West Virginia

The only state formed by seceding from a state that was seceding, which makes its legality permanently interesting. The mountainous western counties of Virginia had long resented the tidewater planter class: they had few enslaved people, poor representation under a constitution that counted slaves for apportionment, and almost no state spending on roads. When Virginia voted to leave the Union in April 1861 those counties refused, organised a Restored Government of Virginia at Wheeling, and that government then consented to its own partition - the constitutional device used to satisfy the requirement that no state be divided without its legislature's consent. Lincoln signed the admission in 1863 while acknowledging the argument was expedient rather than clean. Coal defined everything afterwards. Company towns, scrip wages and armed mine guards produced the mine wars, culminating at Blair Mountain in 1921 where some ten thousand miners fought company forces and federal troops in the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. The Farmington and Monongah disasters killed hundreds each. The state has lost population in most censuses since 1950. Its motto means mountaineers are always free. Charleston is the capital and largest city. The state is entirely within the Appalachians and is the highest east of the Mississippi on average. Harpers Ferry, where John Brown raided the federal arsenal in 1859, is within its borders. The New River Gorge became a national park in 2020. Coal still supplies most of its electricity. The state has no city of more than fifty thousand people.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history