THE LATE singer John Denver once sang the following verse in his song "Country Road" which stated "Almost Heaven… West Virginia". The fact is that few people know about the events that lead to West Virginia to convert into a state of the United States of America.

 

In the beginning of the colonial period, the area which was to become West Virginia was part of Virginia. The process continued even after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It appeared that the history of Virginia [including West Virginia] would be a tale of living happily ever after.

 

The result was the opposite since Virginia looked at the area beyond the mountains in what would become West Virginia as a backwater. The state legislature and governing elite from Virginia looked at the people [including the elite] of West Virginia as nothing more than second class citizens and "ungentrified".

 

The people of what was to become West Virginia did not own slaves but worked the land themselves, which was also a negative in the eyes of the governing elite of Virginia.

The voting rights in Virginia favoured the slave and plantation owners but marginalised the mountaineers of West Virginia. It was the beginning of the exacerbation of social, economic, and political tensions that would eventually explode sooner or later.

 

The breaking point came when Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States of America, in 1861. The Southern states including Virginia seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The people of West Virginia were angry because they wanted to remain in the Union.

 

In 1861, a group of delegates, who were from what is now West Virginia, decided to hold two meetings of secession from Virginia. The first meeting was held in the town of Clarksburg with a recommendation for another meeting in Wheeling. While some within West Virginia were questioning the legality of the secession from Virginia, others accepted it as a way of determining one’s own destiny.

 

Abraham Lincoln was opposed to the idea of West Virginia becoming an independent state from Virginia but there was little he could do. The area that was to become West Virginia was occupied by forces from the United States of America and used as a buffer or border state against the Confederate States of America.

 

After a tug of war between those who wanted West Virginia to become a state or remain a part of Virginia, the people who wanted West Virginia separated from Virginia prevailed. Abraham Lincoln finally signed into law the proclamation of West Virginia as a state in the Union, in 1863.

 

West Virginia may have converted into a state within the Union but Virginia did not give up. Virginia filed a lawsuit against West Virginia for lack of payment of debts incurred while it was a part of that state.

 

After a tug of war between Virginia and West Virginia, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled against West Virginia and ordered it to pay $12,393,929.50 to Virginia, in 1915.

 

In 1939, the debt that West Virginia paid to Virginia was complete and Virginia finally recognised the independence of West Virginia.