West Virginia's Constitutional Critique of Virginia: The Revolution of 1861-1863

Abstract

West Virginia's Constitutional Critique of VirginiaThe Revolution of 1861-1863 John Edmund Stealey III (bio) No citizen or governmental official of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia could have anticipated the chain of events that occurred at the Virginia Convention in Richmond on April 17, 1861, when it secretly adopted the Ordinance of Secession. Popular and scholarly attention has normally concentrated on national ramifications and how the Commonwealth responded constitutionally and militarily during its secession crisis. No modern study has investigated the full implications of the state-level constitutional response of western Virginia delegates and leaders to the event. Fleeing after the disheartening assembly vote, the delegates loyal to the United States had daily faced epithets, hangman's nooses, and secessionist flags on Richmond streets among the enflamed people. On the convention floor itself, the term "western Virginian" had become one of opprobrium and mocking ridicule. Five decades of continual Commonwealth constitutional and political discrimination had devolved on the national loyalists who secessionists cast out as "black Republicans" and "submissionists." The latter slur, perhaps worse than the former, on their honor suggested their cowardice and unmanliness. The unionist delegates had no certain idea how they and their constituents might respond.1 [End Page 9] Submit, they did not. Spontaneously, mass meetings immediately materialized in many western Virginia towns and villages. Several of the recent convention delegates, forming the leadership in rending the Commonwealth, were primary speakers. Some were more radical than others. The most important meeting occurred on two days' notice in Clarksburg on April 22. There, convention delegate John Snyder Carlile spoke and introduced a preamble and resolutions that condemned Virginia's actions and called for an assembly on May 13 in Wheeling "to consult and determine upon such action as the people of Northwestern Virginia should take in the present fearful emergency." The assembled twelve hundred citizens could not have comprehended that they had initiated a constitutional process that severed a state and created a new one.2 The separation of the Virginias in 1861-1863 is notable and exceptional enough in U.S. history to warrant detailed attention to contemporary constitutional grievances that western Virginians had long articulated and soon had the opportunity to address. Perhaps no greater failure in domestic statecraft has transpired than the Commonwealth of Virginia's inability to preserve its state union and its territorial integrity. As contemporary westerners observed with wonder in 1861, the Commonwealth always seemed obsessed with chimerical national wrongs rather than unjust and threatening internal political and constitutional discrimination and oppression within its realm. The western section's constitutional objectives reflect in undeniable ways like a mirror the Commonwealth's antebellum inadequacies that proved so detrimental. In fundamental terms, the American Civil War represented a conflict about the nature of the Union and constitutional legitimacy. Its course and outcome [End Page 10] had penetrating results on two levels, the national and the state. The U.S. victory definitively answered questions about legitimacy and surely changed national fundamental law and its interpretation in numerous spheres. Extensive constitutional ferment also existed in the states. The war effort itself and mobilization had great impact on the modernization process that required constitutional adaptation in loyal states to address national governmental and economic centralization, urbanization, economic and financial growth, the end of chattel slavery, demographic changes, public education growth, and transportation developments. Loyal Virginia itself, initially operating under the 1850-51 frame, in 1864 held a constitutional convention in Alexandria and adopted organic law that governed the Commonwealth until 1869. The war era's cathartic impact on state constitutional change in rebel states is widely known, but the effects extended beyond former Confederate states.3 In Virginia, Abraham Lincoln's election and the secession of four slave states created a volatile situation. Most westerners believed that the January 14 call by the extra session of the Virginia General Assembly, convened by Governor John Letcher, for a convention to meet on February 13 (with delegates elected on February 7) was unduly precipitous and constitutionally flawed. The bypassing of a referendum on the question of calling a convention violated Virginia precedent in summoning the conventions of 1820-39 and 1850-61. A...