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The Industrialist and the Mountaineer
The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier
By Ronald L. Lewis West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2017 Ronald L. Lewis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-943665-52-5
CHAPTER 1
THE INCORPORATION OF WEST VIRGINIA
Incorporators and Resisters
The United States, a nation of diverse regions with their own unique historical experiences and cultural identities, underwent a profound social, economic, political, and cultural transformation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this watershed period the dozen or so American regions were drawn together into a unified whole by a process Alan Trachtenberg has aptly described as "the incorporation of America." At its core was "the conservative consolidating authority of capital — the urban, industrial, often corporate forces" that moved unevenly and ignited strident class conflicts. Opposing factions and individuals with a stake in the status quo resisted, sometimes violently, through strikes, feuds, and vigilantism.
The "old order" was rooted in the conditions of the nineteenth century, while the "new order" was grounded in the power relations of the twentieth century, producing conflict between what some contemporaries referred to as the "old men" and the "new men." The social hierarchy in the countryside featured a narrow elite at the top, a small middle class of business and professional men, farmers, ranchers, and skilled craftsmen, and below them a large amorphous base of landless, unskilled, and the poor. Diffused throughout the rural areas were those who resisted the "aggressive men of capital" who sought to impose "property-oriented law and authority." Those who resisted often displayed a tenacious allegiance to what were essentially highly traditional, even premodern, social values: law and order per se was much less prized than personal and family relationships, violators of which, in accordance with traditional values, were punished by the use of violence. As one scholar observed, "They were not offended by disorder." They had little interest in or sympathy for the incorporating process, which emphasized "the aggregation of wealth, the consolidation of capital, and the centralization of authority at the local, the state, and the national levels." Locals had a clear understanding of community standards, one historian observes, and they often rose up in defense of "community values."
Traditionally, farmers, artisans, and rural merchants shared a sense of personal control grounded in the capacity of traditional households to grow or make the goods their members required. The face-to-face transactions between individual consumers, artisans, and local merchants resulted from the integration of production and consumption that prompted traditionalists in the old order to believe that the price of products should be determined by local rather than the impersonal distant markets. Farmers in the old order required unimproved land, the habitat for fish and game on which rural people depended to sustain their self-sufficient lives. According to one scholar, "The survival of the traditional unity of life and work depended on the survival of local markets, self-sufficiency, and personal networks as the central economic facts of life. Those realities remained powerful where the market remained local," and those who identified with the "old order" resisted efforts to change it.
Industry-oriented public officials had promoted economic development even before West Virginia became a state in 1863 and the promotion of natural resource extraction industries became official state policy. Indeed, in 1906, the Manufacturer's Record reported that "the entire machinery of State government" was employed "to attract capital to the State to develop its railroads, its coal, and its timber interests." The incorporators of the "new order" believed they were the torchbearers of civilization. Newspaper editors, who generally favored the increased population and the increased pace of business activity that would accompany modernization, scorned the unambitious resisters as "Rip Vanwrinkles" who were satisfied with the stagnant old ways of self-sufficiency. "We must help our people out of the woods," proclaimed one editor. Another booster of the "gospel of progress" asserted in 1902 that the entire state was ready for the incorporators: "Even in the heads of the hollows, the 'moss-backs' are being hustled out of their hibernation" and jostled awake "by industrial developers with money to buy land and natural resources."
The incorporators offered a new social vision that departed dramatically from that of the resisters. Their new world encouraged the "progressive" elements in society to shed the restraints imposed by local traditions for a new life founded on economic rationality and growth rather than mere self-sufficiency. Once freed from local constraints and linked to national markets they would enjoy more of everything: money, time, material goods, education, opportunities, and freedom. However, the new order required that local markets be absorbed into the national market system so that "the price and quality of goods would no longer be restrained by local consumers."
The promotion of railroads became an obsession among new local elites after the Civil War. Most of these promoters owned large investments in land and natural resources whose value would skyrocket with the arrival of the railroad. On the other hand, failure to attract railroads would reduce the value of their investments and their communities would become backwaters. Ambitious men of property, therefore, found it necessary to suppress local resisters whose inertia inhibited the "the modernizing of society and the incorporation of power and authority."
The new order collided with the old in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1920s, and the state acquired a national reputation for conflict as a result of the mine wars brought about by the desire for unionization and the Hatfield and McCoy feud. Both were prime illustrations of the "wars of incorporation." Both incorporators and resisters attempted to control political parties which could serve as instruments for gaining hegemonic power over public policy and the law, and to block popular resistance. The national political parties in particular united state representatives in loyalty to a single organization that could compel its members to follow the party line. Politicians who would subordinate policy to winning office were readily persuaded by corporations to adopt favorable business policies "by providing parties and candidates with the money and troops to win elections."
Like West Virginia generally, Tucker County was divided during the Civil War between supporters of the Union and the Confederacy. Many residents alive in the 1890s had fought in that war, and the attending cultural conflicts seriously aggravated the growing postwar struggle between incorporators and resisters. The industrial transition during the decades before and after the turn of the century was led by West Virginia's most prominent industrialist-politicians. Democratic senator Johnson Newlon Camden (1881–1887, 1893–1895) was a lieutenant of John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil trust, and also developed railroads, coal, and timber enterprises in the northern and central sections of the state. Another leader of the Democratic Party, Senator Henry G. Davis (1871–1883), also a developer of coal, timberlands, and railroads, was one of the most powerful industrialists in the state. To control the party apparatus, especially the selection of candidates for office and the distribution of patronage, the factions had to be brought into line with the policies supported by the leaders. Davis and Camden were not only political allies, they were fast friends, and usually they exerted influence by helping one another.
Earlier in Davis's and Camden's careers, during the post–Civil War years, the state Democratic Party remained divided "between those who looked to the future and those who dwelt on the past." As leaders of the party, Camden and Davis, devoted significant time and resources to maintaining a governing coalition within the party among three major, mainly rural, traditional factions. "Redeemers" were generally former Confederates or sympathizers, and were represented by lawyers schooled in the land law inherited from Virginia. According to one state historian, the Redeemers "spoke for the southern and eastern West Virginia strongholds of Confederate sentiments and Virginia traditionalism and were usually conservative in their economic views; in fact, they yielded nothing to the industrialists in their anxiety to attract — and profit from — the investment capital needed to develop West Virginia's natural resources." The "Agrarian" faction was composed of anticorporation and antimonopoly resisters. Notwithstanding their Southern leanings, they made a poor showing in the backwoods counties. Their greatest strength was located in northern and western counties along the Ohio and Kanawha river valleys and along the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad. John J. Davis, a leading Agrarian, had been a Copperhead who opposed secession and was a firm advocate for the southern approach to racial issues. Old Virginia provided their cultural frame of reference, and they still mourned the Lost Cause. They saw Camden, Davis, and Republican leader Stephen B. Elkins as representatives of the outside incorporators, which, in fact, they were. The Agrarians seldom prevailed in intraparty skirmishes, but they occasionally stalemated a convention and forced the selection of compromise Democratic candidates. Another traditional-style political faction within the Democratic Party, the "Kanawha Ring," sympathized with the Confederacy and its heritage. State historian John A. Williams succinctly characterized the leaders of this faction, who were based in two prominent Charleston law firms, as adeptly combining "the traditional face-to-face style and political sympathies of circuit-riding lawyers in the southern interior with the practice of land and corporation law." In other words, they plied both sides of the fence, appealing to traditional southern farmers and Confederate sympathizers as well as the railroad corporations that were expanding into the interior sections. The Kanawha Ring represented, therefore, a hybrid of traditional and modern political styles.
Underlying these intraparty tensions was a contest over how the business of politics should be conducted. In the words of one of the most astute scholars of West Virginia's politics during this era, "Entrenched in the interior counties and in tradition-minded districts along the Virginia border was a pre-industrial political system, whose social basis was kinship, propinquity, and deference to neighborhood and district notables. It rested on face-to-face communications, with linkages provided by lawyers and other itinerants who followed the rough mountain trails through settlements whose residents were scattered along the watercourses, isolated even from nearby neighbors by the difficult character of the terrain."
Opposing the traditional political factions were the "Regular" Democrats led by Camden and Davis. The expansion of railroads, lumber camps, and coal mines during the 1880s and 1890s gradually eroded the traditionalists' political system and supplanted it with a modern one. "Among its features were centralized and continuously functioning machinery for the recruitment of candidates and the conduct of election campaigns," Williams observes. "Against the preindustrial networks of information and influence that survived in West Virginia, Camden and Davis manned the axes of modern communications." They invested in Democratic newspapers, contributed financially to like-minded candidates, provided jobs, railroad passes, legal work, and other forms of private patronage to supporters. To control the party's position on issues of importance to them, Camden and Davis Regulars held a firm grip on the committees that controlled the nominating conventions, awarded credentials, constructed party platforms, and distributed campaign literature and funds. Either Camden or Davis led the West Virginia delegations to every Democratic National Convention from 1868 to 1892.
The Democratic coalition finally began to break down in 1887 when Camden lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, opening the door for Republican Stephen B. Elkins to enter the state's political arena. Elkins successfully led the resurrection of the Republican Party and its ascent to power in the election of 1894. By the mid-1890s, therefore, the industrialists had gained power in both political parties. This state of affairs has been described as "a bipartisan 'merger' operated by and for the leading business interests of the state. ... All were business and political associates or allies of integrated industrial concerns operated from Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or New York."
It was at this exact point in the power struggle between the incorporators and resisters that their surrogates, Frank Thompson and Robert Eastham, confronted each other in the passenger car at the Parsons depot.
Railroads
Early loggers floated timber down the state's streams to be gathered by distant log booms. They utilized hand tools readily available to backcountry farmers, but production was limited by manual labor, and transportation to the mills downstream depended on seasonal flooding from spring rains and snow melt. With timber between six and twelve feet in diameter, exploiting the vast virgin forest of the interior mountains required the steam-powered technology and heavy equipment which could only be brought to bear by the railroads. Development of the interior forests was only a dream until the east-west trunk lines of the B&O Railroad were laid through northern West Virginia in the 1850s, and then the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad bisected southern West Virginia in the 1870s.
After these two trunk lines were in place, numerous small independent railroads sprouted out from the main lines. Alongwith more than 600 logging railroads, they completed an elaborate web of rails connecting the cutting face deep in the forest, the processing mills along the main lines, and the nation's markets. Even excluding the small logging and tram roads, track mileage in the state doubled in the 1880s, doubled again in the 1890s, and covered 3,705 miles in 1917.
Where previously there had been only a thinly scattered farming population, the coming of the railroads caused small towns to spring up along the lines like wildflowers. According to James Morton Callahan, a prominent state historian writing at the peak of the timber boom in 1913, the railroads "carried into the silence of the primeval woods the hum of modern industry," bringing forth "gigantic lumber plants" and bustling new towns. As the lines penetrated ever deeper into the forest, lumber towns were constructed as processing centers and staging areas for the final assault on the timber at the highest mountain summits where Tucker County awaited the age of steam power.
In northern West Virginia a smaller regional system connecting Cumberland, Maryland, to Parsons and Elkins, West Virginia, was established and operated by two of the state's most prominent industrialist-senators, Henry G. Davis and his son-in-law, Stephen B. Elkins. During the Civil War, Davis had quit his job as station agent for the B&O at Piedmont, Maryland, and entered business for himself selling cross ties and other supplies for the war effort. A loyal Unionist, and supporter of separate statehood for West Virginia in 1863, Davis served in the West Virginia legislature and then as U.S. senator from 1871 to 1883. His superior knowledge of the timberlands which he acquired during the search for war supplies prompted Davis to initiate a plan to drive his own railroad into northern West Virginia after the war. He began by purchasing options on timber and coal lands in Mineral, Grant, and Tucker counties. No ordinary businessman, Davis personally explored the northern mountains on horseback, searching out resources and buying lands, always with an eye to the best routes for railroad construction.
With his brother Thomas and son-in-law Stephen Elkins, Davis raised the capital for a new enlarged road, the West Virginia Central & Pittsburgh Railroad (WVC&P), from other businessmen in politics. As a result, the list of stockholders in the new company read like a "Who's Who among the business-minded politicians." In fact, the line was popularly referred to as the "Senatorial Railway" because so many senators purchased stock, as did prominent congressmen, several cabinet members, and other powerful national figures.
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Excerpted from The Industrialist and the Mountaineer by Ronald L. Lewis. Copyright © 2017 Ronald L. Lewis. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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