Virginia's Reluctant Secession

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title

In trying to protect slavery, the secessionists doomed it.

TO DESERVE THAT HIGH PRAISE, a tale must exude four qualities. The story must be sweepingly important. It must star vivid actors. It must illuminate rich complexities. And it must convey stunning ironies that highlight erring humans' capacity to achieve the reverse of what they intended.
The order of secession correlates very well with the percentage of slaves.

Of these four requirements-wide importance, vivid stars, rich subtleties, stunning ironies-the importance of Virginia's decision to secede is the most obvious. At 4:00 p.m. on April 17, 1861, the hour of Virginia's decision-an hour haunted by months of paralyzing indecision-the very size of the Southern Confederacy remained uncertain. Eight of fifteen slave states remained in the Union. More than ever at this climactic moment, the differences between southern regions provided the neglected key to the history of the Old South. More than ever in 1860-61 , the Slave South resembled a three-step ladder, with lower percentages of slaves and less enthusiasm for disunion accompanying each step northward. Farthest South lay the Lower or Deep or Cotton South, with 46.5 per- cent of its population enslaved. These seven Lower South states all seceded between Abraham Lincoln's election on November 6-7, 1860, and his inauguration as president on March 4, 1861. Above the Lower South sprawled the four Middle South states (including Virginia), with 31.7 percent of the population enslaved. Still higher lay the four states of the Border South, with only 12.7 percent of the population enslaved.

Source

[Pat Young has an image here

The Border and Middle Souths together formed the Upper South. No Upper South state had seceded as of April 16, six weeks after Lincoln took the oath of office. The Upper South contained 41 percent of the South's slaves,61 percent of its population,67 percent of its whites, and 81 percent of its factories. |ames McPherson has put it very well: "if all eight states" of the Upper South "had seceded, the South might well have won its independence. If all eight had remained in the Union, the Confederacy surely could not have survived as long as it did."1
1. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry For Freedom: The Civil War Era (NewYork, 1988)' p.306.
 

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[url=https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/virginias-reluctant-secession/]VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION[/url]
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title
P80

After Lincoln's call for the 75,000, no decision was made until ex-Governor Henry Wise ordered an unauthorized attack on Federal army and naval installations(army facility at Harpers Ferry and the naval installation at the Gosport Yards. ), bring a war to VA.

Great epics need colorful stars as well as sweeping importance. Here again, Virginia's decision to secede met requirements. At the key moment, ex-Governor Henry Wise, arguably the most important Virginia politician between the Washington-Jefferson-Madison era and Woodrow Wilson's, put on his most incredible show.2 Wise, an emaciated spellbinding demagogue, had long courted the Virginia commoners shamelessly, securing both their adoration and the aristocracy's contempt. But after President Lincoln called out 75,000 troops to subdue the Confederates on April 15, 1861, and after the Virginia secession convention continued to talk indecisively, HenryWise,Virginia best talker, became the man disgusted with too much democratic talk. The ex-governor unconstitutionally seized the sitting governor's prerogatives. He illegally ordered state troops to capture federal army and naval installations. He thus shamed Virginia's procrastinators into deciding which army to join.
From [url=https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/virginias-reluctant-secession/]VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION[/url]
Wise tells the convention that he has declared war on the Federal government, either kill him or secede.
Then on April 17, right after Robert Scott’s narrow loss and at the very moment the unauthorized seizures were occurring, Wise rose in the convention. He placed his huge horse pistol before him. He snapped open his pocket watch and announced in hushed tones that at this hour, by his command, Virginia was at war with the federal government. If anyone wished to shoot him for treason, they would have to wrestle away his pistol. Ten feet in front of Wise, ex-President John Tyler turned his chair around, tears streaming down his worn face, to cheer as the spellbinder ripped into the stalling Unionists. To an eyewitness, Wise seemed ‘supernaturally excited. His features were as sharp and rigid as bronze. His hair stood off from his head, as if charged with electricity.’ Why can’t you realize, he shouted as his foes, now as ‘white and pale as the wall,’ that Lincoln’s bloodthirsty proclamation makes waverers into traitors? The tyrant’s troops now menace your folks. You must now decide whether to kill your kin. You must decide whether to return the murder weapons that I have ordered Virginia’s patriots to seize. You must now decide whether to secede from the despot or assassinate me.” [p. 87]
 

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O' Be Joyful said:
Does anyone, have handy, that particular excerpt from Virginia's original acceptance of the Constitution in 1788? I believe that they were disregarding a comma or two, in 1861.

As most of us know, the placement of commas are quite important to legal types, such as lawyers and say ...a court authority, like a judge, when evaluating the "meaning" of a legal document or interpretation of a law.
Lots they disagreed with. That is the nature of politics.

Disagree with legislation such as the militia acts which they agreed to but are about a consolidated nation and not a compact and SCOTUS decisions against a compact theory.

Even amendment 11 which VA ratified says in effect that States are not sovereignties in a Compact because they have to have an amendment giving them a sovereign right.

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
VA did not have a problem suppressing the sovereign rights of the Free States.

It is politics.
 

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title

Some of the secessionists, the ones with the 7 highest slave ratios seceded almost immediately after Lincoln's election.

Others waited to see if Lincoln would be a threat to slavery. These cautious Southerners would wait and see if the president menaced slavery. If he menaced, then they would secede.

HenryWise could be the epic star of an epic decision only because this drama possessed a third attribute of a great historical saga: immense complication and subtlety. Or to put it another way, if Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 had posed a simple choice-leave the Union or lose your slaves-no ex-governor would have needed to seize forts or naval yards illegally to push indecisive slaveholders off the fence. But Lincoln's immediate menace remained too debatable for Virginians to storm out of the Union swiftly or easily or unanimously. In Virginia, as throughout the South before the Civil War cannon roared, debate centered on whether Lincoln's immediate threat to slavery demanded the huge gamble of disunion, before the new president could do anything threatening. Southern Unionists saw insufficient reason for secessionists' risky preemptive strike. These cautious Southerners would wait and see if the president menaced slavery. If he menaced, then they would secede.

Southern Unions were Conditional Unionists, if slavery was threatened then they would secede. What is the biggest menace to slavery they inquired, abolitionists, stymied by this forbidding constitutional amendment or Yankee armies swarming inside the South? If we're wrong, they repeated-if Lincoln breaks his pledges- we will be rabid secessionists. But let's wait and see.

Most Unionists doubted that Lincoln and his Republican Party would or could immediately menace. They pointed out that the opposition Democratic Party controlled Congress and the Supreme Court. They noted that the president only pledged to stop slavery expansion into new U.S. territories, not to abolish slavery in old states. They doubted that the U.S. would acquire any new territories, especially territories in southern latitudes, before the 1864 presidential election. Then the South could exercise the right of all election losers. The vanquished could seek victory in the next election. Unionists took heart from Lincoln's pledges to enforce the fugitive slave law. They noticed his stunning support, in his Inaugural Address no less, of a new constitutional amendment, already passed by Congress, forever barring the federal government from abolishing slavery in state. What is the biggest menace to slavery they inquired, abolitionists, stymied by this forbidding constitutional amendment or Yankee armies swarming inside the South? If we're wrong, they repeated-if Lincoln breaks his pledges- we will be rabid secessionists. But let's wait and see.
The theory that the secessionist followed was of the form that since each State could decide which laws of a sister State to follow, Comity, then that also applied with the Federal government. The Secessionists also chose a divide and conquer strategy of letting each State vote.
Wait and see became the motto of most Southerners during the secession winter. If secessionists had had to win South-wide vote to secure disunion, the Unionists would have deterred them by over 2:1 majorities. Before the war began, after all, secession was a landslide loser in the Border South, a 2:1 loser in the Middle South, and barely a winner in several Lower South states. But secessionists did not have to win a South-wide referendum. In American theory and practice, not the people of all the states but the people of each state consented, or withdrew consent, to be governed by governments beyond the state. So secessionists claimed that each southern state's citizens must hold their own referendum, to withdraw their consent to be governed under the U.S. Constitution. In each Lower South state before Lincoln could be inaugurated, secessionists managed to win withdrawal of consent to the Union's government.
 

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title

P82 Secessionists practice the art of the what if. If Lincoln then in 25 years slavery would be dead. About 1885 slavery would be dead. About the time slavery disappeared in Brazil in the real timeline.
Even in the Lower South, disunionists had to struggle to achieve secession before the alleged menace took office. To secure their hard-won mandate, Lower South secessionists urged that in the long run, Lincoln's ideal, a nation that admitted only new free labor states, would be a dangerous alliance for slave labor states. They added that in the short run, Lincoln could use patronage to develop an immediately dangerous antislavery Republican Party in the less enslaved Upper South. Disunionists warned that slaves would listen to the ensuing debate on slavery inside the Upper South. They also claimed that the Upper South's majority of nonslaveholders would eventually be applauding Lincoln's appointees. Within twenty-five years, they predicted, the Border South, then the Middle South, would become nonslaveholding areas. Thereafter, the progressively swelling majority of nonslaveholding states would force slavery's removal from the Lower South. Disunionists would not passively wait while slavery sank to the bottom of the Union and the Lower South stood shiveringly alone against the process Lincoln had begun in 1860-61.
VA did not like what ifs. However, they imagined immediate threats.
This powerful immediate menace argument was a winner in the Lower South. It was also a loser in Virginia, which is why the state hardly seceded simply to avert Lincoln's alleged abolitionism. As Charles Dew points out in his recent book, the commissioners from the Lower South to the Upper South, including to Virginia, emphasized little except Lincoln's immediate menace to slavery, when they urged the more northern South to follow the disunionist lead of the more southern South.3 These Lower South commissioners found brilliant compatriots in the Virginia convention, which met in Richmond on and after February 13, 1861, to consider disunion. The secessionist convention delegates, coming largely from heavily slaveholding areas of eastern Virginia, developed a version of the immediate menace argument that rivaled anything their good friends from the Lower South had to say.a
More depressing predictions on how remaining in the Union will endanger slavery. I have not seen any concern over Tariffs yet.

Virginia secessionists reiterated that Lincoln needed no new congressional acts or new Supreme Court decisions to begin pushing slavery down the road toward ultimate extinction. Lincoln could appoint custom collectors, post office workers, and other federal officials to positions inside Virginia. Lincoln's appointments, warned Jeremiah Morton in the Virginia convention, would soon place "Black Republicans upon every stump, and organizing in every county, and that is the peace that we shall have from this 'glorious Union."' A Black Republican Parry inside the South, continued the Virginia secessionist delegates, would accelerate an ongoing antislavery process up north in Dixie, including up north in Virginia. "Dela- ware," noted Professor James Holcombe of the University of Virginia, "is nominally only, a slave State. Maryland will soon be a free State, and so it is with Missouri and Kentucky."6 And so it is with northwestern Virginia, added Alpheus F. Haymond, "almost entirely depopulated of its slaves, by the influence of Abolitionism."T After pressing slavery out of northernmost Virginia, warned George W. Richardson, nothing could stop Black Republicans "from pressing" slavery "from the counties which come next in order." Eventually, Lincoln's party would sweep slavery down "through Virginia, through the Confederate States, and into the far South."8 As Henry Wise summed up the supposed immediate menace, slavery's "tenure in Virginia is doubtful"-too doubtful for us to allow Lincoln's appointees to rally the lukewarm.9


Notes
4. We are blessed with a complete publication of
the convention's proceedings Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention
of 1861, ed. George H. Reese,4 vols.
(Richmond, VA 1965). For an essay re-
view of these volumes, see William W.
Freehling, The Reintegration of American
History: Slavery and the Civil War (New
York, 1994),pp.3-11.
5. Proceedings,l,257.
6. Ibid.,l,99.
7.Ibid.,rr,69.
8. Ibid., III,106.
9. Ibid.,t,44.
 

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title
P83

Oh my, the issue of unfair taxes shows up. Opps it is the Slaveholders trying to hide their wealth from the taxman and oppressing the nonslaveholders. Remember this fact next time Tariffs show up in a conversation. These constitutional limitations sliced taxes on slave property seventy-five percent, compared to taxes on other property-on nonslaveholders' property.

For proof of slavery's doubtful tenure in northern Virginia, Wise pointed to some antagonistic convention orations. Northwestern Virginia's delegates, representing areas up in the Border South's geographic zone, kept trying to change the subject. These representatives of heavily nonslaveholding districts did not care to discuss whether Lincoln might menace the slaveholders. They demanded to debate whether slaveholders menaced nonslaveholders. A clause in the Virginia Constitution, hey angrily pointed out, limited the valuation of slaves over twelve years old, for tax purposes, to $300 and prohibited taxes on slaves under twelve. These constitutional limitations sliced taxes on slave property seventy-five percent, compared to taxes on other property-on nonslaveholders' property.

Not only is slavery on the backs of slaves, but on the backs of slaveholders called on to support slavery by extra taxation. Then the grateful slaveholders blame the nonslaveholders for abolition and Republican influence.

Slaveholders called their special tax break a barrier against abolition by ruinous taxation. Western Virginians retorted that bloated squires' $600,000 annual tax break riveted "the yoke inequality and oppression" upon poor men. Waitman T. Willey, leader of the northwestern Virginians, warned of "that deep and burning spirit of indignation reigning in almost every Western mind and heart against the gross, unjust,... obnoxious distinction against their interests."r0 Willey's western Virginia cohort, Cyrus Hall, added that"exceedingly restless and impatient" western Virginia nonslaveholders may conclude "that this slave interest in Virginia" is "an engine of oppression. Such sentiments" will give Yankee fanatics the "right of way for the extension of the underground railroad." That abolitionist means of transporting runaway slaves to the North will soon attain a "terminus in the valley of Virginia." Then the liberty line will "commence to tunnel the Blue Ridge" and to move into eastern Virginia.11
P85
 

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jgoodguy said:
Here is the convention that led to it. 1432 mentions.
Rebforever said:
Still no mention of slavery for whatever reason posted.
You have a single data point. There are 1432 other data points that mention slavery.
"...[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] the oppression of the Southern slaveholding States."  is a mention of slavery.[/font]
 

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION

We seem to be edging into the topic of States Rights, so let's go there.

Professor Freehling next considers the state rights argument. “Posterity thinks of state rights as the right of state governmental power to check federal governmental power, in a two government system. When neo-Confederates now claim that state rights impelled secession, they usually mean that disunionists wished to preclude Lincoln from boosting federal governmental power at the expense of state governmental power inside the Union. According to this interpretation, long popular in southern precincts, secessionists acted not to save slavery but to save state rights from Lincoln’s expansive federal legislation, including high protective tariffs, internal improvements, and national banks. Charles Dew describes his shock, as a native Southerner who relished his southern education, to find in the Lower South commissioners’ documents almost nothing about fighting tariffs et al and almost everything about fighting to preserve slavery. Any Southerner who investigates the prewar Virginia secession documents, expecting to find fury about an expansive federal government’s potential economic imperialism, will be equally shocked. Instead, the slavery issue provoked almost all Virginia disunionists’ outrage. So too, western Virginians’ potentially confiscatory taxes on slaves inspired a dozen times more anxiety than the federal government’s potentially prohibitive tariffs on imports.” [p. 84]

Seems states rights were always in service to slavery

We turn next to the relationship between slavery and state rights as it pertains to secession. “Indeed, prewar Southerners’ master mission, to preserve slavery inside a dual system of federal and state governance, dictated crusades to expand federal power and to limit state rights. The fugitive slave issue of the 1850s especially shoved Southerners to the supposedly wrong end of the federal power/state rights spectrum. After Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, several northern states passed so-called Personal Liberty Laws. In these laws, a state’s legislature empowered the state’s courts to stop the federal government’s agents from removing alleged black runaways, if the federal intrusion violated the state’s right to try the accused and to protect the defendant’s rights. … To secure a Union-saving reconstruction in 1860-61, Virginians sought further expansion of the federal government’s power to reach inside northern states for fugitive slaves. The reconstructionists also sought to contract any supposed state rights to resist the federal intrusion. But after Lincoln’s proclamation of April 15, state rights became not a northern weapon to protect slaves fleeing from their masters but a southern tactic to safeguard slaveholders fleeing from the Union. State rights now meant not a limitation of one government at the expense of the other, inside a Union of both, but a prohibition of every speck of federal governmental power, after the people of a state no longer consented to federal governance.” [pp. 84-85]
 

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VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION

Moving right along. Even the purity of war defending one's home is entangled with slavery.

Another powerful motive for Virginians was the choice they had to make. “Once Virginians at last realized that they lay trapped in unstoppable crossfire between Confederate and Federal riflemen, they only could choose which infantry to join. For most of them, it was no contest. Secessionists were erring brothers. Yankees were despicable insulters. The North’s provoking critics, not the South’s provoked defenders, most deserved a fist in the mouth or a bayonet in the gut or a bullet in the brain. This intensely emotional, highly fraternal, and ultimately controlling sense of menace to kin saturates the sources. ‘If we are to be dragged … either to the North or to the South,’ John Randolph Chambliss asked fellow Virginia convention delegates, ‘then in the name of our ancient fame, by whom would we prefer to be dragged? Would you be dragged by the Northern confederacy, your known haters or enemies–or would you prefer to be dragged by your brethren of kindred ties and similar interests?’ … ‘I had rather be under King Cotton than under King Abolition. I had rather be ruled by King Davis than by Autocrat Lincoln.’ War is the ultimate We versus They, and Virginians had been schooled that We equaled southern defenders, They equaled Yankee defamers, throughout thirty years of verbal warfare over slavery.” [p. 85]
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
PP 85-86
Thirty years of conflict over slavery had weaponized Southern opinion against their nation. The North was the enemy. There was always some threat to slavery.
War is the ultimate We versus They, and Virginians had been schooled that We equaled southern defenders, They equaled Yankee defamers, throughout thirty years of verbal warfare over slavery. In the major prewar slavery controversies, as in the secession debate over whether Lincoln could immediately menace slavery, an important minority of Southerners had seen a danger to slavery's endurance-whether the supposed menace was antislavery Englishmen in pre-annexation Texas, northern slave stealers in Kansas, the underground railroad in fugitive slave incidents, or Lincoln's patronage during the secession crisis. The supposed menace always allegedly threatened some weak spot on the fringes of the Slave South, akin to slavery weakened plight in northwestern Virginia.

Maybe the North had some responsibility for secession.

As most white Southerners usually saw it, southern precipitators of these crises exaggerated the menaces, proposed dubious antidotes, and might even counterproductively increase the dangers to slavery. Thus just as the prewar southern majority thought the secessionists exaggerated Lincoln's menace and that disunion would menace slavery more, so most Southerners thought that southern precipitators of the fugitive slave and Kansas controversies exaggerated the menace of Yankee slave stealers and of a free soil Kansas. The southern majority also worried that new pro-slavery laws would yield slim chance of enslaving Kansas, return few fugitives to the South, and inspire many more Northerners to fulminate against aggressive southern defenders. But fellow Southerners saw a menace, they proposed a remedy, and Yankees called the proposers barbarians.

Maybe less inflammatory rhetoric would have helped. Sounds sort of like Secession and Politics on a bad day.

Barbariansl Tyrants! Rapists! Proprietors of brothels! That tone pervaded Yankee antislavery blasts. The insult roused Southerners to scream back about honor ravaged and good name savaged, whatever the plausibility of the supposed menace that began the verbal brawl. To understand why the more moderate Southerners rallied against the insulters, consider how William Lloyd Garrison's tone would offend any self- respecting gentleman. Slaveholders treat slaves, charged Garrison, "as brutal beasts." Slaves enjoy "no protection from licentious and murderous outrages." Their families "are ruthlessly torn asunder- der-the tender babe from the arms of its frantic mother-the heartbroken wife from her weeping mother." The "irresponsible tyrants," continued Garrison, have "most fearfully debased and deteriorated... the entire white population of the slave States." Cursed whites display "unrestrained licentiousness, filthy amalgamation, incurable laziness, profligate wastefulness, satanic pride, pitiable ignorance, hardness of heart, atrocious barbarity." Slavery has set "their passions'on fire of hell,' blending in their character the conceit of the peacock with the ferocity of the tiger," destroying "in them all sense of justice, all perception of right, all knowledge of virtue, all regard for humanity.”
 

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Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
PP 86

The cane is mighter than the pen. We can say that Southern honor was offended by Yankee words and attitudes. That is a cause of noteworthy of more study but entangled with slavery.
 

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Continuing on.

Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
PP 86

The rhetorical back and forth aggravated the situation. Southerners had massed together as maligned brothers, in defense of their equality, their self-esteem, their self-respect, and their honor, decades before Virginians had to choose between firing rifles at the insulters or the insulted.

Less extreme northern antislavery men than Garrison concurred that "the entire white population of the slave States" combined "the conceit of the peacock with the ferocity of the tiger." Such mainstream Northern Republicans as Abraham Lincoln blamed not just the slaveholders but all Southerners for sustaining a Slave Power that supposedly tyrannized over American republicanism. That Yankee assault on southern character and reputation, especially when it came up close and personal in Congress, with U.S. Senator Charles Summer screaming the insults, impelled more southern folks than Preston Brooks to wish to bash the insulter's skull. No wonder, then, that Southerners had massed together as maligned brothers, in defense of their equality, their self-esteem, their self-respect, and their honor, decades before Virginians had to choose between firing rifles at the insulters or the insulted.
Key sentence Most Virginians' inclination to reenlist in ancient wars for honor and fame against Yankee defamers, whatever their distrust of Lower South scaremongers, particularly well illuminates how slavery caused the Civil War. Slavery, it's complicated.

To some extent, VA paid the price for secession for the first secessionists.
Most Virginians' inclination to reenlist in ancient wars for honor and fame against Yankee defamers, whatever their distrust of Lower South scaremongers, particularly well illuminates how slavery caused the Civil War. That casual relationship could easily be understood if most Northerners had elected Lincoln to abolish slavery in the South and most Southerners had seceded to save slavery from Lincoln's abolitionism. But neither occurred. So too, Virginia decision to secede would be easily explained if most Virginians had thought that Lincoln immediately menaced slavery. They didn't. So why did procrastinating Virginians secede anyway-and secede with sufficient love of comrades and hatred of the enemy to be passionate Confederates throughout four years of brutal war, more brutal in Virginia than anywhere else?
 

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Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
PP 87

Peace was out the window and there was only the question of who to shoot at.

The answers start with the fact that Lincoln's supposed peacetime menace sufficed to provoke the Lower South, but not the Upper South, to secede. The answers end with the fact that Lincoln's armed showdown with the South's seceding fragment destroyed the issue of peacetime menace in the (as yet) unseceding fragment. Virginians now faced only one relevant question: Who would you rather kill? And for most folk who inhabited the middle tier of the South's highly familial civilization, the Southerners farther down were blood cousins, the Yankees way above the despised outsiders.

Still they could not come to a decision.

When one adds together most Virginians' repugnance for shamefully firing on even erring southern brothers, plus their post-April 15 sense of heightened menace to slavery, plus their new sense of menace to state rights, no wonder that Lincoln's call for Federal riflemen propelled many previous Virginia doubters of disunion to seek the Union's exit doors. The illuminating surprise is that Virginia's epic of indecision had not yet reached its climax. After news of Fort Sumter, after tidings of Lincoln's April l5 proclamation, after aso-called Spontaneous Popular Convention of citizens met in Richmond and demanded immediate secession, after citizens paraded angrily in the Richmond streets, chanting for disunion now, the official convention of the state still wished to talk- about delaying the decision for secession. Robert Scott, leader of the delayers, still fought after April 15 for a convention resolution that would ask the Virginia people thirty days hence, in mid-May, to choose between two options: either "separate and immediate secession" or "cooperation among the slaveholding States yet remaining in the Union'" To secure his own preference, cooperation with nonseceding states, Scott would go ahead with a border state conference near the end of May.
However, Virginians did not have confidence with the Border States whose alliance with slavery was doubtful.
Scott had previously hoped that a border conference would secure a reconstructed Union. He now hoped that cooperation with the Border South would secure unanimous secession. He now feared that if Virginia seceded without a border conference, the border states would feel ignored, oppressed, unwilling to follow tyrannical secessionists like slaves. He would instead make them masters of their fate, cooperating in an Upper-South-wide rush for disunion. Scott thus celebrated his proposed delay as "a straight road to secession," for "I cannot doubt that all the Border States will act together...with the Southern States."2o But over half his supporters, unreconstructable Unionists, liked his delay because they did not doubt that the border states would act together with the northern states. As the secessionist George Randolph saw Robert Scott, "the gentleman proposes to get out" not by seceding but "by getting the States, that everybody knows will not secede, to join with Virginia in a consultation."2r On April 17, a Virginia convention majority still almost approved Scott's delay. Scott lost by only 79-64. A swing of eight votes would have given the delayer his triumph.
With things in a precarious balance, Henry Wise makes his move and secession wins the day.
 

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Lost Cause said:
..............and what influenced that ultimate decision?
*  Ex-governor Wise attacking US installations with VA troops and bringing a pistol to the convention sounds good to me.
*  Secession being largely imaginary threats, there was the imaginary threat of Federal Forces in VA, but VA had more men under arms than the United States.
*  Coercion as anything that interferes with the Slave States, seems to be there.
*  The problem of being a Slave States in a United States of 28 States, 20 Free and 8 slave. If Deleware or Maryland flips to Free, then there is the 75% needed for an amendment to abolish slavery.
*  The attack on Fort Sumter making a theoretical war a hot one.
*  The Lower South was the largest customer for VA slave owners.
*  VA civilization was the same as the civilization of the seceded States and the Northern civilization was viewed as repugnant.
*  Being kept in continuous secession for Months.
*  Threats by secessionists.
 

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Copperhead-mi said:
I don't have a link but...

From the Proceedings the of Virginia State Convention of 1861, Volume I, February 13 - March 16, Twenty-First Day, Saturday, March 9, pp. 524-528:

"The grievances for which several of the States have withdrawn from the Union and overthrown the Federal Government within their limits, are such as have affected the people of Virginia to a greater extent than any of the seceded States, and it is their determined purpose to require such guarantees for the protection of the rights of the people of the slaveholding States as in the judgment of Virginia will be sufficient for the accomplishment of that object.

Virginia having initiated measures to obtain such guarantees, a proper self-respect impels her to demand of all the parties that they shall refrain, during the pendency of her efforts for amicable adjustment, from all action tending to produce a collision of forces; therefore,

1. be it Resolved and declared by the people of the State of Virginia, in Convention assembled, that the States which composed the United States of America, when the Federal Constitution was formed, were independent sovereignties, and in adopting that instrument the people of each State agreed to associate with the people of the other States, upon a feeling of exact equality. It is the duty, therefore, of the common Government to respect the rights of the States and the equality of the people thereof, and within the just limits of the Constitution to protect with equal care the great interests that spring from the institutions of each.

2. African slavery is a vital part of the social system of the States wherein it exists, and as that form of servitude existed when the Union was formed, and the jurisdiction of the several States over it within their respective limits was recognized by the Constitution, any interference to its prejudice by the Federal authority, or by the authorities of the other States, or by the people thereof, is in derogation from right, contrary to the Constitution, offensive and dangerous.

3. the choice of functionaries of a common Government, established for the common good for the reason that they entertan opinions and avow purposes hostile to the institutions of some of the States, necessarily excluded the people of one section from participation in the administration of the Government, subjects the weaker to the domination of the stronger section, leads to abuse, and is incompatible with the safety of those whose interests are imperillied; the formation therefore, of geographical or sectional parties in respect to Federal polities is contrary to the principles on which our system res and tends to its overthrow.

4. the Territories of the United States constitute a trust to be administered by the General Government, for the common benefit of the people of the United States, and any policy in respect to such Territories calculated to confer greater benefits on the people of one part of the United States than on the people of another part, is contrary to equality, and prejudicial to the rights of some for whose equal benefit the trust was created. If the equal admission of slave labor and free labor into any Territory, excites unfriendly conflict between the systems, a fair partition of the Territories ought to be made between them, and each system ought to be protected within the limits assigned to it, by the laws necessary for its proper development.

5. the sites of the Federal forts, arsenals, &c., within the limits of the States of this Union, were acquired by the Federal Government, and jurisdiction over them ceded by the States, as trusts, for the common purposes of the Union, during its continuance; and upon the separation of the States, such jurisdiction reverts of right to the States, respectively, by which the jurisdiction was ceded. Whilst a State remains in the Union, the legitimate use of such forts, &c., is to protect the country against foreign force, and to aid in suppressing domestic insurrection. To use, or prepare them to be used to intimidate a State, or constrain its free action, is a perversion of the purposes for which they were obtained; they were not intended to be used against the States, in whose limits they are found, in the event of civil war. In a time, of profound peace with foreign nations, such as now exists, and when no symptoms of domestic insurrection appear — but whilst irritating questions of the deepest importance are pending the States--to accumulate within the limits of a State, interested in such question an unusual amount of troops and munitions of war, not required for any legitimate purpose, in unwise impolitic and offensive.

6. Deeply deploring the present distracted condition of the country, and lamenting the wrongs that have impelled some of the States to cast off obedience to the Federal Government, but sensible of the blessings of Union, and impressed with its importance to the peace, prosperity and progress of the people, we indulge the hope that an adjustment may be reached by which the Union may be preserved in its integrity, and peace, prosperity and fraternal feelings be restored throughout the land.

7. to remove the existing causes of complaint much may be accomplished by the Federal and State Governments; the laws for the rendition of fugitives from labor and of fugitives from justice may be made, more effectual, the expenditures of the Government may be reduced within more moderate limits, and the abuses that have enfered into the administrative departments reformed.--the State authorities may repeal their unfriendly and unconstitutional legislations, and substitute in its stead such as becomes the comity and is due to the rights of the States of the same Union. But to restore the Union and preserve confidence the Federal Constitution should be amended in those particulars wherein experience has exhibited detects and discovered approaches dangerous to the institutions of some of the States.

8. the people of Virginia recognize the American principle that Government is founded in the consent of the governed, and they concede the right of the people of the several States of this Union, for just causes, to withdraw from their association under the Federal Government with the people of the other States, and to erect new Governments for their better security, and they will never consent that the Federal power, which is in part their power, shall be exerted for the purpose of subjugating the people of such States to the Federal authority.

9. the exercise of this right by the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, without the assent of the other states, has given rise to new conditions, and presented questions touching those conditions intimately affecting the rights and safety of the other States. Among these are the free navigation of the Mississippi River, the maintenance of the forts intended to protect the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico, and the power to resire in smuggling along the interior borders of the seceded States; but the Federal authorities, under the Constitution as it is, disclaim power to recognize the withdrawal of any State from the Union and consequently to deal with these questions, holding that it is reserved only to the States as parties to the Government compact to take lawful action touching them.

10. without expressing an opinion as to the question of power, but in deference to the opinion of the Federal authorities, the people of Virginia hereby declare their desire to confer upon the Government of the United States the powers necessary to enable its proper authorities to deal peaceably with these questions, and, if it shall become necessary to recognize the separate independence of the seceding States, and to make such treaties with them, and to pass such laws as the separation may make proper.

11. this Convention, composed of delegates elected by the people in disticts, for the purpose of considering the existing difficulties in our Federal Relations, represents the desire and earnest request of the people of Virginia, to meet as directly as possible the people of her sister States, and to them appeal for satisfactory adjustment.--Virginia, therefore, requests the people of the several States, either by popular vote, or in Convention similar to her own, to respond, at their earliest convenience, to the positions assumed in the foregoing resolutions, and the proposed amendments to the Constitution of the United States hereunto appended. And in the event that this Commonwealth fails to obtain satisfactory responses to her requests, from the non-slaveholding States, she will fell compelled to resume the powers granted by her under the Constitution of the U. States, and to throw herself upon her reserved rights.

12. the people of Virginia will await any reasonable time to obtain answers from the other States, to these propositions, aware of the embarrassments that may produce delay, but they will expect, as an indispensable condition, that a pacific policy shall be adopted towards the seceded States, and that no attempt be made to subject them to the Federal authority, nor to reinforce the forts now in possession of the military forces of the United States, or re-capture the forts, arsenals, or other property of the United States within their limits, nor to exact the payment of imposts upon their commerce; nor any measure resorted to justly calculated to provoke hostile collision.

13. in the opinion of this Convention, the people of Virginia would regard any action of the Federal Government, tending to produce a collision of forces, pending negotiations for the adjustment of existing difficulties as aggressive and injurious to the interests, and offensive to the honor of this Commonwealth; and they would regard any such action on the part of the seceded or confederated States as hurtful and unfriendly, and as leaving them free to determine their future policy.

14. the peculiar Relations of the States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas to the other States, make it proper, in the judgment of this Convention, that the former States should consult together and concert such measures for their final action as the honor, the interests and the safety of the people thereof may demand, and for that purpose the proper authorities of those States are requested to appoint Commissioners to meet Commissioners to be appointed by this Convention on behalf of the people of this State, at Frankfort, in the State of Kentucky, on the last Monday in May next."
Thanks!
 

jgoodguy

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Here is the voting patterns of the counties.

The pattern appears to follow slaveholding rather than coercion.
 

jgoodguy

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16thVA said:
I don't see the issue of western Virginia as being off topic, it is very much on topic.
Checking the secession text, on which the OP is based I find a single reference to South West Virginia and none to West Virginia.

https://secession.richmond.edu/quer...rmType=Keyword&order=date&direction=ascending
April 10, 1861 Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention, Volume 3.
In one respect, this question of ad valorem taxation presents to South- west Virginia , a difficult problem for solution. If the price of slaves continues to be high, a tax in the ratio of their market value will be so burthensome, with the small profits upon its labor, as very soon to ...
There are plenty of other threads to discuss West Virginia Statehood. This is just not one. Why in the world do you wish to burden your fellow members with OT talk?
 

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Viper21 said:
For most Americans (not history nerds), WWII started because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Some would say, like Ft Sumter, it was the excuse to thrust the US into war, & was somewhat avoidable. I'm of the opinion that, for the US, WWII was unavoidable. However, there is some evidence to back up the "excuse conspiracy".
What Fort Sumter did was to unite the North and made war political feasible. IMHO Lincoln let Davis decide on peace or war and Davis decided on war. Fort Sumter could have had the opposite effect, blaming Lincoln on the loss of Fort Sumter.
 
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