The events of April 1861 convinced the majority of Virginia’s convention delegates to leave the Union. Again indicative of hesitancy for some and continued advocacy of secession of others in the Commonwealth, the convention had remained in session for three months awaiting events. Since it had only one purpose, and in the process did not ever choose to affirm the state’s loyalty to the Union, it was more a matter of time before it conceded an eventual commitment to the South and to slavery.
On April 17, 1861, delegates passed an Ordinance of Secession for Virginia by a vote of 88 to 55. Twelve delegate votes either were not counted or were cast as abstaining.13Led by John Carlile, western delegates withdrew from the convention. They returned to western Virginia and began planning opposition to the ordinance and secession itself. That momentous issue was scheduled for statewide vote by the citizens of the state on May 23, 1861.
Citizens met throughout western Virginia in support of or in opposition to actions taken by their delegates at the Richmond Convention. The majority of westerners opposed the Ordinance of Secession, but that varied from county to county. In response to an unofficial call issued two days prior, on Monday, April 22, 1861, nearly twelve hundred Harrison County citizens gathered at the courthouse in Clarksburg to respond to the Ordinance of Secession. Most of those in attendance criticized actions taken by the Virginia government and convention. John Carlile submitted resolutions calling for delegates from northwestern Virginia to gather at Wheeling on May 13, 1861 for a larger convention.14
On May 13, 1861, delegates from twenty-seven western Virginia counties duly assembled at Washington Hall in Wheeling to consider responsive action in response to the Ordinance of Secession.15 William B. Zinn16 of Preston County was appointed temporary chairman of the convention, and George Latham of Taylor County was selected as temporary secretary. Virginia’s April 1861 actions had precipitated consequential counter measures in May in the west.
Debate immediately ensued over which delegates should be allowed to participate in the proceedings. General John Jay Jackson of Wood County favored seating all attendees from the northwestern regions of Virginia. But John Carlile’s influence was apparent in most actions by the western counties in 1861. Carlile urged that the convention should be “composed only of gentlemen who come clothed with the authority conferred upon them by the people of their counties when they appointed them.” Adoption of a compromise proposal by Chester D. Hubbard of host Ohio County to create a committee on representation and permanent organization ended the debate.17
After resolving that issue, delegates focused on the proper response they should take to the Virginia secession crisis. General Jackson, Waitman Willey, and most other delegates believed that any steps taken prior to the May 23 statewide vote on the Ordinance of Secession would be premature and “altogether unwise.” Others, however, including John Carlile, sought immediate action. “Let us act,” Carlile declared. “Let us repudiate these monstrous usurpations; let us show our loyalty to Virginia and the Union; and let us maintain ourselves in the Union at every hazard. It is useless to cry peace when there is no peace; and I for one will repeat what was said by one of Virginia’s noblest sons and greatest statesmen, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’”18
Carlile resolved not to await the May 23, 1861 statewide canvass on Virginia’s proposed secession. On May 14, Carlile proposed a resolution for creation of a new state. Proposed names for the new state included New Virginia, Kanawa or Kanawah or Kanawha, and West Virginia, among others.19 Opponents of such a move deemed the separate statehood proposal premature and even revolutionary. A majority of delegates supported resolutions offered by the Committee on State and Federal Resolutions. Those resolutions recommended that if the people of Virginia approved the Ordinance of Secession on May 23, 1861, western Virginians then would elect delegates to a Second Wheeling Convention to begin on June 11, 1861.20
The voters of the Commonwealth approved Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession on May 23, 1861. In substance, approval by that date was merely a technicality. The state government of Virginia already had passed an ordinance of secession, proceeded to align itself with the Confederate States of America [still then headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama], and already was preparing for war even prior to the May 23 vote. During the month following passage of the secession ordinance in April by delegates at the Richmond Convention, citizens of western Virginia gathered in their communities to discuss the issue. Some voiced opposition to secession, while others supported Virginia’s decision to leave the Union. The May 23, 1861 vote confirmed things and made Virginia’s course of action final.
When Virginia’s Governor John Letcher announced that the ordinance had been ratified by Virginia’s citizens by a vote of 125,950 to 20,373, many western Virginians were outraged by news that most of the votes from western Virginia apparently had not been delivered to Richmond for tabulation. Due to the fact that many vote totals were lost, it is unclear how western Virginians voted. Some historians believed that the overwhelming majority in the west voted against secession.21
But regardless, just as Virginia prepared to separate from the Union, there also was already initiative and momentum pointed in the direction of efforts to separate many western counties of Virginia from the rest of the state. Virginia’s secession from the Union had provided a pretext. However, the rationale had been building for decades, even centuries. The May 23, 1861 vote for Virginia’s secession from the Union only served to solidify the preference for separation among citizens of the western counties. And, it led to the next phase.
6
CONSTITUTIONAL LEGERDEMAIN:
SECEDING FROM A SECEDED STATE
President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. Despite his oft-repeated pledge, reiterated eloquently in his first Inaugural Address, not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, seven states remained, in their view, not Lincoln’s, outside the Union, with more to follow.
Following creation of the Confederate States of America in February 1861 and a subsequent Southern assault on Fort Sumter in April 1861, a convention of Virginians on April 17, 1861 approved secession and voted to submit a secession bill to the people. Led by Clarksburg’s John S. Carlile, western delegates marched out of the Secession Convention, and vowed to form a separate state government loyal to the Union. This was the eventual pretext and seed for creation of the state of West Virginia.
Many delegates who abandoned Virginia’s secessionist convention gathered in Clarksburg on April 22. Like Carlile, they called for a pro-Union convention, which met subsequently in Wheeling from May 13-15, 1861. That conclave occurred even before the official vote for secession throughout the Old Dominion.
Just as Virginia essentially had decided to desert the Union well in advance of the statewide vote on secession, western dissidents already had determined to fulfill their desire to separate from the Old Dominion. However, and contrary to West Virginia mythology, the principal forces at work to lead the separation of western counties from the rest of Virginia were more anti-Tidewater than pro-Union, just as they were more anti-black than emancipationist.
On May 23, a majority of Virginia voters approved the Commonwealth’s Ordinance of Secession. It was not possible to determine accurately the vote total from present-day West Virginia. Vote tampering and destruction of records in western counties precluded an accurate tally of the vote for or against secession in western Virginia, although historians presume it was against. But by how much remains unknown.22
In other words, there is no way to tell from that May 1861 vote how deeply the anti-secession [from the U.S.] feelings of the region ran, or how strongly at that moment the pro-secessionist counties were considering the possibility of subsequently leaving the state of Virginia. Specifically, one of the points at issue was whether the strength of the forces advocating separation from Virginia was ebbing or running stronger at that point.
Twenty counties within present West Virginia supported the Co
nfederacy and opposed separation from the Old Dominion. Thirty western counties apparently were opposed to national disunion an d Virginia’s act of secession. The pro-Confederate minority ran as high as forty per cent in a few pro-Union counties, but in some the reverse also was true.23
Because the northwestern Union counties contained about sixty percent of the total population of those western counties and the Confederate-leaning counties only about forty per cent, a 60-40% ratio existed overall, with a majority of apparent Unionists within the future state of West Virginia. Nevertheless, the May 23, 1861 vote in the constitutionally re cognized Commonwealth of Virginia clearly was for secession.24 Meanwhile, the western counties remained divided on both Virginia’s secession from the Union on the one hand and the proposed separation of the west from the rest of Virginia on the other.
Some analysts argue that anti-Union, pro-Confederate secessionists were in the majority in western Virginia. Others feel the Unionists had greater support. That is a separate issue from the later plan for western Virginia to secede from the state of Virginia. But it is relevant to the strength of support for western Virginia’s secession from the rest of the state.
Was that state-splitting constituency a small, vocal, influential, and ultimately decisive minority, as opposed to a majority? Which western counties should be considered: the pro-separation northwestern ones, the counties less inclined to separation and more closely tied to the eastern region, or all the fifty or so counties west of the Blue Ridge? Finally, at what time, if ever, were the numbers of western separatists either more or less than half of the total population of the western counties? Secession had proponents and opposition throughout the South. The same was true both for the state of Virginia as a whole and also within its western counties.
Through all these deliberations and processes of 1862-1863, while all of the officials and delegates considering separation from the rest of Virginia were from the western counties in question [although not the other areas of Virginia] the majority, including those with the most significant roles and influence, were from the northern panhandle region.
Following and precipitated by ratification of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession, delegates from western counties gathered at Washington Hall [now called Independence Hall] in Wheeling on June 11, 1861, to determine a course of action for northwestern Virginia.25 It was about as far from Richmond and the Tidewater area as one could get within the boundaries of the Old Dominion.
Committees on Organization, Rules, and Credentials were immediately established. The Committee on Credentials ruled that eighty eight delegates, representing thirty two counties [not fifty!], were entitled to seats in the convention. Other delegates were later admitted as members during the course of the Wheeling convention.26 The Committee on Permanent Organization selected Arthur I. Boreman to serve as president of the convention.27
Boreman acknowledged that “in this Convention we have no ordinary political gathering. We have no ordinary task before us. We come here to carry out and execute, and it may be, to institute a government for ourselves. We are determined to live under a State Government in the United States of America and under the Constitution of the United States. It requires stout hearts to execute this purpose; it requires men of courage, of unfaltering determination; and I believe, in the gentlemen who compose this Convention, we have the stout hearts and the men who are determined in this purpose.”28 The fact that Virginia was still and always remained a state and a part of the federal Union in the eyes of the government of the United States despite passage of an ordinance of secession by a portion of Virginia’s population mattered naught.
On June 13, John Carlile, representing the Committee on Business, presented “A Declaration of the People of Virginia.” The document called for reorganization of the government of Virginia on the grounds that, due to Virginia’s decision to secede from the United States, all state government offices had been vacated. On the following day, Carlile’s committee reported a draft ordinance for this purpose, and the debate began. This was the seed from which the eventual “Reconstituted Government of Virginia” grew.29
Several members of the convention, including Dennis Dorsey of Monongalia County, initially opposed the reorganization plan. Opponents of “Reorganization” called instead for immediate and permanent separation from eastern Virginia. Carlile, who had advocated the same approach in the First Wheeling Convention, now persuaded delegates that constitutional restrictions made it first necessary to form a loyal government of Virginia in lieu of the Richmond government. He proposed that new state legislature could then give permission for creation of a new state from the territory of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in other words, from itself.30
Carlile stated: “I find that even I, who first started the little stone down the mountain, have now to apply the rubbers to other gentlemen who have outrun me in the race, to check their impetuosity.”31 In reality, the separatists were creating a fiction from the start in order to secure their goals. And, in truth, both groups [reorganizers and immediate separatists] wanted a new, separate state for the west. The differences were procedural, not substantive.
Despite disagreement regarding how actually to create a legal and permanent division of the state [they failed in the first and realized the second], nearly all the delegates noted that differences between Virginia’s eastern and western counties were irreconcilable and argued for that separation. This notion of “irreconcilable” differences with the east fit well with the other extreme words, ideas, and actions of the separatists. In addition to “irreconcilable,” the vocabulary included: “nullification,” “separation,” “secession” [from a state, but not from the Union!], “revolution,” and “reconstitution” [i.e., replacement] of the legally elected and functioning government in Richmond.
On June 19, 1861, members of the convention voted unanimously in favor of the proposed ordinance for reorganizing the government of Virginia. This took place despite the fact that the duly constituted government of Virginia remained in office, in control of the apparatus of the state, physically unhampered, and legally uncontested in Richmond.32
On June 20, maintaining the fiction that the real government of the Commonwealth of Virginia had simply ceased to exist, when in reality everyone knew that it was alive and well in Richmond, delegates selected officials to fill the offices of the “Restored” Government of Virginia. Francis Pierpont of Marion County was elected governor. Daniel Polsley became lieutenant governor. James Wheat of Wheeling was elected Attorney General.33
In a speech to the delegates, Governor Pierpont defended the actions of the Convention. He argued that “we are but recurring to the great fundamental principle of our fathers, that to the loyal people of a State belongs the law-making power of that State.”34 He said nothing about the other people of that state, those outside the western counties, or the elected officials and government still sitting in Richmond. On June 25, 1861, the convention adjourned until August 6 of that year.35
During that period in which the Second Wheeling Convention was out of session, Governor Pierpont called the legislature of the ‘Restored’ [Reorganized] Government of Virginia into an extra session. Actually, it was its first. The meeting was scheduled to convene in Wheeling on July 1, 1861.36
The two legislative bodies [Senate and General Assembly] elected to office on May 23 consisted of persons who remained loyal to the Union. Approximately eight senators and thirty-two delegates participated in the proceedings. The House of Delegates met in the federal courtroom in the Wheeling Custom House; the Senate gathered at a nearby school, The Linsly Institute. Attendance was so sparse on the first day that proceedings were adjourned for lack of a quorum 37
On the following day, July 2, Daniel Frost of Jackson County was elected Speaker of the House. The newly elected Lieutenant Governor, Daniel Polsley, presided over the Senate. In an address read to legislators, Governor Pierpont revealed that President Lincoln had pledged “full protection” to the people
of western Virginia.38
The governor called on the “Restored” legislature to establish “an efficient system to protect the loyal people of the Commonwealth against the intrigues, conspiracies and hostile acts of those who adhere to our enemies.” He also declared opposition to any tax increases and requested that the Board of Public Works be abolished, with its powers to be conferred on the governor.39
Moving forward, on July 9, legislators elected a number of state officials, including Lucian Hagans as Secretary of the Commonwealth, Samuel Crane as Auditor of Public Accounts, and Campbell Tarr as State Treasurer. The legislature then proceeded to select two United States Senators. John Carlile was unanimously elected to fill the slot of R. M. T. Hunter, who, like his other Confederate counterparts in the U.S. Congress, was deposed for leaving his seat. Three candidates were nominated to replace the deposed James M. Mason. They were Waitman T. Willey, Peter Van Winkle, and Daniel Lamb.40 The Wheeling Intelligencer newspaper voiced editorial opposition to the selection of Willey, presumably reflecting some pool of opinion in that regard. But despite opposition to Willey due to his perceived conservatism, he was elected to fill the other U.S. Senate seat for Virginia.
On July 13, there was a bitter debate in the U.S. Senate over this issue, since new Senators were not seated to represent other seceded states. Some presecession Senators had stayed in their seats, most notably Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, and thus did not forfeit those seats. But those who left following secession were not replaced, except for the two new men from “Virginia.” That was a major advantage to the Republicans, who overwhelmingly dominate d Congress throughout the war. Finally, Carlile and Willey were formally recognized and seated by the U.S. Senate. They were seated as United States Senators from Virginia!41
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