The Commonwealth of West Virginia

The Commonwealth of West Virginia is the mountain polity of the United Kingdom of America, and the only polity of the Realm ever created by dividing an existing one against its will. The Commonwealth of Kentucky was also cut out of the Province of Virginia, but Kentucky was let go: ten conventions, an Act of the Virginia legislature and a negotiated date. West Virginia was taken. The two Commonwealths are the amicable and the violent version of the same act, and West Virginia is conscious of the comparison.

It was made by the American Civil War, when the western counties of the Province of Virginia refused a rebellion their own Province had joined and were governed throughout it by a loyal government seated at Charles Town. It was confirmed in 1866, when the Legislature at Richmond consented to the separation in exchange for the Realm assuming a defined portion of Virginia’s pre-war public debt.

Everything about the Commonwealth proceeds from that. Its capital is still the town where the loyal government sat. Its General Assembly bears the same name as Virginia’s and is built nothing like it. Its members swear an oath at every opening that names both the people and the Crown. And it is, as its own government does not dispute, among the poorest polities in the Realm, second only to Mississippi.

The organising fact of the place is loyalty, and the organising question is what loyalty has been worth. West Virginia stayed loyal in the war, and the war made it. It was loyal to the Crown, and in 1921 the Crown ended the fighting in its coalfields on terms the miners could accept. It was loyal to the Church of America, which stood with the coalfields when very little else did. And it was loyal to Labour for a century, until the 1980s, when it concluded that Labour had chosen otherwise.

Three of those loyalties were repaid. The fourth was not, and the Commonwealth grieves it rather than resenting it, which is a distinction West Virginians make carefully and outsiders rarely hear.

History

The counties that refused

The country that became West Virginia was, before the war, the western third of the Province of Virginia, and it had never sat easily inside it.

It was mountain country, poorer than the Tidewater, worked by smallholders rather than by plantations, and holding a small fraction of the Province’s enslaved population. Its representation at Richmond was thin relative to its numbers, its roads and schools were an afterthought, and its trade ran west and north down the Ohio rather than east to the Chesapeake. The grievance was old, specific and economic before it was ever constitutional.

When Virginia joined the rebellion, the western counties did not.

The refusal was not unanimous and the Commonwealth’s own histories say so. Families divided, some counties were genuinely contested, and men from the western counties fought on both sides. What is not in dispute is that the organised political community of the west declined the rebellion, held to the Realm, and paid for it in raids, occupations, burnt property and reprisals across two years.

The loyal government at Charles Town

The government that the western counties formed sat at Charles Town, and its constitutional claim was not that it was a new thing.

Its claim was that it was Virginia. By the Realm’s own reckoning the rebel administration at Richmond had put itself outside the law, and the loyal government was therefore the lawful government of the Province, exercising its authority in the part of it that remained loyal. That claim was accepted by New Westminster, acted on throughout the war, and is the foundation of everything the Commonwealth says about itself.

It is also why the Commonwealth did not describe itself, then or since, as having seceded from anything. In its own account it did not leave Virginia. Virginia left, and West Virginia stayed where it was.

The bargain of 1866

The war ended and the claim had to be turned into a polity, which is a different problem.

A loyal government’s case for permanence was strong on the merits. It had governed since 1861, its people had refused the rebellion at real cost, and it had no wish whatever to be returned to the authority of Richmond. None of that answered the constitutional objection, which was that a Province cannot be divided without its own consent, and that the consent of a government the Realm itself had recognised as the lawful government of Virginia could not honestly be used to consent to Virginia’s dismemberment.

So the consent was obtained from Richmond, and it was bought.

Virginia at the end of the war was ruined, deeply in debt, excluded from the compensation paid to slaveholders in the loyal polities, and governed by federal appointees. The bargain was this: the Realm assumed a defined portion of Virginia’s pre-war public debt, the new polity took a share of the remainder proportionate to its population and assessed value, and Virginia’s readmission to ordinary self-government was accelerated. In exchange the Legislature at Richmond consented to the separation.

West Virginia was admitted in 1866.

The debt, and the quarrel

The debt apportionment produced litigation that ran into the twentieth century, and it is settled in law and has never been accepted in feeling.

The Virginian case is that a third of the Province was taken during a war, that the consent was extracted from a legislature under duress in the worst year in its history, and that the debt bargain was a bad one which West Virginia has never fully honoured. The West Virginian case is that the counties refused a rebellion their own Province had joined, governed themselves lawfully while doing it, and paid for the privilege in a settlement negotiated openly and consented to formally.

Both cases are made with feeling at present, and the quarrel is conducted now mostly through sport, roads policy, water, and the periodic reintroduction of a reunification motion in one assembly or the other by a member who knows exactly what he is doing.

Nobody supports the reunification motion. That is not the point of it. It is introduced for the pleasure of introducing it, debated with enjoyment on both sides of the mountains, and voted down by margins that would embarrass a serious proposal. It has become one of the Realm’s minor parliamentary traditions, and the members who move it are usually the ones with the safest seats.

Geography

The Commonwealth is mountain country, and almost nothing about it can be explained without saying so first.

The Alleghenies run through it and give the Alleghany Council its name. The land is folded, forested, steep and short of flat ground, which shaped the settlement pattern into narrow valleys and hollows and made every road, rail line and pipeline expensive. There is very little of the Commonwealth from which a horizon can be seen.

Three regions carry its politics and are named in its federal representation.

Charleston and the Kanawha is the industrial and administrative heart: the chemical corridor, the largest city, the river, and the greatest concentration of people and money.

The Northern Panhandle reaches up between Ohio and Pennsylvania to the river towns, is the most industrial and least mountainous part of the Commonwealth, and looks north and west more than it looks south.

The Southern Coalfields are the country the world means when it says West Virginia: the deep seams, the company towns, the union history, the poverty, and the mine war.

The Eastern Panhandle, where Charles Town sits, is a fourth country again, closer to the Potomac and to the federal district than to any of the above, and is the part of the Commonwealth most likely to be mistaken for Virginia by somebody who does not live there.

Water

Water in West Virginia is not scenery and is not an amenity. It is the recurring subject of the Commonwealth’s politics.

The land sheds water fast because it is steep, and the valleys people live in are the places it goes. Flooding is chronic, seasonal and unevenly distributed, falling hardest on the narrow coalfield hollows where there is nowhere to build that is not a floodplain and where a century of mining has changed what the ground does with rain.

The Commonwealth also sits at the head of water that other polities drink. What leaves West Virginia goes down the Ohio and reaches a great many people, and the obligations that follow from that are a permanent item in its dealings with the Realm and with its neighbours. Chemical releases into the Kanawha and its tributaries have twice in living memory left substantial populations without drinkable water, and the Commonwealth’s own reporting on both is unsparing.

New River Gorge has been a Royal American Park since 1978, designated as a National River, and is governed through a board on which community, labour and Indigenous representatives sit. It is the Commonwealth’s most-visited place and the clearest demonstration of the argument that its landscape is worth more standing than extracted, which is an argument the coalfields hear differently.

Blair Mountain and the mine war

The mine war

The mine war is the Commonwealth’s central modern memory, and it is treated with a seriousness that the rest of the Realm does not always match.

The coal operators of the southern fields governed their company towns as private jurisdictions: their own housing, their own stores, their own scrip, their own police in the form of hired mine guards, and their own effective control of the local courts and officials. Organisation was met with eviction, blacklisting and force. Men were killed on both sides across a decade, and the Commonwealth’s government was for much of that period unable or unwilling to assert ordinary law in the coalfield counties.

In 1921 several thousand armed miners marched south to organise the fields by force, and were met on Blair Mountain by an opposing force of mine guards, deputies and volunteers. It was the largest armed confrontation on the soil of the Realm between the Civil War and May Day.

What the Crown did

The fighting was ended by the Crown, and the manner of it is why the Crown is trusted in these counties.

The ministry of Charles Evans Hughes advised that federal force be interposed. John J. Pershing had been installed as Governor-General on 17 August 1921, days before, and the intervention fell in the first fortnight of his tenure.

No reserve power was used and none was needed. The action was ordinary executive action taken on ministerial advice, and the Realm’s constitutional record is precise about this: the reserve powers of the Crown in right of America have been used twice, by Marshall in 1943 and by Rice in 2006, and Blair Mountain is not among them.

What mattered was the disposition. Federal troops were interposed between the two forces rather than deployed against the miners, the mine guards were disarmed alongside them, and the miners were told they would surrender their weapons to the Realm and not to the operators or the county authorities.

They did. The march broke up within days with very little further loss of life, and the men went home. West Virginians have never stopped making the distinction: they did not surrender to the coal companies, they surrendered to the King’s soldiers, and the difference was the whole of it.

What it left

The prosecutions that followed fell overwhelmingly on the miners, several hundred of whom were charged, and the Commonwealth’s account of that is plain: the men who had been disarmed by the Realm were then tried by the courts of counties the operators controlled. Most were acquitted by juries who knew exactly what they were doing.

Union recognition in the southern fields did not follow for another decade and came through federal labour law rather than through the mountain.

What Blair Mountain left was a settled conviction, held across the political turn of the 1980s and still held, that the Crown is the institution that came when nobody else would, and that the Realm is worth belonging to for that reason if for no other. It is the oldest and least examined of the Commonwealth’s loyalties, and it is the one that has never wavered.

The nations

The Shawnee, Cherokee, Haudenosaunee and other peoples used, hunted, travelled and contested this country, and no single nation held it exclusively in the period before European settlement. It was mountain country used by many and settled permanently by fewer, which shaped both the history and the modern legal position.

The nations concerned hold recognised standing in the Commonwealth, as in most polities of the Realm, and it is exercised through consultation on land, water and burial sites, through representation on the New River Gorge board, and through participation in the treaty relationships that reach across polity lines.

The Commonwealth’s record is not good and its own account of it has improved. Removal from this country was substantially complete before West Virginia existed as a polity, which is a fact and is not an excuse, and the Commonwealth spent a long time treating that sequence as though it settled the question of obligation. It does not, and the standing that exists now was won by the nations rather than granted by the Commonwealth.

Demographics and society

West Virginia holds roughly a million and three quarters people, and the number has been falling for most of a century. The population is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly native to the Commonwealth or descended from people who were, and unusually settled: West Virginians who stay, stay for generations, and the ones who leave mostly leave young and for work.

Out-migration is the demographic fact that governs everything else. The coalfield counties in particular have exported their young people for decades, which leaves an older population, a thinner tax base, schools consolidating across longer distances, and a health burden that falls on a workforce too small to carry it. The Commonwealth’s own projections do not show this reversing.

There are Black communities of long standing in the southern coalfields, brought in during the great expansion of mining and organised into the same union locals as everybody else, whose presence the older histories of the Commonwealth passed over and whose part in the mine war is now properly recorded. There are smaller communities descended from the Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Slovak miners recruited in the same period, and their churches, halls and cemeteries are still where the seams were.

The Church

The Church of America is established in West Virginia and is genuinely followed, which is unusual in a polity of this kind and has a specific cause.

The Church stood with the coalfields. Its clergy in the southern counties in the mine war years buried the dead of both sides, refused the operators’ money, opened their buildings to organising meetings when no other hall in a company town was available, and in several documented cases were run out of the counties for it. The Church nationally was slower and more equivocal, and the Commonwealth’s own church historians say so, but the parish clergy of the coalfields were where they were.

That is remembered. Church attendance in West Virginia is among the highest in the Realm, the Lords Spiritual have a standing relationship with the Commonwealth that other polities find slightly baffling, and the Church’s own social teaching on labour is quoted in the General Assembly by members of both parties.

The independent and holiness congregations that dominate this country are numerous and are not counted by any denomination. What is different is that they have never been the majority, and the reason is that the established Church did not behave here as an establishment usually behaves.

Poverty

West Virginia is among the poorest polities in the Realm, second only to Mississippi, and its own government does not pretend otherwise.

Incomes are the lowest, health outcomes among the worst, the population has been falling for decades through out-migration of the young, and the tax base cannot carry the roads, schools, water systems and health services that a mountain country with a dispersed population requires. None of this is contested by anybody, and the Commonwealth has stopped pretending otherwise in its own publications.

The Realm’s answer is substantial federal transfers, and the arrangement is resented by both giver and receiver, which is the part worth understanding.

It is resented in the Commonwealth because a polity founded on having kept faith when it was dangerous does not enjoy being the Realm’s dependant, and because the transfers arrive with conditions, reporting requirements and periodic public commentary about whether the money is well spent. It is resented outside the Commonwealth because the sums are large, visible and recurrent, and because a polity that votes against the ministry paying for it is an easy thing to be irritated by.

Neither resentment is groundless and neither is edifying, and the Realm has never found a way to conduct the arrangement that does not humiliate somebody.

Economy

What it is now

Coal is declining, and it remains the largest single employer in the Commonwealth, and it remains political. All three of those are true at once and any account that drops one of them is wrong.

The industry is a fraction of what it was. Employment has fallen for decades through mechanisation before it fell through closure, so the tonnage and the jobs came apart long ago and the Commonwealth has been managing the gap ever since. What has not happened is the industry’s disappearance, and the political weight of coal in West Virginia is not proportionate to its share of the economy and never has been.

The reason is that coal is concentrated. A chemical plant losing four hundred jobs is a bad year in Charleston. A mine closing takes the wage base of a whole valley, and there is no second employer in the valley, and there is nowhere in the valley to move to.

Severed rights

The single most consequential legal fact about the Commonwealth is that the mineral rights are severed from the surface across a very large part of it.

One party owns the land. Another party owns what is underneath it, together with the right of reasonable access to get at it. Those rights were separated across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, frequently by agents buying from families who did not read the instrument, often for sums that were derisory even then, and they have descended ever since through inheritance, sale and corporate reorganisation until the surface owner and the mineral owner are strangers to one another and sometimes cannot readily be identified at all.

The ownership is mixed and much of it is absentee. Substantial mineral holdings in the Commonwealth belong to companies and trusts seated outside it, some of them outside the Realm, and the profits of extraction have never circulated locally in proportion to the extraction.

What that does in practice is the material of ordinary West Virginian life. A family may own a house and not own the coal beneath the garden. Subsidence, haul roads, blasting, water and the loss of a hillside may be lawful exercises of somebody else’s property right. Litigation is expensive, slow and asymmetric, and the Commonwealth’s courts have spent a century building a body of law around reasonable access which is respected elsewhere in the Realm and which nobody in the coalfields regards as adequate.

What else there is

Coal is not the whole economy and has not been for fifty years.

The chemical industry of the Kanawha valley is the largest of the alternatives, an inheritance of the same geology and river transport that built the coalfields, and it is a substantial employer around Charleston. Natural gas has grown considerably and now rivals coal in value if not in political weight. Timber works the mountain counties. Rail remains genuinely important, because a country this steep moves bulk by rail or does not move it.

Tourism is real and concentrated: the New River Gorge, whitewater, the ski country, the state and Royal parks, and the historic ground of the Eastern Panhandle. It employs a great many people badly paid and is not the answer the coalfields need, which is the standing objection to it.

Public employment is disproportionately large: schools, hospitals, the universities at Morgantown and Huntington, and the road authority that keeps a mountain network open in winter. In several counties the school district and the hospital are the two largest employers, and in a few of them they are the only ones.

Government and politics

The word Commonwealth

West Virginia is a Commonwealth, and it chose the word.

The Realm’s other Commonwealths are California, Cascadia and Illinois, and the term has long since detached from any single constitutional meaning. Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Bay are all Provinces here. West Virginia is therefore not echoing its parent by taking the word. It is doing the opposite.

The reasoning, stated at the founding and repeated since, is that a Province is a thing the Crown erects and a Commonwealth is a thing a people hold in common. A polity whose whole claim rests on its own people having kept a government alive without instruction from anybody preferred the second word, and took it.

The Lord Lieutenant

The head of state is the Lord Lieutenant of the Commonwealth of West Virginia, appointed by the Governor-General on ministerial advice for a term of five years.

The title is unique in the Realm and the choice was deliberate. Most Provinces have a Lieutenant-Governor, which is the American colonial form, and the other Commonwealths have a Governor. Lord Lieutenant is the older British form for the sovereign’s own representative in a county, and a Commonwealth insisting that it had been the loyal continuation of a lawful government reached past the colonial vocabulary for the imperial one on purpose.

The office is vice-regal and constitutionally ordinary: royal assent, the commissioning of a First Minister who commands confidence, the opening and prorogation of the General Assembly, and reserve powers held against a constitutional emergency. No Lord Lieutenant has ever used the reserve powers.

The General Assembly

The legislature is the General Assembly of West Virginia, which is the same name Virginia’s carries, and this is the Commonwealth’s sharpest institutional joke.

It kept the name and rejected the structure. Virginia’s General Assembly sits as a House of Delegates and a Provincial Senate. West Virginia’s sits as the Commons of West Virginia and the Alleghany Council, and shares with Richmond nothing but the words on the door.

The point is not subtle and is not meant to be. There are two General Assemblies of the old Virginia country, they are differently built, and only one of them stayed loyal.

The Commons of West Virginia is the popular chamber, elected on population, and is where the Commonwealth’s politics is actually conducted.

The Alleghany Council represents the counties, weighted so that the mountain and coalfield counties are not overwhelmed by the Kanawha valley and the northern industrial towns. Its name is the older spelling of the mountains that run through the Commonwealth, and it was chosen because a chamber representing counties in this country is representing ridges and hollows more than it is representing lines on a map.

Dual confidence

A First Minister of West Virginia must command the confidence of both chambers at once.

This is the strictest ministerial test in the Realm, shared only with the Grand Duchy of Minnesota, and the two polities arrived at it from opposite directions. Minnesota built it into an admission settlement as a check on a hereditary crown. West Virginia adopted it because a Commonwealth made by counties refusing to be governed from a distant capital was not going to allow a ministry to govern on the numbers of one chamber alone.

The consequence in practice is that West Virginia’s ministries are slow to form, and that a First Minister who loses the Alleghany Council has lost, whatever the Commons says. The coalfield counties have used that leverage repeatedly and are not apologetic about it.

The oath

At every opening of the General Assembly, members swear an oath that names two loyalties and one place.

The Blair Mountain clause was added in 1922, the year after the fighting ended, and the addition was itself contested: some members held that a constitutional oath should not name a recent industrial dispute, and were voted down by members who had been on the mountain.

Charles Town

Charles Town is a small town, and the Commonwealth governs from it on purpose.

It is not the largest city. Charleston, in the Kanawha valley, is much larger, is where the General Assembly meets, and holds the chemical industry, the commercial life and a substantial part of the Commonwealth’s administration in practice. Wheeling in the Northern Panhandle is older and richer. Neither has the capital.

The reason is the founding. Charles Town is where the loyal government sat, and moving the capital would concede that the government there had been a wartime expedient rather than the lawful government of Virginia. The Commonwealth has declined to concede that for a hundred and sixty years.

The smallness is treated as a virtue and the argument is made seriously: a capital too small to be a metropolis cannot become a separate interest, and ministers cannot avoid the people they govern. Whether that is a genuine constitutional advantage or a long-running act of self-congratulation is argued about at every session, mostly by members from Charleston.

The turn to the Crown Union

West Virginia was a Labour polity for a century and is now a Conservative and Crown Union one, and the turn happened in the 1980s with the first great closures.

Four things were at work and the Commonwealth’s own account names all of them.

Labour in government was seen to have chosen the climate over the coalfields. Whatever the merits of the policy, the sequence as it was experienced in the southern counties was that a party built by miners took decisions that closed mines, and explained them in language about a national interest that the counties did not feel included in.

The unions weakened and the party lost its machine. Labour’s organisation in West Virginia had been union organisation. As membership fell the party’s capacity to canvass, to identify voters and to hold a valley fell with it, and nothing replaced it.

The cultural and religious distance widened. A party whose centre of gravity had moved to the metropolitan polities was speaking a language that a churchgoing, gun-owning, mountain electorate heard as belonging to somebody else, and the party’s own people in the Commonwealth said so repeatedly and were not listened to.

And the Crown Union offered something Labour would not, which was straightforward protection of the industry. Whether it could have delivered that is a separate question and the answer is probably not. It offered it, plainly, and the offer was heard.

Grief rather than resentment

West Virginia grieves Labour. It does not resent it. The distinction is real, it is made carefully by people who now vote the other way, and it is the single thing most often got wrong about the Commonwealth from outside.

The sentences you hear are about ownership. It was our party. We built it. We sent them there. The complaint is not that Labour was always the enemy but that Labour stopped being theirs, and the loss is spoken about in the register of a bereavement rather than of a quarrel.

The practical consequence is that the Conservative and Crown Union vote in the coalfields is wide and shallow, that Labour’s own historic institutions are still honoured in places that have not voted for it in forty years, and that the party’s private hope of recovery has never entirely gone away.

Culture and daily life

Life in West Virginia is shaped by the mountains before it is shaped by anything else. Settlement runs in narrow valleys and hollows, roads follow water because there is nowhere else for them to go, and a journey of thirty miles can take an hour and a half. People are used to distance and are not romantic about it.

The dominant social institutions are the church, the volunteer fire department and the school. In a small county all three draw on the same few dozen families, and a person may be a deacon, a firefighter and a school board member without anybody finding that remarkable. Volunteer emergency service is close to universal in the rural counties because there is no alternative, and the fire hall is frequently the only public building large enough to hold a funeral, a wedding or a meeting.

Music is not a heritage exercise here. The old-time and bluegrass traditions are living practice, played at home and in halls rather than performed for visitors, and the Commonwealth’s fiddle and banjo repertoire is documented and taught without being embalmed. Church singing, particularly the shape-note and gospel traditions of the coalfields, sits alongside it.

Hunting and fishing are ordinary rather than recreational, and the seasons structure the calendar in the rural counties much as harvest does elsewhere. High school football carries a weight that outsiders consistently underestimate, in counties where the team is the last institution in which a whole community still assembles.

The food is plain, filling and specific: pepperoni rolls, which were a miner’s lunch before they were anything else, ramps in the spring, biscuits and gravy, and a great deal of home preserving that is a habit rather than a fashion.

Political tensions

West Virginia is the Realm’s clearest test of what loyalty is worth, and the answer it has received is genuinely mixed.

It kept a government alive at real cost when doing so was dangerous, and the Realm made it a polity. It was met on Blair Mountain by soldiers who disarmed both sides and let the miners go home, and it has trusted the Crown ever since. Its established Church stood in its coalfields when the operators owned everything else in them. Those are three debts honoured, and the Commonwealth does not forget them.

Against that, it is among the poorest polities in the Realm, kept solvent by transfers that embarrass everybody involved, holding an industry that is going and cannot be replaced at the scale it once employed, on land where a great many families do not own what is underneath them.

The Commonwealth’s own conclusion is that it was right to stay loyal and that loyalty has not been enough, and it holds both halves of that without much apparent difficulty. It is a place with an unusually clear sense of its own worth and an unusually poor sense of its own prospects, and the two do not seem to interfere with one another.

The reunification motion will be moved again. It will be voted down again. And the member who moves it will be re-elected, because everybody in both polities understands that the joke is the point and that the quarrel it rehearses is one neither side actually wants to end.

The quarrel with Virginia

The oldest tension is not internal. Virginia and West Virginia have never settled with one another, the debt is settled in law and not in feeling, and the argument is conducted through sport, roads policy, water and the reunification motion. Neither polity wants it resolved and both would miss it.

Coal against everything else

The live internal argument is between the coalfields and the rest of the Commonwealth, and it is not a simple one.

Charleston and the northern towns have an economy that does not depend on coal and a politics that increasingly reflects that. The southern counties have no such alternative and regard proposals for transition as things said by people whose own wages are not at stake. The Alleghany Council is where that argument is fought, because the county chamber gives the coalfields leverage the Commons alone would not, and a First Minister who forgets it does not last.

The transfers

The third tension runs outward. A polity kept solvent by federal money, voting steadily against the ministry that supplies it, is a standing irritation in both directions, and neither the Commonwealth nor the Realm has found a way of discussing it that does not end badly.

Symbols

The flag

The flag is a dark blue field bearing a single green star edged in red, in proportions of three by five, and it carries no words, no date, no crown and no seal.

It was adopted in 1922, in the same session of the General Assembly that added the Blair Mountain clause to the members’ oath. There had been no official flag before it. The design was chosen by open competition and was submitted by a schoolchild, which the Commonwealth has never stopped mentioning.

The official description gives two of the three colours a meaning. The blue is loyalty and the Union. The green is the mountains. It says nothing whatever about the red.

Nothing on the flag depicts Blair Mountain, and nothing needs to. The Commonwealth adopted a flag with the miners’ red running round the star in the year after the fighting, has never printed an explanation of it in any official instrument, and has never been asked for one by anybody who lives there.

It is flown constantly and privately: on houses, on trucks, on porches and at funerals, far more than on public buildings, and more in the southern coalfields than anywhere else.

The Lord Lieutenant’s flag

The vice-regal flag is the same field and star ensigned with the royal crown in gold, and it is the only place the Crown appears in the Commonwealth’s flags. The polity flag carries none, on the settled view that a Commonwealth is a thing its people hold in common and its flag should say so, while the Crown’s representative flies the Crown’s own device.

The arms and the motto

The motto is Montani Semper Liberi, mountaineers are always free, and it has never been translated on any official instrument of the Commonwealth. The Latin is deliberate and slightly perverse in a polity of this kind: the words are the least demotic thing about West Virginia and are quoted constantly by people who would not claim a word of Latin otherwise.

The arms carry the mountains, the crossed tools of the miner and the farmer, and the date of admission. The date is 1866, and Virginia has objected to its presence on the arms at intervals for a century and a half on the ground that it commemorates a purchase.

The Commonwealth’s day is kept in June and marks the admission rather than the separation, which is itself a constitutional statement: West Virginia celebrates the day it was recognised, not the day it stopped obeying Richmond, because in its own account it never did stop.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Province of Virginia, from which it was divided and with which it has never settled
• The American Civil War, which made it
• John J. Pershing and Charles Evans Hughes, at Blair Mountain
• The Church of America, which stood in the coalfields
• The Royal American Parks System and the New River Gorge
• The Grand Duchy of Minnesota, the Realm’s only other dual-confidence polity

Categories

Polities · Geography · History