canal followed the national Road in the 1820’s. Settlers would follow the national road west to the Ohio River, or turn north into Pennsylvania and take the Ohio River south from Pittsburgh into Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois territory. Whether following the Wilderness Road southwest in wagons or the national road to the Ohio, the land-water route, settlers by-passed present day West Virginia because of its mountainous terrain. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company developed the national road route into a railroad in the 1840’s and 1850’s, and by 1858 the B and O ran from Baltimore, through Harper’s Ferry, over the Allegheny Ridge, to the interior of Virginia, and all the way to the Ohio River. Here West Virginia is invested in the strategic transportation routes of the Union. The strategic corridor concept of military history explains the otherwise anomalous shape of West Virginia. The Eastern panhandle, the 3 o’clock arm of the new state included the counties running along the Potomac, it essentially secured the Potomac, the National Road, the B and O canals and the B and O railroad from Confederate interference. The northern panhandle, the 12 o’clock arm was a northern, industrialized area of Virginia, between Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and Steubenville Ohio, and at the time, Wheeling was a leading industrial center. This area was greatly influenced by northern industrial and political currents, and had little use for the slave economy based in Richmond. The northern panhandle, a true military salient, was lost to the confederacy, and the Union gained a strategic corridor protecting the Ohio River and the westernmost lines of the B and O. So we have two strategic corridors in the panhandles, one protecting the Potomac and the B and O, the other protecting the Ohio, the B and O and the Wheeling Industrial area. Another strategic geographic factor in the partition was the forbidding nature of the Allegheny Mountains. No railroad line at that time crossed the Alleghenies south of Harper’s Ferry, and the high mountain ridges, running from the Southwest to the Northeast, had long divided the markets and political economies of the two regions. With statehood the Allegheny ridge became a wall. The midland trail, through Lewisburg and Greenbrier county was a traditional route, and farther north the Staunton Parkersburg road wound up into the high Appalachians, but these two routes had no rails, and furthermore, General McClellan had secured the western towns early in the war, in actions between Droop Mountain and Philippi. This wall secured W. Va. from confederate forces and Virginia from Union forces, and helped focus the fighting in the Valley and the Piedmont, where there were railroads and enough open ground to deploy armies. The highest ridges of the Alleghenies were the boundary because these ridges had formed the boundaries between the east facing and west facing counties. The jagged edge is caused by straight lines connecting high ridges, but the WV-VA line follows the Allegheny Ridge closely. The Richmond governments (of Virginia and the Confederate States) held on to the southwestern counties, which gave them a strategic corridor into Tennessee and points south, and heavy fighting in the southwest allowed the South to secure considerable Salt and Lead mines, this area was not lost to West Virginia. So now we can look at a theory of history even grander than that of strategic corridors and mountain frontiers. The Long Duree, a concept made popular by the Annales School of twentieth century historians, applies here. The Long Duree concept of history states that geologic time, and great geographic constants, plays a role in human events. Britain, the Mediterranean and the eastern European steppes have all been illuminated by the application of this theory, and I believe the significance of the partition of Virginia and West Virginia is best understood via the Long Duree. The key word here is watershed. The geology of the rivers is causative forces in the history of the are and perennial forces in human behavior there. Virginia was settled from the Chesapeake Bay, of course, and Virginians moved inland along the James River, the York, the Rappahannock and the Potomac. These rivers carried Virginians through the tidewater, up into the piedmont and the Valley. The headwaters of the James and Potomac are found high in the Alleghenies, along the ridge. The rivers of Virginia flow into the Bay and into the Atlantic. To the west another social and political group emerged. This group of people were beyond the Alleghenies, and their rivers led to the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. West Virginians drank from fresh water geologically separate from the Atlantic bound rivers of Virginia. In the western counties, the Greenbrier River, New River, the Kanawha River and the little known Guyandot River flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. It is no coincidence that the political, social and economic boundaries follow this timeless and geologic element. It is also possible to apply this approach to the Union’s expansion at this time. With the Republican Union forces in possession of everything north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, the added political power of the southern Ohio Basin, Kentucky and West Virginia was critical to strategic war interests. Not only was the North securing its industrial, rail and river interests with the eastern panhandle and northern panhandle of the new state, by pushing forward (southeast from the Ohio, toward Richmond) and securing the watershed of the Mississippi-Ohio all the way to the High Allegheny ridge, the Union was combined with the old New England and Pennsylvania area states with the entire western watershed, and this isolated the south. The politically stable Atlantic Northeast had joined with the massive inland power of the Mississippi and Ohio. And this process occurred because of continental, geographic factors of long duration. Braudel's Long Duree of geographic reality played out as strategic political reality in the case of West Virginia." Victorian Iron Forge 35mm 1959 Agfa 2004 Photo By Shanet Clark David Shanet Clark Harpers Ferry West Virginia 35mm 1959 Agfa  2002 Photo by Beverly Clark MONTANI SEMPER LIBERI SOURCES AND NOTES ON LEAD ARTICLE: Harold Faulkner, American Economic History 8th Edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), page 100; and John A Craf, Economic Development Of the United States (New York: McGraw Hill 1952), page 122. / Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire In British North America. (New York: Publisher, 2000), Introduction, page 10. Writers’ Program WPA West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, (Washington: Oxford University Press 1941), page 45. Otis Rice, A West Virginia History (Lexington, UK Press 1980), page 151. On February 18, 1862 the Convention approved West Virginia Constitution unanimously, with subsequent election polls: 18,862 for, 514 against. The March 26, 1863 statewide vote: 28,321 for statehood, 572 against. Among Union Soldiers: 7,828 for, 132 against. Significantly, Calhoun, Greenbrier, Logan, McDowell, Mercer, Pocahontas, Raleigh, Webster and Wyoming Counties sent no returns—these counties were occupied or seriously disrupted by confederates and “engrossed” into the new state by Unionist refugee representatives in Wheeling. John Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties: A Border County In the Civil War (Morgantown: WVU Press, 2003) quotes James Morton Callahan’s History of W.Va. Old and New (Chicago, 1923) Vol. 1 p. 332, where Waitman T. Willey said: “West Virginia belonged, by nature, not to Virginia, but to the valley of the Mississippi, its natural outlets were south and west with Cincinnati and Chicago with Pittsburg in the North, with Baltimore in the East.” Shaffer also quotes Granville D. Hall, The Rending of Virginia (Chicago, 1901): “Mountain barriers had been reared by nature between the two sections…commerce divides with the watersheds and flows with the streams. The interests and purposes of men follow commercial lines.” Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties, page 83. Rice, West Virginia, page 138. Also see Writers’ Program WPA West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, (Washington: Oxford University Press 1941), page 100, “A crooked line following the crests of Dividing Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains for 365 Miles would roughly mark the boundary between W.Va. and Va. On the south and east…the state’s 1170-mile boundary, which for the most part follows the course of rivers or the line of mountain ranges” Richard W. Stephenson and Marianne M. McKee, ed., Virginia In Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth and Development (Richmond, Library of Virginia, 2000). page 83. Most historical atlases of U.S. history give insight into the partition border of 1863. Peter Jefferson’s map series and its derivatives show how little was known about the grounds west of the Warrior’s Road. A few colonial era maps exist and require interpretation, for example, West Virginia is called Florida, West Augusta, Kanawha, Transylvania, Westylvania, Vandalia and Franklin in various proposed jurisdictional maps. The most common phrase inked onto the transmontagne Virginia region is probably “Reserved for the Indians.” Map II-21-A-D: Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, “A Map of the most Inhabited part of Virginia…drawn by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson [Albemarle County Surveyor and Deputy Surveyor] in 1751.” Also page 82, Map II-20 “A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America (Philadelphia) 1755” a.k.a. the Lewis Evans map. Richard von Glahn, The Son Yuan Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2003), page 48: “The Annales school privileged economic and demographic movements over politics and ideas as the defining forces of historical change, and this shift in historical understanding entailed a reconceptualization of historical time. Slow ecological permutations, secular economic/demographic cycles and lastly the history of events” Gail Roberts, Atlas of Discovery (New York: Crown, 1973) page 77, Richard W. Stephenson and Marianne M. McKee. Virginia In Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth and Development. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000.also see Encyclopedia Britannica’s “West Virginia.” Writer’s Program WPA West Virginia page 45 records these facts. The National Road, Cumberland to Wheeling completed 1818. First functional and first commercial steamboats on the Ohio River, 1811, 1817. Staunton to Parkersburg Road 1823-1847. Northwestern [Virginia] Turnpike incorporated 1827. Winchester to Parkersburg Road 1838. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad started 1827 reaches Ohio River 1852. “Eastern Virginia interests fought with all their power in the General Assembly to impede its [B&O RR] progress.” James Holmberg, ed. Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Page 200. Twohig, Dorothy, ed. Letters of George Washington, Retirement Series. (Charlottesville:UVA Press, 1998) Volume one page 453, letter from Washington to Daniel McCarty November 3, 1979. WPA, West Virginia page 100, John McCardell The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism 1830-1860 (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1979). McCardell examines the fault lines of the old Virginia trans-Allegheny political relation and gives unusual emphasis to the 1829-1830 Virginia Constitutional struggle, and the second convention of 1850 and views these as preliminary to Southern Nationalism, Virginia’s secession and West Virginia’s counter-secession. Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties, Introduction Writer’s Program WPA West Virginia, page 51, “The B and O Railroad was subjected to attack continuously. The RR officials tried to maintain a neutral position, thus they changed their tactics after Jackson had corralled a large portion of their rolling stock and run it into the Shenandoah [Valley] their support was thrown to the North and made itself felt in the formation of W.Va. and the later inclusion of the Eastern Panhandle counties in the new state.” See also Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: UNC 1989) on the border areas significance. Otis Rice, West Virginia, page 147-151. Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties, Appendix Charts. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean.