Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850

Democrats were divided between easterners who supported an apportionment in the General Assembly based on a mixed basis of population and property which favored their slave-holding counties.

The Whigs were more united statewide in their insistence to expand suffrage and find a more equitable reapportionment between east and west sections.

[4] The Convention delegates were a younger generation raised in the Second American Party System of Democrat Jefferson Davis and Whig Henry Clay.

Unlike the three generation Convention of 1829-30, they were primarily in their twenties and thirties at the beginning of their careers in the professions and industry, without large land holdings, without gentry family ties.

Beale who argued against the natural equality of all men, and the "plundering propensities" of the multitude seeking a "majority of mere numbers".

"[7] Albert G. Pendleton suggested that nearly 100,000 citizens of the western counties were disenfranchised by the 1830 Constitution, and that malapportionment led to the lack of internal improvements needed in west.

Even with proposals for freed slave expatriation to Africa, Barbour doubted any assurances from the west for the long run preservation of slavery.

In the remaining two months of the Convention, it was agreed to allow direct popular election of the governor, but each office holder would be limited to one term.