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How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans
By Roger Sollenberger | June 1, 2017 | 10:30am
Photo by Justin Sullivan Politics Features Fake News
A year ago I was part of a digital marketing team at a tech company. We were maybe the fifth largest company in our particular industry, which was drones. But we knew how to game Google, and our site was maxed out. We did our research and geared the content for the major keywords that we knew people used most frequently when they were shopping for drones or researching drones or looking for drone video. We knew our audience: their buying habits, their interests, ages, geography, etc., and soon our Google results were up there with a company that was literally an order of magnitude bigger than we were. A few months later, we were beating them at Google.
Our sales reflected this nearly immediately, but perhaps more importantly, we were perceived as being much bigger and more influential than we actually were. It was unfair and fair at the same time. It's just how that game is played, everywhere.
But then the giants wised up, poured a ton of people and money into it and squashed us.
Thing is, it doesn't take all that much to do what we did. Ask any digital marketer. You just need a little experience and a whole lot of time and money. I'm not going to get into the weeds of SEO (search engine optimization). But I am going to say something that sounds completely insane, and warn you that we're in the middle of something we've never experienced in America: a full-on psychological war. And Google, of all places, is a main battlefield.
I'm going to show you one specific weapon in this war that's being used against you and me and the United States right now: Google. There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind:
First, most of us don't even know we're in this war yet. You don't know when you've been wounded, when you've been killed. And that's the whole point: You're not supposed to.
Second, the attacks in this war aren't aimed at your enemies. You attack your own side.
Independence Is Division
First: Why this is important. Why this is a war.
Google, whether you're aware of it or not, is a total slaughterhouse. Trump's data team (he's reportedly set up a "war room" to combat the Russia story) has weaponized information, and for about a year now has been slaying American brains: Trump supporters' brains. It started with the election, then died down, but now it's coming back, vengeful and desperate.
As a result, we're at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.
This is, of course, about the truth, and about the cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities of Americans. This is nothing new for propagandists. What's different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.
I can describe it in no other terms but a war.
The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself. If I think about this for too long I grow terrified and want to take everyone's computer away. But it might be too late.
Beyond the Bots: Trump's Twitter Toupee
The past few days, we've seen some good reporting about the surge of Trump bots on social media. (Bots are automated, non-human accounts.) And though he didn't, as some people have claimed, net five million new Twitter followers in three days (though he did gain three million in May), nearly half of his followers, a full 49 percent, aren't real people.
That's right: Trump is being followed by 15 million robots.
The Washington Post just ran a pretty cowardly piece about Trump's bot following. They titled it "Something Fishy Is Going on with Trump's Twitter Account," but didn't say why this fishiness mattered in the first place. Who really cares if his followers are fake? So what if he wears a Twitter toupee? (A Twoupee, if you will.) We're used to that from Trump.
Here's where WaPo wouldn't, for some reason, go: those bots aren't just digital codpieces. They're attack vectors for weaponized information. What does that mean?
Misinfotainment
When we think about the Russian attacks during the election, most of us probably think of the DNC hacks, Podesta, and the steady drips from WikiLeaks of that stolen information. If you hate Hillary Clinton, I'm sure that at some point in the past nine months you've said something like, "Well, who cares how that information got out there, it's the truth!"
I won't argue. Instead, I'd like to point out that's not the whole story. According not just to me and FAKE NEWS! reports, but to the declassified U.S. intelligence report on Russian subversion in the 2016 election, the attacks included weaponizing false information (what "fake news" really is: stuff that's entirely made up; pure fiction) and creating real-seeming sites to host this fake news. So no, the whole hacking effort was not just publishing "the truth" about Clinton. Much of it was publishing fake news. Or, perhaps more dangerously, misleading news.
This brings us to Google today. A couple weeks ago I saw an insane person on my Facebook feed screaming about how Obama had leaked classified information about the Bin Laden raid that got people killed. What the fuck? I'd never heard anything about this, and the raid was six years ago, and this guy was a total right-wing crackpot, which is the trifecta for guaranteeing at least fifteen full minutes of batshit conspiracy theory misinfotainment. So I duly Googled "obama classified information bin laden." If you do that right now, here's what you get.
WHAAAAAT?! Obama's mouth killed people! Media is libturd hypocrites!
Let's ignore the criminal level of stupidity for a minute. Look instead at the dates on those articles. May 16 and 17 of this year. This year. The Bin Laden raid, again, was six fucking years ago. What's happening here? Why are all these different white nationalist news sites suddenly writing about this together? Why did they start doing it on May 16? Why do those articles even exist?
Well, on May 15, you might remember, The Washington Post broke this little gem: President Trump shared top secret intel with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador. In the Oval Office. In front of Russian state media.
Whoops-a-daisy!
The right-wing bullshit factory lurched to life. These outlets launched a broad "what about?" attack, a coordinated attack, on Obama and the left. That bullshit story about Obama's "dangerous" classified "leak" suddenly broke throughout the right-wing media sphere. Some of these articles are even cut-and-paste jobs. There's no effort here, just content. Tons of content, made quickly, made together, all spewing the same lies, but optimized.
But if you'll notice the bottom of that results page, there's a single redeeming link: PolitiFact. Thing is, it's at the bottom. But Alexa, a service that ranks all websites around the world based on their traffic, ranks PolitiFact much higher (~10,000) than the hit just above it, "trumptrainnews.com" (~128,000). Shouldn't such a gap work in PolitiFact's favor?
It doesn't. And it doesn't work in your favor, either.
Let Me Google That for You
Now let's see exactly what's up here. Together, we're going to Google the phrase "trump no evidence collusion." (And because Google searches change over time, I'll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump's data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump's war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more about this crazyAF, richAF, crackpot genius with a heart of shit.
Before we begin, though, we need to establish the fact that this statement is a lie: "There's no evidence of collusion!" The reason I'm using this specific example is because this highly nuanced claim is the perfect loophole to exploit for misinformation, to shade the truth as lie and get away with it clean.
The truth: no one in the intelligence community and no one on any of the Congressional committees looking into this thing, be they Democrat or Republican, none of them have said categorically, flat-out, "There is no evidence of collusion." Period. People investigating the case will only go so far as to say they haven't seen any evidence. Or that there hasn't been any evidence made available to them yet. But they don't ever say there flat-out isn't any evidence of collusion. Ever. Read this if you don't believe me.
Back to the Googs. Here's what I saw when I Googled "trump no evidence collusion" on the afternoon of May 29.
How many mainstream sites do you see on the first page? Zero. Let's go to page two.
Ah! There, buried under InfoWars and National Review and The Blaze and not one, not two, but three pieces from The Free Beacon, we finally find good old Reuters! And, lo: the good old Washington Post! And what about The Failing New York Times? Truly failing. Here's page three:
Uh. Page four?
Nope. The New York Fucking Times doesn't pop up until page five. Ahead of it: Lifezette; Talking Points Memo; The Blaze; The Daily Caller; something called ntknetwork; constitution.com; GOP.com; GatewayPundit; the aptly named NewsBusters; TownHall.com; and, kings of kings, Breitbart and InfoWars.
And when I googled the search term the night of May 31, as I'm writing this, it's even worse. The Washington Post, which had a page two hit on May 29, is now at the bottom of page four.
Now, to state the obvious, the way those results are ordered isn't exactly organic. Alexa ranks the NYT at 120 globally; WaPo at 190. Now, what about the illustrious townhall.com, which had not one but two hits on page one? It's ranked at 9,109. In other words, those first four pages (four full pages of synchronized bullshit) are evidence of a massive and centrally managed strategic misinformation campaign being waged on your brain.
These dozens of sites are all peddling the same lie with articles published at the same time. So if you wondered whether there really was collusion and wanted to dig into the Googs to get your story straight, you'd be overwhelmed by four fucking pages of what look like news sites telling you that even Democrats say there's flat-out no evidence of collusion. So why the fuck, you ask, are we wasting our time and resources attacking poor, duly-elected President Trump on false pretenses?
But again, the truth of this statement is trickier. No? Funnily enough, even these crackpot websites agree. Here are a few screenshots. If you read closely (which they're betting you won't) they all include the proper, honest caveats: no evidence YET; no one says they've SEEN evidence; etc. I've highlighted them here so you can get a feel for their strategic invisibility: you don't notice the quiet spot for all the noise around it.
See? You'd either miss this caveat altogether, or you'd forget about it or write it off as meaningless or some kind of error. It's so small, after all. This is completely forgivable: It's a human vulnerability. I exhibit it. Everyone does. We want to be right. We trust our brains. We believe in ourselves, in our capacity to execute sound, independent judgment. But this is the very thing that's being strategically exploited on a truly massive scale. This is a scheme to generate an overwhelming amount of misinformation, not just to combat a more nuanced truth, but to marginalize the truth, to weaken it, to BURY it underneath your own misplaced convictions about yourself.
We're being flattered into stupidity. Here's how it works.
How The SEOsage Is Made
First: Create content that subtly masks the truth.
Second: Shape that content into something people will share.
Third: Make it identical, and make a ton of it.
Fourth: Flood the internet with that content.
Fifth: Flood the internet with that content.
Six: Flood the fucking internet with that content.
The Google algorithm orders its search results, among other ways, by popular keywords used, publish date, and how many other links point to your site. You can do things to max out your keyword SEO, like I did in my last job, but the results we're seeing here, their consistency, the thoroughness of their victory, and the standardization of the messaging all requires a well-funded, well-coordinated effort. Ask any digital marketing expert: This is an organization of writers and data geeks who are paid handsomely to spend all day churning out content, pointing readers from one site to another, and using social media bots as vectors to beam this misinformation out to micro-targeted demographics.
It's a truly amazing operation. Time Magazine did an outstanding piece of reporting on this quite recently. So did The Guardian, here. Those pieces will scare the shit out of you. If they don't, I'm afraid you're an unwitting casualty of this war.
Why aren't Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven't learned.
How it works? Begin with some research. Find out which keywords people are using most frequently to dig up the kinds of stories you want to warp and feed them. Words like evidence; Trump; collusion; Comey; Clapper; Yates; Russia; etc. Then create an alternate narrative that deflects from the mainstream news and that can work independently of time: One you can bring back whenever you need it. Some examples: Benghazi; emails; Butobama.
Now, importantly, we need to make it highly shareable. Why do people tell other people things? Because they want to inform them, meaning ultimately they want to feel and look smart. You can flatter people into thinking they're smart by offering "new" information that "the other side" is hiding or not covering at all. You can flatter them into ignorance in the name of independence, flatter them into stupidity in the name of being smart.
That kind of content, as proven, will spread like wildfire.
Now sync that messaging across a shit-ton of "news" sites. Link to each other. Max out that SEO. Drop a ton of money into adsense. Create as much synchronized content around your keywords as possible. Then publish. Then update and publish again. And again. And again.
Because time also matters.
Take one of those townhall.com page one hits, for instance. As mentioned earlier, I first noticed this bullshit on May 29. I'm writing this at about 10:30 p.m.-ish on May 31, yet this search result shows that the townhall.com article about the evidence of collusion is now only one day old. Here's a screenshot of the same search terms, current time and date up at the top. Behold! James Clapper has become unstuck in time:
Why do these stories keep showing up? Well, they're not exactly the same stories. These sites are so shitty and unpopular that the stories would drop off almost immediately if left to their own devices. So the sites must continually update/rewrite/tweak/republish again and again so the Google algorithm thinks they're new. (Google also prioritizes newness.)
And look: James Clapper's testimony was weeks ago, yet these articles read like they're breaking a new story. And they're only a few hours old. The Post and the Times, however, aren't spending their resources on this stuff. They have responsibilities to keep up with the real news. And so do we, as citizens. But these psycho-dipshit crawlspaces don't have that burden, and they're betting you don't want it, either.
The Burden
I want to remind you, at the end of this technical stuff, that we're talking about something critical: How our brains work determines how our tribes are formed and behave, which determines how our society functions, or doesn't.
Because check this out: Who do these weapons target? These sites are havens for people who already support Trump or who already hate the left. The psychological weapon of misinformation is therefore perhaps unique in that it's intended primarily for use against your "allies," to further entrench or indoctrinate them in your camp.
The result? The American psyche is being transformed. Truthfully, it already has been. We've entered a new political, philosophical, social, and cultural era. People don't seem to understand yet, or aren't willing to face it, but reality is completely malleable. Even in America.
After all, the only things that can be true to you (that is, capital-T "True") is what you choose to believe about the world around you. You get to make that choice yourself. For some of us it's a freedom. Others a burden. Trump's crew and the right wing elite have understood this for years. Hell, the Russian people have lived with this for decades. We're no match. We're soft targets. All a propagandist has to do is link our identity to our beliefs. Once that's accomplished, your identity anchors your beliefs. But then you start to see there's this huge web of believers out there, and a common identity begins to shape up. A tribe emerges. Never mind that half of them are robots: You're not giving up who you are. And so if your beliefs define who you are, as a person and as a member of a tribe, there's nothing in the world short of an existential cataclysm that will ever, ever get you to change your mind.
If you don't want to.
Which reminds me: Ironically enough, these sheep sites bleating that there's no evidence of collusion are themselves evidence of collusion. Buried somewhere in that Time Magazine article is a real scoop: The FBI is investigating Robert Mercer's data firm, Cambridge Analytica, along with Breitbart News for colluding with Russia to spread misinformation and manipulate the hearts and minds of micro-targeted Americans during the 2016 campaign. The question here is, how do we react? Will we snap out of it and be able to change course, once this truth is out there on the table? Or will this truth be so painful, so humiliating, so devastating to our identities that it sends us running straight for the warmth of the barrels gunning us down?
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What are Requirements for California Oil and Gas Well Surety Bonds?
California's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources oversees the drilling, operation, maintenance, plugging and abandonment of oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Oil and gas operators in California must file individual or blanket bonds with the Department. The bonds protect the State of California from financial loss, protect the environment, prevent pollution, and ensure public safety.
A bond covers drilling, redrilling, deepening, or other operations permanently altering the casing in oil, gas, geothermal or service wells. The bond can be forfeited if an operator fails to plug and abandon a well, failure to clean up a spill or screen a sump associated with a well.
The bond must be obtained with a surety agency that is licensed in California. SuretyGroup.com is licensed to write all surety bonds in California, including all oil and gas bonds.
The "obligee" is the entity that requires the bond or other form of security. California's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources is the obligee for California oil and gas well drillers.
Instead of a surety bond, another form of security may be accepted by the Division. Acceptable forms of security include a certified or cashier's check, certificates of deposit, or savings passbook account number.
If the business is a partnership, then all the names of the partners must be on the bond, stating that they are a partnership, and with the name of the firm listed. If the principal is a corporation, then a seal from the corporation must be affixed on the bond. A seal of the surety must also be affixed.
The name of the principal and the well designation must coincide exactly on both the bond form and on any notice of intention to drill, redrill, deepen, abandon, reabandon, or permanently alter the casing on a well.
There are two types of bonds: Individual well surety bonds and blanket surety bonds.
Onshore wells covered by a blanket surety bond, which is 20 or more bondable wells at any time. If there are less than 20 wells, individual well bonds must be filed.
Operators with $200,000 or $400,000 blanket indemnity or cash bond must pay either idle-well fees, maintain an escrow account, or file idle-well bonds at $5000 each.
Operators with $200,000 blanket indemnity bond with over the 50-well limit must file a rider to increase the bond to $400,000 or $2,000,000.
Operators with $200,000 blanket cash bond and well amount exceeds 50 must complete a new bond form for $400,000 and file an additional $200,000 security deposit, or file a $2,000,000 blanket bond.
Life-of-Well or Life-of-Production Facility Bond: For operators with a history of noncompliance. The surety bond amount will vary according to the costs of removing a well or a production facility associated with a well.
Designate an agent as a company contact.
Submit a completed permit request form, "Notice of Intention to Drill New Well"
Receive Division Approval before begin drilling. The permit must be posted at the drill site at all times.
The premium that you pay for a California Oil and Gas Well surety bond is dependent on credit and the number of wells. Our rates start at $100 for bond amounts $10,000 and under with good credit. Bond amounts over $10,000 start at 1% of the bond amount with good credit. Contact our Surety Bond Specialists for a free quote.For bond amounts over $50,000, personal and corporate business financial statements may be required.
A surety bond rider would be needed if there is a name change of the principal, a designation change on the well, or to increase the monetary liability of a bond or previous rider.


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Updated: Missing York teenager found after public appeal
29 Oct 2014 @ 4.34 pm
YorkMix | News
Katie Free, pictured with boyfriend Will Gilligan
York teenager Katie Free, who went missing from Grimsby after checking out of the town's hospital, has been located as a direct result of a public appeal.
A police spokesperson said that Katie, 18, from Rawcliffe, was "located in the North Yorkshire area where appropriate care and support is now being provided to her.
"We would like to thank the public and the media for their help in the search for Katie."
From 29-10-2014 at 4.34 pm
York teenager goes missing after leaving hospital
A York teenage girl with "ongoing health issues" has gone missing.
Katie Free, 18, from Rawcliffe, York, was receiving in-patient treatment at Grimsby General Hospital but left at 12.45pm on Sunday (October 26).
She has not been seen since and police are growing concerned for her welfare due to an existing medical condition.
Katie is white with a pale complexion. She has blue eyes and red hair often worn in a ponytail.
She is 5ft 7ins tall and of thin build and wears glasses.
When last seen she was wearing black leggings with boots and a blue coloured top, with a coat over the top.
Katie is believed to be with her boyfriend Will Gilligan who is from the Darlington area. It is thought they may have travelled together to the east coast area of North Yorkshire.
"Katie's welfare is our main priority and as time moves on our concern is growing due to her ongoing health issues," said Chief Inspector Mark Bishop of North East Lincolnshire police.
"It is important that we locate Katie as quickly as possible so that we can ensure she receives the support she urgently needs.
"We are appealing to Katie to make contact, either with her family or the emergency services at the earliest opportunity.
"We would also ask the public to help us by calling us to inform us if they see Katie and provide us with details of her whereabouts."
Katie or anyone with information as to her whereabouts is asked to call the police on 101 quoting Humberside police log number 371 of October 26.
Tributes paid to North Yorkshire ambulance man who died from Covid
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'Let us ride on York's footstreets' – Bike couriers plea

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Are you tired of making those ice machine maintenance calls? Here comes good news for you! Manitowoc AR-PRE Arctic Pure Ice Machine Water Filter will keep your Manitowoc ice machine running in top condition. Siliphos is designed into this filter to reduce scale build-up even under the hardest water conditions.


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Sometimes it takes a community to raise an NPS score, as the telecommunications company has discovered
Brad Howarth (CMO)
Sometimes big ideas have inauspicious beginnings.
Emma McRobert had been in the US looking for a new messaging platform for the Optus customer care website when she learned about an idea that would revamp the company's entire contact centre model.
That idea was Team of Experts, a model of customer care created by T-Mobile which assigned every one of its post-paid customers to a team of highly trained experts dedicated to their care.
McRobert returned to Australia with a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept and the idea of creating 10 communities. But then the rapid onset of the Covid crisis led Optus' chief executive officer, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, to ask McRobert to think bigger.
"Our CEO said to me there had never been a better time than now to roll this out across all of the customer care team, given the amount of disruption everyone was experiencing," McRobert tells CMO. "She gave me four weeks.
"We delivered the first round in three-and-a-half weeks. We didn't plan on rolling out Community of Experts across all of our centres, but during the peak of the pandemic we started to roll it out everywhere. Within a short period of time, we had rolled out the vast majority of features."
The Community of Experts sees every Optus customer assigned to a dedicated team based on their local area, meaning customers interact with the same people with every time the make contact. Twelve months later, McRobert says she has delivered on her CEO's request.
"T-Mobile took four years to put in what we put in in 10 to 11 months," she says. "We trained people on the things they needed to be trained on, and now we are in this nice place where we can give people the room to breathe and absorb what we have already changed."
Read more CMO's new State of CX Leadership report finds functional misalignment hampering CX efforts
The changes needed to implement Community of Experts took significant investment of both resources and time, from both Optus and its employees. McRobert says it is important not to underestimate the culture development required to make it come together.
"We had to change everything we knew about the way that we interact with customers," she says. "We had to re-do all of our service design around how we wanted to interact with our customers and document that. We needed to think about the culture we wanted to live and breathe every single day. Then we had to do all of the training. At last count, we have put in about 200,000 hours of extra training for all of our people.
"We are essentially stopping the way someone thinks about interacting with a customer and asking them to do something completely new. So it's making sure our experts now feel empowered to actually take longer on the phone, to talk to a customer and understand their needs. Their job is to listen to the customer and solve what they need. And if they don't know the answer, they can turn to the person next to them to help them with that.
"It's the retraining and rethinking on what good looks like, which is quite a significant change."
Read more How Theatre Royal Sydney is putting the theatregoer centre stage
Optus has also altered the physical layout of its contact centres so coaches and experts sit side by side.
"Community of Experts is about no hierarchy," McRobert said. "We do daily stand-ups and everyone has a voice in terms of things that are broken."
While McRoberts says the effort has been extraordinary, she is very pleased with the results. Optus recently achieved its best ever result from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's complaints report, with a 27.9 per cent reduction in complaints in comparison to 2020. This equated to 3.9 complaints per 10,000 subscribers in the quarter between April and June 2021.
"In terms of metrics, you will see that the contact demand will reduce," McRobert says. "Yes, we will spend more time on an interaction, but our customers will be happier with us, therefore they are going to want to stay with us, and in the future, buy something with us.
Read more What BizCover has done to personalise and automate customer service and marketing
"Contacts cost money, but they are an opportunity to have a conversation with a customer. Every time we have a conversation with our customer it is a chance to create a better relationship with them and look at the value of that interaction over time, not just in that moment."
In addition, employee engagement is at an all-time high, reaching in the 70s, with transfers having halved since the program's introduction.
"Our people have never been happier," McRobert says. "We have seen lifts in our employee engagement, because they actually feel like they can help the customer at the end of the line."
The work has been recognised by international design promotion organisation, Good Design Australia, with Community of Experts winning Best in Class for Service Design in the Good Design Awards. The next stage in the program's development will see the locality-based nature of the Communities mapped out against Optus' retail store footprint. This is aimed at creating relationships between community mangers and area mangers and store managers.
"They will be able to map that local market, understand the customers that are in that local market and the type of experience those customers are having, and plan that local market together," McRobert says. "We will be able to manage that customer experience end-to-end and make sure we have a really good connection between the physical store and our contact centre."
Altogether, McRobert says these results are critical for helping Optus achieve its customer goals.
"Our vision is to become Australia's most loved everyday brand, and the Community of Experts is front and centre in being able to deliver that for our customers," she adds.
Tags: customer servicecustomer supportcustomer experience managementemployee engagementcustomer technology


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How Virginia Split Into "East" and West Virginia (But With Only Three Shenandoah Valley Counties, and Without Southwest Virginia)
Virginia and Tennessee railroad, built before the Civil War, linked eastern and southwestern Virginia
Source: Library of Congress, Map showing the Fredericksburg & Gordonsville Rail Road of Virginia
Political conflicts among Tidewater, the Piedmont, Northern Virginia, and however many regions you wish to identify are a long part of the state's history. These differences led to a formal split and the creation of a new state, West Virginia, in 1863.
In the first inauguration speech of a West Virginia Governor, Arthur Boreman made clear why splitting from Virginia was justified:1
West Virginia should long since have had a separate State existence. The East has always looked upon that portion of the State west of the mountains, as a sort of outside appendage - a territory in a state of pupilage. The unfairness and inequality of legislation is manifest on every page of the statute book; they had an unjust majority in the Legislature by the original Constitution of the State, and have clung to it with the utmost tenacity ever since; they have collected heavy taxes from us, and have spent large sums in the construction of railroads and canals in the East, but have withheld appropriations from the West; they have refused to make any of the modern improvements by which trade and travel could be carried on from the one section to the other, thus treating us as strangers; our people could not get to the Capital of their State by any of the usual modes of traveling, without going through the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
The East and the West have always been two peoples. There has been little intercourse between them, either social or commercial. Our people seldom visit the East for pleasure. The farmers do not take their stock, grain, wool and other agricultural products there to sell; the merchants do not go there to sell or buy; the manufacturers have no market there; indeed, we have had nothing to do with the Eastern people, except that our Senators and Delegates have gone to Richmond to sit in the Legislature and our Sheriffs have gone there to pay in the revenue as an annual tribute from this section of the State for the inequality and unfairness with which we have always been treated by them.
Our markets, our trade and our travel are North and West of Virginia, through natural channels, or those constructed through the enterprise of our own people, or such means as they could procure. The mountains intervene between us, the rivers rise in the mountains and run towards the Northwest; and, as if to make the separation more complete, Eastern Virginia adopted the fatal doctrine of secession, while the West spurned and rejected it as false and dangerous in the extreme.
Thus nature, our commerce, travel, habits, associations, and interests, all - all say that West Virginia should be severed from the East. And now, to-day after many long and weary years of insult and injustice, culminating on the part of the East, in an attempt to destroy the Government, we have the proud satisfaction of proclaiming to those around us that we are a separate State in the Union.
Some boundaries proposed for West Virginia during the Civil War extended much further to the east. The new state could have included all Virginia counties west of the Blue Ridge, and even all the counties along the Potomac River downstream to the Occoquan River. In the end, West Virginia included only three Shenandoah Valley Counties - and the southwestern Virginia counties within the Valley and Ridge province stayed with "old" Virginia, due to the influence of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad.
Panhandle of West Virginia showing Morgan,
Berkeley, and Jefferson counties in the Shenandoah Valley
European settlers did not spread out through Virginia after 1607 like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond. Settlement did not expand equally away from a central point at Jamestown, with new farms and communities emerging a few miles in every direction every few years.
The English settled first in Tidewater Virginia, clearing the land near the rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Instead of a smooth, gradual spread outward from one central place, English settlement spread primarily to the north of the James and east of the Fall Line. South of the James, in the Albermarle-Pamlico Sound watershed, there was less demand for land in the first 150 years after Jamestown.
Why? South of the Appomattox River watershed, Virginia rivers do not empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Farm crops loaded on boats and shipped downstream end up in North Carolina. Farmers south of the Appomattox River could load boats to carry crops down the Blackwater, Nottoway, or Roanoke rivers - but those boats ended up in the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, while most ships sailed to Chesapeake Bay ports.
Source: Chesapeake Bay Local Assistance Department
By 1700, a gentry of 5% or so of the population (the "First Families of Virginia"or Cavaliers) took control of the politics and economy of the colony. The plantation owners shifted from importing indentured servants to importing slaves as the primary labor force for their tobacco plantations.
They built large manor houses on their Tidewater plantations - Berkeley, Carter's Grove, Mount Airy, Stratford Hall. Using their influence in the House of Burgesses and with the Governor, they obtained land grants and speculated in western lands - lands west of the Fall Line. The Lees and Carters competed in the upper Potomac watershed for control of the Fairfax land office and access to waterfront property downstream of Great Falls.
Governor Spotswood led a military exploration/real estate speculation expedition up the Rappahannock River valley in 1716. His "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe" crossed the Blue Ridge near where modern US Route 33 passes through Swift Run Gap. The "knights" celebrated their arrival with multiple toasts on the banks of the Shenandoah River, in a party that is still memorable nearly 300 years later:2
We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley, the Princess's health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret, and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquors, viz.; Virginia red wine and. white wine, Irish usquebaugh, brandy shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, cherry punch, water, cider, etc.
Modern real estate agents will recognize the expedition (and the party...) as a familiarization tour to spur land sales. The old saying about real estate values being determined by three things ("location, location, and location") applied in colonial times as well as today. Spotswood himself imported indentured servants to develop an iron plantation at Germanna, upstream from Fredericksburg, while defending his even-handedness in supporting development south of the James.
While the officials in Williamsburg processed requests for grants and occasionally an actual survey for a patent west of the mountains, a few of the gentry actually visited their land claims on the other side of the Blue Ridge. George Washington spent much of the 1750's in Shenandoah Valley and travelled south to Shawsville to inspect frontier forts. Patrick Henry travelled to visit his properties nearby in Christiansburg, a town named after his brother-in-law William Christian.
But most settlement west of the Blue Ridge came from a different direction, *not* from Tidewater Virginia. The House of Burgesses created new counties stretching to the crest of the Blue Ridge (such as Prince William) in the 1730's, but settlers did not spread westward in a steady flow. Instead, lands west of the Blue Ridge were settled by immigrants walking southwest from Philadelphia, before all the lands east of the mountains were fully occupied.
In an agricultural economy, the higher-quality limestone soils of the valley were one reason for bypassing the Blue Ridge. Even today, Virginia's two primary agricultural producers are Augusta and Rockingham counties. Recognizing the uneconomic value of farming in the mountains, Virginia purchased the hard-scrabble farms in the Blue Ridge 70 years ago and donated the land to the Federal government for Shenandoah National Park.
However, another key reason for settling the Shenandoah Valley from the north rather than the east was cultural rather than physical.
The religious intolerance in Europe spurred many refugees to flee to the New World in the first half of the 1700's. Virginia had "established" the Anglican church as an official part of the government. Mandatory church levies (i. e., taxes collected by the sheriff) funded both social welfare and church operations, including the construction of the brick colonial churches still seen in Tidewater today (such as Bruton Parish church in Williamsburg and Pohick Church in Fairfax County).
Tidewater was dominated by the Church of England, the region but was not exclusively Anglican. International shipping ports like Norfolk had numerous non-Anglican sailors adding diversity to the Virginia culture, and the colony was relatively tolerant of Protestant dissenters. Prior to the French and Indian War, Scottish merchants ("factors" purchasing tobacco in Fall Line cities from small planters) provided a Presbyterian business class.
In addition, in the Piedmont a substantial number of indentured servants and poor farmers were stimulated by the "Great Awakening" and itinerant dissident preachers, especially the Baptists. Patrick Henry's mother was a Presbyterian convert, perhaps one reason he was such a rabble-rouser... Historians still debate how the threat to the hegemony (domination) of the gentry class affected the political thinking prior to the American Revolution.
West of the Blue Ridge, the Anglican and Tidewater English presence was far more limited. Immigrants coming south through Pennsylvania were predominantly Protestant - but not Anglican - refugees, people who fled the many conflicts among political states that have now been assembled into modern-day Germany. These Pennsylvania "Dutch" fled to William Penn's haven, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. They discovered the price of land was lower as they moved west, and substantially less as they crossed the Potomac River into the "empty" Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
The valley was empty in part because it was a border territory raided by Iroquois from the north, Cherokee from the south, and Shawnee from the west. In addition, diseases brought from Europe by Spanish explorers in the 1500's and permanent colonists in the 1600's may have dramatically reduced the population of the indigenous Native Americans.
In the days when transportation was by one-horsepower wagon, the Blue Ridge was a significant physical barrier that divided the colony.
"East" Virginia was the Tidewater region, plus the Piedmont region where small planters produced tobacco for export. Those planters rolled hogsheads of tobacco eastward, downhill to the cities like Fredericksburg developing along the Fall Line, in order to ship their crop to Europe. Wagons that carried crops eastward to market returned home with nails, cloth, and other manufactured products. The mercantile system ensured that industries in England would have a market in the colonies, and the Fall Line cities became the "hinge" between the Piedmont and England.3
But those cities were irrelevant to the immigrants west of the Blue Ridge, so long as roads through the mountain gaps were too poor for farm wagons. The immigrants who had come south from Philadelphia, migrating west to Lancaster and then following the limestone valleys south into Virginia, sent their farm products back north as well. Since the roads were poor (OK, really really poor), hauling tobacco to Philadelphia was a poor (OK, really really poor...) economic decision.
So the immigrants in the valley raised livestock, walking their herds to market in Baltimore and Philadelphia long before cattle drives of Texas longhorns captured Hollywood's imagination. If the movie moguls ever film a Virginia cattle drive, look for the herds of cattle from the South Branch of the Potomac River walking north, down the Shenandoah Valley. (After numerous pauses for grazing on grasslands in the valley, the herds should cross the Potomac River and then veer eastward to the market cities of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Expect the herd of cattle to be followed by droves of pigs, feeding on the manure left behind on the trail by the cattle - with a flock of turkeys or chickens behind the pigs, fully utilizing all the food resources on the way to market.)
Prior to the French and Indian War, the economic ties, religious sympathies, and family loyalties of the Shenandoah settlers were to the north, not towards Tidewater Virginia. However, after the Piedmont filled with settlers oriented to the Tidewater, a substantial number of "English" immigrants came into the valley across the Blue Ridge.
The French and Indian War triggered a decade of Tidewater commitment to the valley, from 1753-1763. George Washington lived in Winchester for several years as the commander of the Virginia forces, and the legislature and the governor committed substantial resources (though still far-from-enough) to fund forts and militia on the frontier from the Potomac to the New River. He was sensitized to the western attitudes and sought throughout his political career to use transportation improvements to link western loyalties to the primary American cities on the East Coast.
By the 1800's, roads crossed from Tidewater through the "wind gaps" in the Blue Ridge to the Valley. In the 1850's, railroads such as the Manassas Gap Railroad cemented the economic ties between the valley and the Fall Line cities.
But transportation improvements were never fairly allocated to the western counties of Virginia. After the Board of Public Works was created in 1816, the state financed 40-60% of the cost for turnpikes, plank roads, canals, and railroads. The legislature approved few projects west of the Allegheny Front, where the waters drained into the Ohio River.
Instead, the Tidewater-dominated General Assembly supported projects to enhance farm-to-market transportation leading to Petersburg, Richmond, and Fredericksburg. (Alexandria was part of the District of Columbia from 1800-1846, and the State of Virginia was reluctant to finance improvements to a non-Virginia city during those years.)
And the western counties were grossly under-represented in the General Assembly. In 1816, disgruntled political leaders organized the Staunton Convention with representatives from 36 counties, including some from the eastern region of Virginia. The convention noted that obnly 1/3 of the white population lived east of the Blue Ridge, but that minority controlled the majority of seats in the House of Delegates and had even more power in the State Senate.4
The number of white males west of the Blue Ridge was greater than the equivalent population east of the mountains, when the state constitution was revised in the early 1850's. But the constitution was written so the western counties would never achieve control of the State Senate.
Tidewater planters were concerned that western voters would change the tax structure to finance "internal improvements." The Tidewater planters ensured property taxes on slaves remained low, while taxes on land were relatively high. The western residents had most of their investments in land while the eastern planters had invested in slaves. Instead of ensuring the tax burden was fair, the western residents were taxed more heavily - and the taxes were used to finance transportation improvements in the eastern portion of the state.
There was ill will between the regions of Virginia before the Civil War. Northern Virginians benefitted when Whigs controlled the General Assembly, supporting internal improvements in the Potomac watershed such as the C&O canal. Democrats steered investments to the James River watershed when they controlled the political machinery. But westerners never got their fair share... no matter which party was in control before the Civil War.
After the 1776 state constitution was revised for the first time in 1830, the Tidewater planters provided a higher level of public support for residents west of the Blue Ridge. The Board of Public Works provided financing for turnpikes, canals, and railroads linking the southern ("upper") Shenandoah Valley near Staunton to Richmond, and the more-northern portion of the valley near Front Royal/Mount Jackson to Alexandria.
As one study of the origins of West Virginia has noted:5
Before 1830 the Shenandoah Valley and Trans-Allegheny regions cooperated in their efforts to gain common objectives: universal manhood suffrage; increased representation in the General Assembly; liberal appropriations for internal improvements, popular election of governor, judges, and members of county courts; abolition of the governor's council; and the removal of tax discriminations in favor of slave property...
...Before 1830 the Shenandoah Valley and Trans-Allegheny Regions stood together in opposition to eastern domination. But at the Constitutional Convention of 1830 the Valley deserted its former allies and moved toward the center of the pro-slavery orbit. After 1830 the pattern of sectional conflict continued to change, ever reducing the geographical area in Virginia that was seriously at odds with the conservative, slaveholding east. By 1861 Northwestern Virginia had little more in common with the Valley and Southwestern counties included in the new state tha a cobra and a mongoose.
When the secession Convention finally voted to leave the Union in April 1861, the representatives of the western counties chose to meet separately and to "secede" from Virginia. This political decision was the final break, creating a fixed political boundary between two separate states after West Virginia was accepted into the Union. What had been a shifting frontier between Virginians who were oriented towards the Chesapeake Bay vs. the Mississippi drainage was locked into place.
In 1862, Governor Pierpont of the Restored Government of Virginia described why the western and eastern sections of the state had developed very different cultures:6
Geographically, the East is separated from the West by mountains which form an almost impassible barrier, as far as trade and commerce is concerned. The barrier is so great that no artificial means of intercourse have ever been made beyond a mud turnpike road. All the trade and commerce of the West is with other States, and not with Eastern Virginia.
The two sections are entirely dissimilar in their social relations and institutions. While the East is largely interested in slaves, the West has none, and all the labor is performed by freemen. The mode and subjects of taxation in the State have been a source of irritation and indeed of strife and vexation, between the two sections for many years past, as well as that of representation in the Legislature.
Despite the tilt towards Tidewater, the southwestern counties west of the Blue Ridge stayed in Virginia and did not join West Virginia in 1863-66. A decade before the Civil War, the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad crosed the Blue Ridge. The rail line was built west from Lynchburg through the Roanoke River gap, then down the Valley and Ridge to Bristol.
The easy transportation link to the Fall Line ports transformed the economy of southwestern Virginia. While the percentage of slaveowners in the region remained low compared to the portion of Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, the economic links between the southwest and the eastern part of the state grew substantially.
in 1860, the Trans-Allegheny District of western Virginia was divided into Northwest and Southwest districts
Map Source: US Geological Survey (USGS), National Atlas
Counties west of the Allegheny Front seceded from Virginia starting in 1861, and established a new capital in Wheeling for the new State of West Virginia in 1863. However, the far southwestern counties retained their loyalty to the capital based in Richmond, due to economic and cultural ties that had been strengthened through business facilitated by the rail line.
The Federal government anticipated the outbreak of a civil war that might trigger the western counties in Virginia to splinter off and form a separate state. The United States Coast Survey obtained early access to the 1860 Census data, and created the first map displaying that data in June, 1861. By September, a new version of the map displayed the name of the proposed new state - Kanawha.7
the percentage of population held in slavery was lower in the 39 original counties proposed for the State of Kanawha - though McDowell County was excluded
Map Source: Library of Congress, Map of Virginia : showing the distribution of its slave population from the census of 1860 (September, 1861)
On December 3, 1861, the First Constitutional Convention in Wheeling started debate with:8
The State of Kanawha shall be and remain one of the United States of America. The Constitution of the United States, and the laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land.
MR. SINSEL. Mr. President, in the first section I move to strike out the word "Kanawha."
MR. POWELL. I second that.
MR. VAN WINKLE. I should like, sir, to hear some reason assigned if there is any, why this name is not a good one.
The subsequent debate included expressions of reverence for supposedly-virgin Queen Elizabeth; concerns over confusions if the name "Kanawha" was used for both a county and the entire state; suggestions for "Allegheny/Alleghany," "Potomac," and "Augusta;" support for "Columbia," "Western Virginia," and "New Virginia;" and opposition to any use of "Virginia" in the name. One member of the convention drew laughter when he suggested it would be unfair to use "Virginia" in the name of the new state:9
Those gentlemen who are so tender for their old mother, should be a little more magnanimous, sir, and when they are going to rob the old lady of her territory should not steal her name too.
The debate concluded by striking out "Kanawha" from "The State of Kanawha shall be and remain one of the United States of America... and inserting a blank, then voting on how to fill the blank in "The State of ______ shall be and remain one of the United States of America..."
The first vote was to choose the name "West Virginia" to fill the blank. When 30 of the 44 members voting endorsed that option, debate ended and the name of the new state had been decided.10
Virginia-West Virginia Boundary
West Virginia was chosen over Kanawha, Allegheny, and New Virginia, among other choices
Source: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, "What's In A Name?" The Naming of West Virginia
Brief sketch of the erection and formation of the state of West Virginia from the territory of Virginia (1891 book by John Marshall Hagans)
California Law Review
Is West Virginia Unconstitutional?, by Vasan Kesavan and Michael Stokes Paulsen, Vol. 90, No. 2 (March 2002)
Debates and proceedings of the first Constitutional Convention of West Virginia (1861-1863) (1939 book, edited by Charles H. Ambler, Frances Haney Atwood and William B. Mathews
West Virginia - American Local History Network (genealogy/history)
West Virginia Archives and History (genealogy/history)
Inaugural Address (June 20, 1863) of Governor Arthur I. Boreman
Payment of the Virginia Debt
US GenWeb - West Virginia Counties (genealogy/history)
West Virginia: A History (1984 book by John Alexander Williams)
West Virginia Division of Culture and History - A State of Convenience - The Creation of the State of West Virginia
West Virginia History (History 153 class at West Virginia University)
Intrasectional Conflict and Slavery
Secession and the Reorganized Government
West Virginia: Documents in the History of a Rural-Industrial State
West Virginia Military Research
West Virginia Independence Hall (Wheeling, WV)
West Virginia could have been much smaller...
Source: West Virginia Public Broadcasting, April 17, 1861: Virginia Politicians Vote to Secede from the Union
1. "Inaugural Address of Governor Arthur I. Boreman - June 20, 1863," A State of Convenience: The Creation of West Virginia, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/boremania.html (last checked April 3, 2013)
2. Edward Porter Alexander (editor), The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710-1719, Colonial Williamsburg, 1972, p.106, http://books.google.com/books?id=ZQyVinBxMRMC (last checked March 18, 2013)
3. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard Of The United States, The Twentieth Century Fund (New York), 1961, pp.103
4. Carl Edward Skeen, 1816: America Rising, University Press of Kentucky, 2003, p.167, http://books.google.com/books?id=aDHBSYXazMcC (last checked March 18, 2013)
5. Richard Orr Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, p.6, http://books.google.com/books?id=q9Lna2shH7oC (last checked March 18, 2013)
6. "Governor Pierpont's Address to the Reorganized Government of Virginia - May 6, 1862," A State of Convenience: The Creation of West Virginia, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/pierpont050662.html (last checked April 2, 2013) 7. Susan Schulten, "How a Map Divided Virginia," New York Times, May 5, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/how-a-map-divided-virginia/ (last checked March 18, 2013)
8. "'What's In A Name?' The Naming of West Virginia," West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statename.html (last checked September 5, 2019)
10. "'What's In A Name?' The Naming of West Virginia," West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statename.html (last checked September 5, 2019)
Regions of Virginia - and Why Isn't There An East Virginia?
Virginia Places


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