1825, for example, the western men complained that twenty counties
in the upper country, with over two hundred and twenty thousand free
white inhabitants, had no more weight in the government than twenty
counties on tidewater, containing only about fifty thousand; that
the six smallest counties in the state, compared with the six
largest, enjoyed nearly ten times as much political power.
[Footnote: Alexandria Herald, June 13, 1825.] To the gentlemen
planters of the seaboard, the idea of falling under the control of
the farmers of the interior of the south seemed intolerable.

It was only as slavery spread into the uplands, with the cultivation
of cotton, that the lowlands began to concede and to permit an
increased power in the legislatures to the sections most nearly
assimilated to the seaboard type. South Carolina achieved this end
in 1808 by the plan of giving to the seaboard the control of one
house, while the interior held the other; but it is to be noted that
this concession was not made until slavery had pushed so far up the
river-courses that the reapportionment preserved the control in the
hands of slave-holding counties. [Footnote: Calhoun, Works, I., 401;
Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in S. C., in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1900, I., 434-437.] A similar course was followed by
Virginia in the convention of 1829-1830, when, after a long
struggle, a compromise was adopted, by which the balance of power in
the state legislature was transferred to the counties of the
Piedmont and the Valley. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv., Debates (1829-
1830); Chandler, Representation in Va., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XIV., 286-298.] Here slave-holding had progressed so far
that the interest of those counties was affiliated rather with the
coast than with the trans-Allegheny country. West Virginia remained
a discontented area until her independent statehood in the days of