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Before 1776 Virginians spoke of the West as the back-country, back settlements, or back parts. The fact that they were seen as being at the back rather than the front shows that the colonists were still facing Europe. After independence, however, Virginians and other Americans turned around in an intellectual sense, faced the interior of their own continent, and saw their futures there. This was especially true in Virginia because after 1800 the commonwealth's agriculture collapsed from two centuries of farming without enough crop rotation or use of fertilizers.

Leaving Virginia

Soil exhaustion in the Tidewater became chronic, and the Piedmont was "worn out, washed and gullied" so that after rainfall, rivers "appeared like a torrent of blood" carrying off the topsoil. Conditions were better in the Valley of Virginia, where wheat rather than tobacco was dominant, but even there people saw a brighter future outside Virginia. Many German families made their way to the Midwest, while the Scotch-Irish continued down into Tennessee and beyond. Between 1817 and 1829 the value of land in Virginia plummeted from $207 million to $90 million. At a time when most Virginians' incomes were tied to agriculture, the result was catastrophic. The census of 1850 -- the first to ask place of birth -- found 388,000 native Virginians in other states, but this seriously understates the scale of migration because hundreds of thousands who left in the decades after the Revolution had died by 1850. There also are the huge numbers of slaves taken west with masters or sold to the emerging Cotton South. In all, perhaps one million Virginians left the commonwealth between the Revolution and the Civil War. Virginia fell from first to seventh place in population, and its number of Congressman dropped from twenty-three to eleven. It was at this time, in 1831, that a group of Virginians came together to form the Virginia Historical Society. They were proud of the state's glorious past, but they were equally certain that its glory days were behind it.

Although this mass exodus caused Virginia to slip into a secondary role both politically and economically, these westward-bound settlers spread Virginia culture, laws, political ideas, labor system, surveying methods, concept of honor, and architectural styles across America. Many of these migrants were black. Just as the African slave trade of the 1600s and 1700s had led to the creation of an African-Virginian culture, this second "Middle Passage" of hundreds of thousands of blacks out of Virginia created a system of slavery and black culture that was of continental dimensions.

Cotton and the Slave Trade

The agricultural depression in Virginia meant that, in many places, slaves cost more to maintain than they produced. This did not lead, however, to the elimination of slavery, although in 1832, by a vote of just 73 to 58, Virginia narrowly defeated a resolution of principle committed to gradual emancipation. One reason for its defeat was that slavery, although unproductive in Virginia, was thriving elsewhere, creating high demand and prices for slaves.

The invention of the spinning jenny in England and the cotton gin in New England enabled cotton to replace wool as the staple for clothes. Cotton clothes were cheaper and did not trap perspiration like wool. The major source of cotton for this burgeoning industry was the Deep South. Cotton harvesting required stoop labor performed by slaves. Virginia was not a major cotton producer, but became the major exporter of slaves who either were unneeded or uneconomical at home. For the people of the world as a whole, cotton clothes were a great blessing. For the American South, however, cotton revived and strengthened slavery so that the generation of the Revolution, which had been uncomfortable about slavery -- although not enough to end it -- was succeeded by a southern generation that largely defended slavery as a positive good rather than an unfortunate necessity.

They rationalized slavery by convincing themselves that blacks were inferior, that they were better treated that northern white laborers, and that the Bible sanctioned the institution. As free discussion of the issue was discouraged, southerners began to think of themselves as a culture apart from the rest of the nation.

First Families of Tennessee

Throughout the 1700s Virginians moved southwest down the Valley of Virginia, leading inexorably into the Valley of East Tennessee. In 1769 William Bean of Virginia became the first white settler in what would become Tennessee. By 1772 the several hundred Europeans there had constituted themselves the Watauga Association, taking Virginia's laws as the basis for their local government. Among its leaders were James Robertson, a Virginian who would be called both the "Father of East Tennessee" and the "Father of Tennessee," and John Sevier, a Virginian of Huguenot extraction. However, a survey run in 1779-80 showed that their settlements were too far south and that, in fact, they were North Carolinians.

A group of these first families of Tennessee decided to settle along the Cumberland River, 200 miles to the west. Virginians James Robertson and John Donelson, respectively, commanded the overland and flatboat contingents that made a rendezvous at the French Salt Lick. They first called it Nashborough, then Nashville in a gesture to France, America's ally in the Revolution. Many Virginians followed in their wake. One was Thomas Hardeman of southwest Virginia, who chafed under the "restraint and monotony" of tenancy to Tidewater planters. With a Revolutionary War service land grant, Hardeman settled in Middle Tennessee, and within a few years owned 7,000 acres.

A Better Life in Kentucky

The Tennessee country was conceded to North Carolina in 1780. But Kentucky remained a Virginia county from 1776 until it became a separate state in 1792. To Virginians of that period, Kentucky seemed to be the gate of escape to a better life. One Virginian wrote, "People are running mad for Kentucky hereabouts!" while another observed, "one would think. . . that half of Virginia intended to Kentuck." In fact, tens of thousands did go.

Generally, they found that the Virginia gentry already had used its political connections in the east to get the best lands in the west assigned to them. By 1792 at least half of all Kentuckians owned no land at all, although the promise of it had drawn them. Kentucky held out the hope of prosperity, but the reality was more complex. Like Daniel Boone--who had blazed the Wilderness Road to Kentucky in 1775many of the discontented moved again. Farther west, they hoped they would be beyond the reach of Virginia's elite.

In 1778, two years after Kentucky County was created, the Illinois country was made Illinois County. Virginia claimed it by virtue of its 1609 charter, and it was Virginia governor Patrick Henry who sent George Rogers Clark there to expel the British. His victories ensured that the region became part of the United States rather than British Canada.

Virginians in Ohio

However, as part of a coordinated effort to promote national unity, Virginia ceded its claims north of the Ohio River to the federal government in 1784. Nonetheless, large numbers of Virginians poured into southern Ohio after the Indians there were defeated in 1794. In the vanguard was a small elite known as the Virginia clique or the Chillicothe Junto. They broke the power of a rival group from the free states and dominated Ohio's early political history.

Slavery was outlawed in the Northwest, but the Virginia elite transplanted much of its culture. In his 1847 history of Ohio, Connecticut Yankee Henry Howe wrote disapprovingly of the disparities of wealth in the parts of Ohio settled by Virginians.

Both the 1850 and 1860 censuses show that more native-born Virginians had migrated to Ohio than to any other state. Kentucky was second in 1850, Missouri in the 1860. Ironically, in the Civil War that would be fought largely because of the westward movement of slavery, Virginia found that it had supplied as many people to the North as to the South.

The Lure of Texas

These expatriate Virginians, not only in Ohio, but also in Indiana, Illinois, and elsewhere in the Midwest, found themselves with tracts of farmland that were huge by Virginia standards. But they lacked the traditional Virginia slave labor force to work these broad acres. A Virginian came to the rescue. In 1831 Cyrus McCormick successfully demonstrated a mechanical reaper for harvesting wheat. He made no profit from it, however, until he relocated his business to the tiny town of Chicago in 1847. His firm later became known as International Harvester.

By the time McCormick moved to Chicago, Texas was exerting the same kind of appeal to Virginians that Kentucky had in the 1790s. Some Virginians, however, settled there earlier, when it was a Mexican province. Stephen F. Austin, a native of Wythe County, led "The Old Three Hundred" settlers there in 1822. In 1836 at least twelve Virginians were among the fifty-nine signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico. Virginians died in the Goliad massacre, and seventeen were among the 180 defenders of the Alamo. William "Bigfoot" Wallace of Rockbridge County, headed to Texas to avenge a cousin killed at Goliad. Texas independence was secured when an army led by Sam Houston, another Rockbridge native, defeated and captured the Mexican president, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

Among the expatriate Virginians were such colorful characters as Fluvanna County's "Texas Jack" Omohundro -- hunter, scout, cowboy, Indian fighter, and actor. Some emigrants, however, returned to Virginia. After helping to establish the Pony Express in 1859, Ben Ficklin came back to serve the Confederate cause in Virginia. After the Civil War, William Byrd returned to Winchester and became the grandfather of future Governor Harry F. Byrd, Sr., and Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

Moving West

The annexation of Texas in 1845 sparked the Mexican War, which resulted in California and much of the Southwest becoming part of the United States, too. The leading American generals both were Virginians -- Zachary Taylor, who won the initial victories, and Winfield Scott, who ended the war by capturing Mexico City. Then, in 1849, news of "Gold in California!" reached Virginia. Newspapers quickly filled up with advertisements by ad hoc companies that proposed to transport men there for $300. Many were young men who, in depressed Virginia, looked forward at best to scraping by. One was Charles Fairfax, descendant of the owner of Virginia's Northern Neck in the 1700s -- and heir to the title baron Cameron, had he wanted it. He was among those aboard the Glenmore when it left City Point, Virginia, on April 6, 1849. After rounding Cape Horn, it reached San Francisco on October 6. The men were so impatient to rush to the mines that the tobacco crop they had brought was left to rot on the wharf, although it would have been as good as gold if sold to the tobacco-starved miners. Generally, Virginians got there too late to get rich by mining. But many stayed and became successful in the professions and in politics. "Charlie" Fairfax became speaker of the California House. Men like him helped to form a new California elite. A product of this Pacific gentry was General George S. Patton, descended from Virginians on both sides of his family. In World War I he maintained that he had seen his Virginia ancestors in the clouds and that they had given him courage.

Back in Virginia

Of course, not all Virginians moved west. Nor was the state entirely moribund. There was a spate of canal-building that later gave way to railroad development. Such men as Peter Minor and Edmund Ruffin introduced scientific farming to restore Virginia's agricultural productivity. By the 1840s manufacturing was taking root in several cities, especially Richmond. But, before a flood of mass-produced factory goods crowded out handcrafted objects, Virginia craftsmen enjoyed a golden age. Cabinetmakers, chairmakers, silversmiths, blacksmiths, ironmongers, tinsmiths, clock and watchmakers, saddle and harness makers , gunsmiths, and many other craftsmen produced works of beauty that today are avidly collected for ever-increasing sums.

The vast majority of Virginians, however, lived on farms, despite the hard times between the Revolution and the Civil War. The average Virginia family then would have had a butter churn and a few other labor-saving devices, but in a pre-industrial age almost everything still was done by hand. Almost all food had to be made from scratch. Water had to be carried to the house in buckets. Fires had to be tended all day, and people's clothes often caught fire during cooking. Wood had to be gathered for fuel. The matron of a large slaveowning family might delegate all the cooking to a slave cook, but the much larger number of families who had one or two slaves merely shared the cooking chores with slaves. Women, slave or free, usually tended the vegetable or herb gardens and oversaw the dairy, the chicken coop, and the smokehouse. There was butter to be churned and bread to be baked. As a family prospered and acquired more pots and pans, cleanup took that much longer.

In pre-industrial Virginia, the vast majority of clothes and textiles were made at home, either by white women or female slaves. Most Virginia families would have had flax or wool spinning wheels for making yarn. Fewer had looms for converting the yarn into fabric. The whole process involved procuring the flax or wool, cleaning, preparing, and spinning the yarn, then dyeing and weaving the fabric for clothes, sheets, blankets, or sacks. If one had the energy, quilting, weaving coverlets and counterpanes, or stitching samplers were cherished means of self-expression for women and girls.

Making fabric at home for sale was one of the few earning opportunities available to women. In 1812 Virginia produced the largest yardage made at home of any state -- 9,605,000 yards. Few Virginia women were able to work outside the home until after the Civil War, when clothes-making was mechanized and public schools were created. There were, after all, the children to be considered. Bringing them into the world was dangerous throughout this period. Surgery was unsafe and germs unknown. Pregnant women often were shut up for months without company on isolated farms. Raising children was time consuming but could bring much joy. Early death for children was commonplace, however, as measles, typhoid, cholera, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and other scourges reigned almost unchecked.

Slave Life

Virginians of African descent had one more danger to dread- the 30 percent chance that they would be sold away from family, friends, and everything they knew. As slaves they received only the barest necessities and had no real protection under the law. Four-fifths lived in rural areas. On plantations, a hierarchy ranked a few household slaves above the field hands. Women also cooked, served meals, washed, ironed, mended the master's clothes, made rough "negro cloth" and "negro shoes" for themselves, cared for white and black children, did housekeeping, and tended gardens. Former slaves remembered being hungry much of the time. They ate little meat. Their diet consisted mainly of cornmeal, salt pork, bacon, peas, collard greens, turnips, and sometimes opossum or raccoon.

Masters leased many of their slaves to iron forges, tobacco warehouses, and mines. These hired out workers labored in bricklaying, construction, and the clothing trades. At times, one-quarter of skilled laborers in Richmond were slaves. On such plantations as Monticello, slaves were trained as cabinetmakers to produce furniture.

In their "free" time slaves played marbles, gambled, told stories, played music, danced, or plotted escape. Out of slave culture emerged proverbs, recipes, dances, songs, gospel music, and the blues tradition that led to rock-and-roll. Slavery became the political issue in American politics. In 1776 every state had held slaves. After the Revolution racism prevented both southerners and northerners from realizing an equal, multiracial society. But slavery began to disappear in the North, where it had never really taken root economically. More and more it came under attack where it remained -- in the South. As slavery became exclusively southern, and under attack, white Virginians increasingly identified with the people of the other slave states. They began to think of themselves not only as Virginians and as Americans, but also as southerners.

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