The earlier settlements west of the mountains were made by the more adventurous persons of the east, who had no property or other ties to attach them to the soil whence they came. At a later date, a more substantial class, Germans and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, made settlements in this western country. They brought few slaves with them but engaged in agriculture. A new type of people from the free States to the north and west, next, came to Western Virginia.[4] Slavery did not become a flourishing institution there, and in the decades between the years of 1840 and 1860, the demand for slave labor in the Gulf States caused the bulk of the slave population to go to that market. The commercial and industrial interests developed there found their outlets west and north. There was little intercourse of any kind and practically no commerce with Eastern Virginia. No railroad connected the west with the east. Burning political differences manifested themselves, and these, with the lack of commercial and social intercourse already noted, accentuated strife between the two sections,[5] as was manifested in every State constitutional convention held prior to the Civil War. The Constitutional Convention of 1829 at Richmond was one of the most important conventions in the history of the Virginia dissension. The transmontane people, the people of the Valley and some of those of the Piedmont were arrayed against the aristocratic land owners of the Tidewater, demanding a greater share in the government of the Commonwealth. The leading issues before the convention were: (1) the question of extension of suffrage, (2) a more equitable basis of representation in the legislature, and (3) the question of taxation as a minor problem. The right of suffrage was then conditioned upon the ownership of land. The law regulating this matter had remained the same since 1776, except that the number of acres of improved land, the possession of which entitled one to vote, had been reduced from 50 to 25.[6] Thus all those persons who were not attached to land or who did not possess land in sufficient quantities were denied the ballot. The west, whose white population, in 1829, was 319,516, argued and fought for citizen-suffrage, while the east, whose white population was 362,745 at this time, representing a fifteen per cent increase since 1790, as compared with one of 150 per cent for the west, opposed this measure.[7]