As I was reviewing my notes on West Virginia this evening, I noticed that I had highlighted a passage in John Alexander Williams’ book Appalachia: A History:
“The men who created West Virginia presented it to Congress as a slave state in the midst of the Civil War; when Congress rejected the proposal, the statemakers amended their constitution to end slavery with compensation to slaveowners and to prohibit all black people, slave or free, from settling within the borders of the new state.”
The original plan for West Virginia was to achieve the old Upper South dream of the White ethnostate:
Encyclopedia of West Virginia:
“A controversial issue at the convention was slavery. Delegates ranged from slave owners to abolitionists. Gordon Battelle, a Methodist minister from Ohio County, called for a ban on importation of slaves into the state and for gradual emancipation. A compromise provided that no African-Americans, slave or free, could enter the new state.”
The following excerpt on Virginians and the colonization movement comes from the chapter “Toward a White Man’s Country” in Winthrop D. Jordan’s classic book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812:
“If there was one thread of development which showed how deeply Americans felt about Negroes, it was a campaign which developed in the 1790’s especially in Virginia for ridding the state (and the entire nation) of black men. Perhaps “campaign” is too strong a term for the wishful proposals which were so obviously doomed to failure, but it was the enormity of the obstacles rather than any weakness in the wish which kept the early colonization movement from accomplishment. …
Most Americans must have shared in some measure this half-conscious concern for retention of physiognomic identity. As Patrick Henry put it, “Our country will be peopled. The question is, shall it be with Europeans or Africans?” …
Thomas Jefferson of course did. When freed, the Negro was “to be removed beyond the reach of mixture” so that he would not “stain the blood of his master.” He disclosed in the Notes that the Virginia revisal of 1777 (in which he had been very active) had included an emancipation bill which provided that Negroes born free after a certain date “should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses,” and then as young adults “be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pair of the useful domestic animals, etc. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants.” Throughout his life Jefferson never deviated from his conviction that Negroes must be “removed” when freed, nor from the ground for that necessity. Six months before he died in 1826 he closed the matter with an octogenarian’s finality: “The plan of converting the blacks into Serfs would certainly be better than keeping them in their present condition, but I consider that of expatriation to the governments of the W. I. (West Indies) of their own colour as entirely practicable, and greatly preferable to the mixture of colour here. To this I have great aversion; but I repeat my abandonment of the subject.”
Jefferson’s term for ridding America of Negroes was suggestive, for “expatriation” expressed precisely his desire to have Negroes out of his country. On this point his vision of an expanding empire for liberty in America was crystal clear: there was no social room for inclusion of Negroes. As newly elected president, prior to the Louisiana Purchase, he wrote glowingly of the future of his continent: “it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself … and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” Manifestly America’s destiny was white.”
NO WAY.
THIS IS WHAT THOMAS JEFFERSON REALLY MEANT BY THE ETERNAL PRINCIPLES OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM WHICH IS THE ESSENCE OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDING IDEAL:
In reality, this idea of racial separation from blacks was pushed by Thomas Jefferson who was an Anglo-Saxonist until the day he died. The Virginia state legislature banned the settlement of free blacks in 1793, endorsed the removal of blacks from Virginia in 1804 and 1805 and along with Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee appropriated money to colonize blacks in Africa in 1816. The colonization movement culminated in the founding of Liberia which has a capital named after President James Monroe.
Jefferson’s revisal of the laws of Virginia also called for banishment of White women from Virginia who had mulatto children with blacks:
“If any white woman shall have a child by a negro or mulatto, she and her child shall depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter. If they shall fail so to do, the woman shall be out of the protection of the laws, and the child shall be bound out by the Aldermen of the county, in like manner as poor orphans are by law directed to be, and within one year after its term of service expired shall depart the commonwealth, or on failure so to do, shall be out of the protection of the laws.”
As was the case all over Appalachia, there was a regional divide on slavery in Virginia with people like Thomas Jefferson in the Piedmont and the western side of the state where there were significantly fewer slaves feeling the most strongly about emancipation and colonization.
The following excerpt comes from Daniel Walker Howe’s book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848:
“Without the governor’s support, the emancipation-colonization program stalled in Virginia’s House of Delegates. Thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of the late president, gave it cautious endorsement. So did the editors of the state’s two leading newspapers, Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer and John Hampden Pleasants of the Richmond Constitutional Whig. Both sides in the debate agreed that Virginia should be a white person’s country and that a substantial free colored population constituted a security risk. (Much was made of the fact that some free Negroes had joined Turner.) Conservatives conceded that the state would be better off with fewer slaves and a more industrial-commercial economy, but argued that the domestic slave trade would suffice to drain off surplus black laborers from Virginia to the trans-Appalachian Southwest, without legislative intervention. After prolonged debate, on January 25, 1832, the House voted 67 to 60 that “further action for the removal of slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.” By this fateful procrastination, Virginian statesmanship abdicated responsibility for dealing with the state’s number one problem. When the Civil War came thirty years later, Virginians would still be divided; the great slavery debate of 1831 foreshadowed the bifurcation of the Old Dominion into Virginia and West Virginia.”
When West Virginia was admitted to the Union in 1863, it came in with the expectation of fulfilling its dream of becoming a White ethnostate after the abolition of slavery and its separation from Tidewater. Instead, it turned out that West Virginia’s fate was to swiftly become an industrial colony of Northern capital in the Reconstruction and New South eras.
Most whites obviously did not regard the Negro as constituting enough of a threat to do anything about him (or his jew masters) until it was too late. Now look at where we are. Have any lessons been learned, HW?
“The men who created West Virginia”
Were politicians from Pennsylvania and Ohio who used to troops from those states to create it by force of arms.
The “West Virginia” Union regiments were all redesignated Ohio and Pennsylvania regiments. Just like most of the “Kentucky” Union regiments were from Indiana, and the “Missouri” Union regiments were all recruited in Chicago from Illinois and Iowa men.
Here’s a link to a website on the real history of “West” Virginia;
https://sites.google.com/site/wvotherhistory/home
Some highlights from a timeline on the aforementioned website;
https://sites.google.com/site/wvotherhistory/1861-a-southern-timeline
“The new state flag is raised above the Planters Hotel in Guyandotte, the only town on the Ohio River to vote for secession. Shots are fired from the Ohio side and strike the hotel.”
“Ohio and Indiana State Militia invade western Virginia, landing at Parkersburg and Wheeling. Among the Indiana soldiers is the future author Ambrose Bierce, who would later write of his experiences in western Virginia.”
(“The Wellsburg ‘Herald’ complains about low Union enlistment. “…after all the drumming and all the gas about a separate state she has actually organized in the field four not entire regiments of soldiers…”
(The majority of those soldiers were from Pennsylvania and Ohio.)
By this time more west Virginians are enlisted in Confederate or State service than in the Federal army.”)
“Federal soldiers assault the Wayne County Courthouse at Trout Hill, which was defended by Hursten Spurlock, Jesse Spurlock, Mr. Adkins, Clerk of the Court, and Methodist preacher Rev. Johnson, and 9 other men, all were taken prisoner. Four Wayne citizens are killed. Burwell Spurlock, a member of the Richmond Secession Convention, was reported as taken prisoner. In November he will go to Richmond to sign the Ordinance of Secession.”
“Reviewing the Oct. 24 vote at the Constitutional Convention in Wheeling, delegate Chapman J. Stuart says that the vote shows that West Virginians never came out in favor of a new state.”
It wasn’t the “Federal Government” that did any of these things. It was the people of Pennsylvania and Ohio, who did it.
The Confederates weren’t resisting the federal government. They were resisting the Northern People itself, who were acting on their own initiative, for their own peculiar state interests, and entirely outside of the framework of the Constitution, laws and Union of the United States.
The Northern states violated the Constitution by forming an alliance, long before 1860, and waging war against other “fellow American” states.
It’s this selfishness, narcissism and hypocrisy on the part of most Northerners, that is deeply resented by Southrons.
Fourth West Virginia Infantry:
In the early recruitment of “Virginia” Union troops in western Virginia a number of the regiments were composed of Ohioans and Pennsylvanians, whose own state recruitment had been filled and thus were welcomed by the Wheeling government as “Virginians”.
According to Whitelaw Reid, in Vol. 2 of his work, “Ohio in the War”, pg. 919, he wrote:
“This regiment, although mustered into the service as a Virginia organization, was recruited mainly in Ohio. Seven full companies of it were recruited in the counties of Meigs, Gallia, Lawrence, and Athens. These numbered some six hundred men. Portions of the remaining companies were also interspersed with Ohioans.”
https://sites.google.com/site/wvotherhistory/fourth-west-virginia-infantry
Disfranchisement in West Virginia:
https://sites.google.com/site/wvotherhistory/disfranchisement-in-west-virginia
Very interesting. The more I study things, the more I see that I am a product of my region, which my ancestors helped pioneer.
You mention a Virginia editor with the last name *Pleasants*. I have a female ancestor from early 1700s Virginia with the maiden name of *Pleasant*, who passed her family name off as a middle name to both a son and a grandson whom I am descended from. Perhaps there is a distant connection between me and this newspaper editor?
Well at least WVA remains the whitest state in the Empire today, something which genuinely annoys the jews and communists.
Maine and New Hampshire are whiter than W. Va and they have higher quality white population too.
It appears that the primary human failing is lacking the willpower and energy to actually bring their good ideas into reality.
Informative article, Hunter! It is another hidden link which hooks ‘free-soilers’ with negro-phobia.
now for a pop quiz…who said the following? (google it if you need to)
““Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse and the increase of mixed breed bastards may some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.”
Seems like good o’l Abe was more Spencerian than Richard Spencer!
Indeed, if there was anything Spencerian in Antebellum America, it was in the Free-Soiler, Anti-Slavery North. That’s my thesis.
You can bring up Southern anti-slavery people like T. Jefferson, but’s that proves my point…Anti-Slavery people, the many in the north and the few in the south were almost all ‘send ’em back to Africa’. You can contrast this with slave-owners, like Jefferson Davis and Bedford Forrest, who as a whole had genuine affection for black people and who certainly did not want to push black people into the sea or send them up smokestacks.
Well, then, the slave-owners were rat-bastards for having “genuine affection” for the detestable niggers who have turned our cities into garbage and opened the door for every other kind of brown infestation swarming into the place.
Are you some kind of nigger-lover or something? Your tone seems to betray a disturbing Negrophilia.
Send ’em all back to Africa right now. They’re a detestable blight on the nation.
Ironsides,
Three things:
1. Your name. It stinks. It was Oliver Cromwell’s nickname. He was John Brown’s hero. He was NOT Jefferson Davis’ hero
2. ‘Negro-philia’ ? Not sure what you mean by that. But If you are asking me if I am a Christian, my answer is yes, and there is nothing more unchristian than driving people out from their native land, the land of their ancestors. Pushing colored people around, sir, that’s what the Yankee Army and the Yankee freedmen’s bureau did. Read about it sometime.
3. If you really want to be a true son of the Confederacy, then you need to try and act more like a Christian, because that what they were.
Thomas Jefferson and many Founders admired Cromwell though. His legacy is certainly more complicated than what his detractors say.
>>>>Thomas Jefferson and many Founders admired Cromwell though. His legacy is certainly more complicated than what his detractors say.<<<<
Oh yeah, Wync, I forgot to mention how Cromwell was Pervert Freud’s hero as well.
But maybe we southerners should cut him some slack. I know he only banned Christmas celebrations throughout his empire (and mincemeat pie eating) but he might have allowed Easter to survive. I guess that makes him not as bad as the New England killjoys who banned both!
He was kind of like that witch in the children’s book about Narnia… who made it always winter but never Christmas!
And, Rich L, since you are here…. WV is a good test case for your ‘inventions = racial superiority’ theory …. what have West Virginians invented? I’ve searched and come up w …….'grandparents day'?
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/west-virginia/things-start-in-wv/
They rank near the national bottom of SAT scores… lower than DC if you count participation rates
https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-by-state-most-recent
According to your theory, that makes West Virginia whites racially inferior.
So much for your bullshit theory…..
BWAHAHAHA!! It’s nice to live rent-free in someone’s addled little mind.
Well, Cromwell’s admirers (I’m not among them) would say that he was a great military leader who saved England from an incompetent king with Popish leanings.
He had good reasons to ban Christmas too. It is after all a Pagan festival which “Christians” use as an excuse to drink and fornicate.
About West Virginia, you must remember that it is an Appalachian state settled by white trash, mostly scummy Scotch-Irish. They are certainly inferior whites compared to those in Tidewater Virginia.
>>>>he was a great military leader who saved England from an incompetent king with Popish leanings. He had good reasons to ban Christmas too. It is after all a Pagan festival which “Christians” use as an excuse to drink and fornicate<<<
Wync, Wync, Wync!
Who do you think settled in the southern colonies? It was the royalists, my friend. Not the religious kooks that settled New England! The Carolinas were named for that popish king you are so happy got be-headed.
Speaking of religious kooks….Christmas was never banned in Dixie and has always been well-celebrated. It was banned in the north and Catholics – the ultimate Christmas celebrators- were persecuted in the pre-war north NOT THE SOUTH. [are you sure you ain't a Yankee ? 🙂 ]
Also, to conclude…. Ironsides, for some reason, invited Jews into England. They were not being persecuted..they were doing just fine in Holland and wherever else they were….You might think that Importing them into England was good for the English people. However I doubt that absent Cromwell's 'humanitarian' move, that England would have gone to war in the 1800s to protect the Sassoon family's opium trade.
I know I'm repeating myself but sometimes its just best to leave people where they were born.
Royalist cavaliers were actually a small portion of the people who settled in Virginia. The Appalachian region is populated by Scotch-Irish. That’s the reason it has always been backward.
The worst religious kooks in America today are southern Baptists and Presbyterians in that region. They also don’t like the Papists.
>>>The worst religious kooks in America today are southern Baptists and Presbyterians in that region. They also don’t like the Papists.<<<
Wync,
1. How people might feel about Christmas and Catholics today is not a good measure of how their ancestors did 200 years ago. The Highland Scots who settled the Carolinas were also Monarchists in their own way….they were just big fans of a different king, Bonnie Prince Charlie…a CATHOLIC pretender to George's throne in the 1700s. Yes they were protestants, but they had just sacrificed lives and livelihoods for a CATHOLIC cause.
Would you have done that? Would a KKK wizard do that? probably not. But you should not project your present day feelings on an ancient people who as a whole, DID do that.
2. My measure of kookiness is not yours. To me Kooks are know-it-alls that state matter-of-factly "Christmas is not a Christian festival". That's what Cromwell and the New England Puritans were proclaiming. If you believe that, my friend, then you deserve the Kook label as well and you are not a true son of the South.
What little history of West Virginia I was taught was, they bravely separated from the intransigent secessionist slavers in Virginia. What a (sarc) surprise that story is, like most other history kids are programmed to believe, propaganda and not even remotely factual.
BTW, I love how “ethnostate” is a term only applied to Americans of European descent. Everywhere else in the world, countries with an ethnic majority are simply called “nations.” I won’t ever use that loaded term, because it plays into the anti-European propaganda.