CHESAPEAKE, THE, the Western Province occupying the bay and tidewater of that name, seated at Oceana (q.v.) since that city's founding in 1697 and, by the Census of 1910, the second most populous of the five Western Provinces admitted under the Second Frame (q.v.). Its economy, tobacco through the greater part of the last two centuries, has diversified since the eighteen-thirties into wheat and mixed husbandry across the greater part of the tidewater, a shift this contributor's own tables attribute rather more to the exhaustion of the older tobacco soil than to any planned agricultural reform, whatever the credit some improving landholders of the province have since claimed for it.
The province's returns present, on close examination, a demographic division this contributor has found nowhere else repeated among the Western Provinces in quite the same proportion: the northern and central counties, clustered about Oceana itself and given over chiefly to wheat and free labour by 1837, held a bound population, at the Census of 1830, of under one in six of the whole; the southern counties, bordering Carolina and still committed to tobacco and a bound labour force considerably closer to that province's own proportion, held nearer one in two. It was this division, more than any single act of the provincial assembly, that determined the Chesapeake's own uneven course through the Severance (q.v.) of 1837: the southern counties joined the Act of Severance with the same near-unanimity Carolina itself showed, while the northern counties returned militia to the Commonwealth's own colours in numbers that this contributor's tables find scarcely distinguishable, proportionately, from New England's own contribution — a single province, in the plainest statistical sense, fighting a portion of the war against itself.
The scars of that division healed rather faster than the Reconstitution (q.v.)'s own planners expected, the northern and southern counties returning a single provincial delegation to the Assembly without serious dispute within a decade of the Reunion, though the returns this contributor has examined show the southern counties' own franchise statistics still tracking, in their broad shape, the pattern recorded at greater length under CAROLINA (q.v.) rather than the pattern the northern counties themselves record. The Chesapeake remains, on the whole, the most agriculturally various and the most internally divided in its own recent history of the five original Western Provinces, a distinction its own civic literature does not dwell upon nearly so often as its returns would justify. (M. S. W.)