Virginia in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 13th of April, 1861, a 100-gun salute thundered from Virginia's state capitol in Richmond. Crowds surged into the streets, shouting for "Jeff Davis," "the Southern Confederacy," and "Dixie's Land." The American flag came down from the capitol building, and the Confederate banner went up in its place. Nine days before that celebration, Virginia's secession convention had voted 88 to 45 against leaving the Union. In those nine days, a cannon shot in South Carolina changed Virginia's politics entirely. A presidential demand for troops and a governor's defiant refusal completed the break. How did Virginia become so central to the Confederate cause? And what became of the Virginians who refused to follow?

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• 2. A Convention in Balance

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  The Virginia Secession Convention first met on the 13th of February, 1861. It gathered at the Richmond Mechanics Institute on the corner of Ninth and Main Street. The 145,700 voters who had elected its 152 delegates had produced a body that leaned heavily toward caution. Thirty delegates were secessionists, thirty were unionists, and ninety-two were moderates. Many Virginians feared not northern aggression but what they called "rash secession" by the lower South.

  Among the convention's first acts was the creation of a 21-member Federal Relations Committee, charged with brokering a compromise. Its members were split among 4 secessionists, 10 moderates, and 7 unionists. Virginia native and former President John Tyler was simultaneously leading a national Peace Conference in Washington, D.C. That conference had been convened on the 4th of February, the same day as the elections for convention delegates. Its failure by the end of February began to erode unionist support among moderates.

  Georgia's Henry Lewis Benning, who would later serve as a Confederate army officer, delivered one of the convention's most revealing speeches in February 1861. Benning argued that if slavery were abolished, white Southerners would be driven out and "completely exterminated." He told the delegates: "I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that." Mississippian Fulton Anderson addressed the same convention and accused the Republican Party of "unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery." Their speeches made explicit what the convention's proposals would formalize: that the protection of slavery was the central issue.

  Fourteen proposals eventually emerged from the convention's work. They defended slavery and states' rights and demanded the removal of federal forces from seceded states. They also called for a conference of border slave states to coordinate Virginia's position. Delegates debated each proposal from the 15th of March through the 14th of April. The unionist faction's goal throughout was delay. They hoped to adjourn until October, buying time for Virginia's congressional elections in May and for a political settlement that could make secession unnecessary.

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• 3. Fort Sumter and the Pivot

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  Unionist John B. Baldwin of Augusta County met with President Lincoln on the 4th of April, 1861. Baldwin presented three conditions that could keep Virginia in the Union. These were the evacuation of Fort Sumter, a national convention to debate sectional differences, and constitutional guarantees protecting slavery. Lincoln was skeptical. Baldwin warned that Virginia would be out of the Union within forty-eight hours if either side fired near the fort. Some accounts report that Lincoln offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia convention would agree to adjourn.

  On the 6th of April, the convention voted 63 to 57 to send a three-man delegation to Washington to learn Lincoln's intentions. That same day, Lincoln informed South Carolina's governor that a food ship carrying no weapons would attempt to resupply Fort Sumter. Confederate President Davis then ordered General P. G. T. Beauregard to take the fort before those supplies arrived. The Virginia delegates reached Washington on the 12th of April, delayed by bad weather. That morning, Confederate artillery had already opened fire on Fort Sumter.

  Lincoln informed the Virginia delegates that he intended to hold the fort and respond to force with force. He read from a prepared text, telling them that if "an unprovoked assault has been made upon Fort Sumter, I shall hold myself at liberty to re-possess, if I can, like places which have been seized before the Government was devolved upon me." Lincoln's call for three Virginia regiments totaling 2,340 men to rendezvous at Staunton, Wheeling, and Gordonsville broke the remaining unionist coalition. Governor Letcher's reply was unambiguous: "The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view."

  On the 17th of April, former Governor Henry A. Wise delivered a speech announcing that Virginia militia were already seizing the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry. The navy yard at Gosport was simultaneously seized; Union forces, believing several thousand militia were approaching, evacuated and burned the facility. The secession convention voted that day to provisionally secede, pending public ratification. That ratification came on the 23rd of May by 132,201 votes in favor to 37,451 against. Votes in many northwestern and eastern counties had been discarded or lost.

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• 4. Richmond's Industrial Heart

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  The Confederate decision to move its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond came in May 1861. Richmond sat just 100 miles south of Washington, D.C. The move was driven not by politics but by economics. Richmond was the only large-scale industrial city under Confederate control for most of the war. Its factories and foundries could not be moved the way a capital could.

  The Tredegar Iron Works was the third-largest foundry in the United States at the war's start. It produced most of the Confederacy's artillery, including giant rail-mounted siege cannons. Tredegar also manufactured railroad locomotives, boxcars, rails, steam propulsion plants, and iron plating for warships. Richmond's other factories produced guns, bullets, tents, uniforms, harnesses, leather goods, swords, and bayonets. The city's warehouses functioned as the logistical hub for Confederate forces in the field.

  Petersburg, 20 miles south of Richmond, was the junction of five railroads and the only continuous rail link to the Deep South. Its fate was tied so tightly to Richmond's that the day Petersburg fell, Richmond fell with it. The Shenandoah Valley to the west was known as the "Breadbasket of the Confederacy." It connected to Richmond by the Virginia Central Railroad and the James River and Kanawha Canal. In southwestern Virginia, the salt works at Saltville were essential for preserving army food supplies and became the target of two separate battles.

  Public opinion in the North had long demanded that Union forces advance "On to Richmond!" That political pressure shaped the war's eastern geography as profoundly as any general's orders. Richmond also maintained shipyards, though these were smaller than those the Union held at Norfolk. Norfolk would not return to Union hands until May 1862.

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• 5. The Birth of West Virginia

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  When the Richmond convention made its secession vote, the 49 delegates from future West Virginia counties voted 32 to 13 against it. Four were absent or abstaining. Within weeks, as fighting began in western Virginia, 29 of those 49 delegates returned to Richmond and signed the secession ordinance, reflecting deep divisions within the region.

  Historian Richard O. Curry estimated that in those counties, approximately 34,677 had voted against secession and 19,121 in favor. That left 24 counties favoring secession and 26 opposing it. The actual totals were uncertain; votes in many northwestern and eastern counties, where Unionist sentiment was strongest, were discarded or lost. Governor Letcher himself had to estimate the figures for those areas.

  In Wheeling, one of Virginia's largest cities, Unionist leaders organized a rival government. Francis H. Pierpont was elected governor of the Restored Government of Virginia, which was officially recognized by the Lincoln administration. That government raised Union troops, appointed two senators to the United States Senate, and remained in Wheeling until August 1863. When it moved to Alexandria, West Virginia's admission to the Union had already been set in motion.

  West Virginia was formally admitted to the Union on the 20th of June, 1863, becoming a new state carved from 50 counties of western Virginia. The region provided roughly 20,000 soldiers to the Union and another 20,000 to the Confederacy. In April 1865, Francis Pierpont and the Restored Government of Virginia moved to Richmond. They took up residence in the very capital they had spent four years opposing.

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• 6. Who Fought for Whom

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  Virginia's Confederate forces numbered roughly 155,000 troops, more than any other Confederate state contributed. At least 30,000 of those men were actually from other states, primarily Maryland, whose own government remained under Unionist control throughout the war. Among the Virginian commanders, Robert E. Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia. Stonewall Jackson, born in what would become West Virginia, commanded one of the war's most celebrated forces.

  Robert E. Lee was offered command of Union forces on the 18th of April, 1861, one day after Virginia's effective secession. He declined. Five days later, he accepted a Confederate commission as brigadier general. J. E. B. Stuart, A. P. Hill, and Jubal Early also commanded Confederate forces as Virginians.

  Around 27,000 Virginians served in the Union Army. Roughly 21,000 were white, and roughly 6,000 were Virginians of African ancestry. Some Black Virginians traveled as far as Massachusetts to enlist in Union regiments. The regions that sent the most Union soldiers were those with few or no enslaved people and high concentrations of poor families. Those areas also had long records of opposing secession and lay mainly in the northwestern part of the state.

  Virginia also supplied three of the Union's most senior commanders. Winfield Scott served as General-in-Chief of the Union Army. David G. Farragut became the first Admiral of the Union Navy. George Henry Thomas served as a Union general. Forty percent of Virginia's officers in the United States military when the war began remained loyal to the Union. At least one man served in both armies. A Confederate soldier from Fairfax County approached Union guards at Chain Bridge in his Confederate uniform. He told them he was heading to Washington to visit his uncle. Asked the uncle's name, he replied it was Uncle Sam. He was immediately enlisted as a Union scout.

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• 7. Fire and Aftermath

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  The First Battle of Bull Run, on the 21st of July, 1861, opened Virginia's Civil War at the railroad junction near Manassas. Union forces attempted to take that junction as a supply base, but Confederate troops moved by train to meet them and won. From that engagement, the war in Virginia stretched through four years of major campaigns. George McClellan was pushed back from Richmond. John Pope fell at the Second Battle of Manassas. At Fredericksburg, Union forces suffered a heavy defeat. In the spring of 1863, General Hooker was defeated at Chancellorsville.

  Ulysses Grant's 1864 Overland Campaign moved through Virginia in a sustained series of battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. It ended with the Siege of Petersburg and Confederate defeat. As Union forces closed in on Richmond in April 1865, the Confederate government fled the city. Retreating Confederate troops set fire to Richmond's public works to prevent them from falling into Union hands. That fire burned 25 percent of the city before the Union Army arrived and extinguished it. Richmond emerged from the war with most of its buildings and factories undamaged. It had been saved by the same army that had spent years trying to take it.

  Manassas National Battlefield Park, Richmond National Battlefield Park, and Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park are among the federally preserved sites in Virginia. Petersburg National Battlefield and Appomattox Court House National Historical Park also protect ground where the war's outcome was decided. On the 3rd of February, 2020, a bill to remove Civil War monuments advanced in Virginia's legislature, as civil rights activists called for eliminating Confederate statues that tied the state's cities to a legacy of slavery.

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