Waitman T. Willey, a leader in the West Virginia statehood movement and a major architect of the postwar Republican party in the new state
Even greater troubles for West Virginians grew out of the Virginia Land Law of 1779. The legislation created a land office and provided methods for adjudicating claims to unpatented western lands. It allowed settlers who had taken up lands prior to January 1, 1778, preemption rights to four hundred acres and the option of acquiring an additional one thousand acres at prevailing prices. On the other hand, it disappointed many settlers by recognizing the rights of the Greenbrier and Loyal companies. The politics involved in land questions, however, appeared in the failure of the law to validate the claims of the Ohio Company, on the ground that its surveyors had not been accredited by county surveyors as required by earlier laws.
The most pernicious effects of the Virginia Land Law of 1779 lay in provisions making preemption rights and claims based upon military and treasury warrants transferable. The provisions enabled speculators to acquire millions of acres of land in West Virginia, often for mere pittances. By 1805 some 250 persons or groups, often in interlocking combinations, each acquired ten thousand acres or more. Five of the grantees received princely domains in excess of five hundred thousand acres. They included Henry Banks, a Richmond merchant; Wilson Cary Nicholas, whose land dealings contributed to serious financial troubles for his friend Thomas Jefferson; Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier; James Welch; and James K. Taylor. Also prominent among speculators were merchants of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and other eastern cities, as well as those in West Virginia towns; several members of Congress; at least fifty-two members of the Virginia legislature; and other persons of local importance.7
The traffic in lands left much of West Virginia in the hands of absentee owners, who often had more interest in exploitation of their resources than in the region itself. Moreover, since Virginia law did not require surveys of tracts in accordance with the sphericity of the earth, nonresident speculators, as well as others, plastered West Virginia with successive layers of claims, many of them overlapping and ill-defined. The system made land titles highly insecure and kept lawyers busy for decades.
Settlers, faced with the loss of their lands, looked to the legislature for relief. Nicholas County petitioners voiced a typical condemnation of a land system that, “after expelling a man from what he fondly hoped was his freehold and his home, consigns to his tardy but successful rival, and often to the merciless speculator, a property acquiring its chief value from the sweat of his brow, and the labour of his hands, without remuneration or recompense to the sufferer for that labour and industry.”8 On the other hand, many speculators found that after they recognized prior settlement rights, they had little useful land left. Nor was all the land of speculators desirable land. Levi Hollingsworth of Philadelphia was told by his local agent that his 13,245 acres in Pendleton County had little value, “inasmuch as no Stage rout approached nearer than 40 miles of this place & the balance of the journey must be made on horseback or in a balloon.”9
All West Virginia residents, whether or not their own lands were in dispute, suffered from the land system. Speculators often lacked or were unwilling to spend resources to develop their holdings and waited for the state government to provide roads, canals, and other improvements. Much of their land, however, was classified as wild and taxed at abysmally low rates that yielded little money for internal improvements, schools, or other services. The vicious cycle continued when speculators, unable to realize any immediate returns on their investments, failed to pay taxes and allowed their property to revert to the Literary Fund, a condition that afforded the state only tracts of land providing no taxable income at all.
The chaotic land system deprived West Virginia of thousands of desirable immigrants and retarded its economic growth. Although many worthy men and women settled in the state and fought valiantly for its improvement, others preferred the rich farmlands and secure titles of lands farther west to the relatively scarce bottomlands and uncertain prospects south of the Ohio River.
In the long view of history, the land system must be regarded as one of the most unfortunate influences upon the development of West Virginia. Hundreds of tracts acquired by post-Revolutionary War speculators subsequently changed hands, but the patterns of absentee ownership, external control of land and natural resources, and arrested economic development long remained and imposed a colonial economy upon the state. The farseeing statesmanship that Virginians gave the nation in its early days, unfortunately, did not always extend to the state's own internal affairs. As a result the land magnates, the economic royalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, gained an advantage that they have never relinquished.
1William McKinley to [James] Ross, [Jasper] Yeates, and [William] Bradford, August 23, 1794, John George Jackson Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
2Martinsburg Potomak Guardian, January 2, 1799.
3Quoted in Stephen W. Brown, Voice of the New West: John G. jackson, His Life and Times (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), 18.
4Martinsburg Potomak Guardian, January 24, 1799.
5W.P. Palmer and others, eds., Calendar of Virginia Stare Papers and Other Manuscripts, 11 vols. (Richmond, 1875-1893; New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1968), vol. 9, 111-12.
6Saunders and Laidley to Barbour, May 23,1812, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 10, 147.
7A general account of Virginia land policies and their effects is in Otis K. Rice, The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia Beginnings, 1730-1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 118-49.
8Kanawha County Legislative Petition, December 17,1817, Virginia State Library, Richmond. Most petitioners lived in Nicholas County, then part of Kanawha.
9'Quoted in Rice, Allegheny Frontier, 143.
7
The Quality of Mountain Life
The Mountain Environment Mountainous. regions of the world have always been conservative and slow to change. Isolation from the mainstream of national and world events entrenches within their people beliefs, attitudes, and customs that in more accessible places retreat under the pressure of new ideas and changing interests. West Virginia has been no exception to this pattern. Her confining mountains and lack of broadly unifying river systems discouraged easy communication in early times and fostered a high degree of particularism among her people. Pioneer characteristics long persisted, in some isolated areas even to the twentieth century. The essential features of life in bygone years therefore require some attention in order to understand West Virginians of today.
An Economy of Abundance. Nature lavished her bounties upon West Virginia. The vast forests that originally covered the state provided cover for a great variety of game animals, ranging from bears, deer, and elk to small quarry such as squirrels and wild fowl, including turkeys and pheasants. Reports of hunters who killed a hundred or more bears in a single season were not uncommon. From forest trees came walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and hazelnuts, as well as such wild fruits as the cherry, plum, crab apple, and papaw. Smaller plants added blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, wild grapes, and other delicacies to the pioneer diet. Matching the forests in their abundance were the streams, which teemed with numerous kinds of fish.
Although most families began to clear land for crops immediately, they continued to rely on the forests and streams for part of their sustenance. Joseph Doddridge one of the most discerning observers of pioneer life, recalled a saying that hunting was good in every month that had an r in its spelling. François-André Michaux, a French traveler in the Ohio Valley in the early nineteenth century, declared that many residents had developed such a fondness for hunting that they neglected the cultivation of their crops.
The