The story below is an excerpt from our July/August 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
The instabilities and uncertainties of the young nation led to several attempts for states that never came to be.
America’s earliest years as a nation were fraught and filled with possibility, when every decision marked a precedent and fate had not yet set the young republic’s course.
In the 1780s, between the British surrender at Yorktown and the passage of the Constitution, settlers in three different territories encompassing portions of Appalachia made bids for statehood. Had they been successful, America would have seen its first wholly Appalachian state more than 80 years before West Virginia split from Virginia, and the United States would look quite different today.
These Appalachian statehood movements grew from roots in the mid-1700s, when settlers and speculators swarmed west across the Blue Ridge Mountains and southwest through the Great Appalachian Valley.
A flurry of political maneuvering nearly resulted in the creation of a 14th colony—Vandalia, which would have occupied what is now West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky, along with parts of Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Vandalia was delayed by the French & Indian War and Pontiac’s War in the 1750s and ’60s, as well as reticence from Pennsylvania and Virginia, who still were defining the western edges of their respective territories.
The outbreak of the American War for Independence beginning in 1775 ended the Vandalia movement but opened new possibilities for settlers living in the mountains on the western fringe of the colonies.
Many western settlers were taken up with the Spirit of ’76—a zealous pursuit of individual liberty and the republican ideal—and a coinciding frustration that the state governments to their east were not doing much to build infrastructure or protect them against Native American raids.
Settlers in the Vandalia territory, now known as Westsylvania, petitioned the Continental Congress for statehood in 1776, early in the war; Congress ignored the petition. Four years later, when Pennsylvania and Virginia finally resolved a long-running boundary dispute over Pittsburgh and surrounding counties, the statehood movement flared up again. In 1782, however, Pennsylvania passed a law making separatism not only illegal but punishable by death, effectively resolving the issue.
To the southwest, the Transylvania settlement—which later became known as Kentucky—began after negotiation of the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with the Cherokee in 1774. Richard Henderson and his partners hired famed long hunter Daniel Boone to lead a crew of 30 men through the Wilderness Road from Castlewood, Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap to establish Boonesborough in 1775. Later that year, 100 settlers drafted a compact to establish a government.
Henderson petitioned the Continental Congress in 1776 for recognition of Transylvania, but it declined to act without the consent of North Carolina and Virginia, both of which maintained claims on the territory. That year, Virginia General Assembly absorbed the territory as Kentucky County; two years later it voided the Transylvania Company’s territorial claim, compensating Henderson and partners with a land grant on the Ohio River.