By this same census the area of Virginia was fixed at 64,770 square
miles, divided into one hundred and forty-eight counties. By an
analysis of the census returns, it will appear that in the portion of
the state lying west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, embracing eighty
counties and 37,992 square miles, there were 596,293 whites and only
66,766 slaves; while in the remaining sixty-eight counties containing
26,778 square miles, there were only 451,006 whites and 424,099
slaves. Even with respect to this last mentioned portion of the state
the slaves were not evenly distributed but were congested in certain
well defined localities. Thus of the 424,099 slaves in the sixty-eight
counties lying east of the Blue Ridge, 173,109 were in twenty-two
counties situated between James River and the North Carolina border
known as the "Black Belt," the white population of which was only
128,303.
"ARROGANT SLAVEHOLDERS"
The foregoing facts have an important bearing upon the statement so
often found in the writings of historians and publicists, that the
white population of Virginia and the South was composed in large
measure of "slaveholders, arrogant and rich," and "poor whites," and
that in the Civil War the former fought to defend their property
interests in slaves, and the latter from a deep-seated fear that
emancipation would reduce them to the social level of the blacks. It
would seem impossible for such conditions to exist in counties and
cities where the whites largely outnumbered the blacks. "Arrogant
slaveholders," counting their slaves by the scores and dominating the
social and economic fortunes of their white neighbors, could be found
only in sections where the slaves greatly outnumbered the whites.
While agriculture was undoubtedly the pursuit in which a great
majority of the people of Virginia was engaged, yet this majority was
not made up of "arrogant slaveholders" and "poor whites." The United
States census showed that the great body of her white people were
small farmers, wage-earners, mechanics, merchants and professional
men, with some not inconsiderable number of miners, fishermen and
employees in manufactories. The prosperous, among this more numerous
element of her population, had little or no pecuniary interests in
slave property, while the poorer classes entertained as little fear
for the preservation of their social status from the abolition of
slavery, as they had pecuniary stake in its maintenance.
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Footnote 181:
_8th Census_, 1860, Vol. on Agriculture, p. 245.
Footnote 182:
_Causes of the Civil War_, American Nation Series, Chadwick, p. 33.