West Virginia in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  West Virginia is the only state in American history to have declared its independence from the Confederacy. That singular fact points to something stranger and more contested than most state-origin stories: a civil war within a Civil War, fought not just between armies but between neighbors, county governments, and the competing claims of two separate administrations, each calling itself the lawful government of Virginia.

  By the time Abraham Lincoln signed the statehood bill on the 31st of December, 1862, the road to statehood had passed through fractured conventions, bitterly divided vote counts, a guerrilla war that never fully ended, and a slavery debate that split even the Unionists who had built the new state. Historian Otis K. Rice noted that what one newspaper called an "astonishing unanimity" in favor of statehood was, in reality, a reflection of deep division and intimidation. The statehood referendum drew fewer than 19,200 votes in favor from a pool of nearly 80,000 enumerated voters.

  Who actually wanted this new state? How did a railroad and a convention in Wheeling reshape the map of the United States? And why did the Confederacy, until the very end of the war, insist that it was liberating West Virginia rather than invading it? Those questions shape everything that followed.

• 2. Secession's Fracture Lines

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  On the 17th of April, 1861, the Virginia state convention in Richmond voted to leave the Union. Of the 49 delegates representing the counties that would become West Virginia, 32 voted against the secession ordinance, 13 voted in favor, and 4 were absent or abstained. That initial resistance looked like a clean break. It was not.

  Most of those 49 delegates returned to Richmond for a second session in June, and 29 of them ultimately signed the ordinance of secession. The war had started, and loyalty proved more fluid than a single vote in April could capture. Historian Richard O. Curry estimated that the popular vote on secession across the future West Virginia counties ran roughly 34,677 against to 19,121 in favor, with 24 counties supporting the ordinance and 26 rejecting it.

  Geography and commerce shaped where those fractures fell. The construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the 1850s had drawn thousands of northerners and immigrants into the towns of northwestern Virginia. In Wheeling by 1860, two of every three heads-of-households were not native Virginians. In Grafton, a key railroad hub, roughly half the adult males were Irish or other immigrants. Just a short distance away, secession flags flew from the courthouses of Barbour County in Philippi and Tucker County in St. George.

  Berkeley County illustrated the gap between a vote and a commitment. It had voted three to one against secession, yet gave twice as many men to the Confederate army as to the Union. Counties in the southwest voted three or four to one against secession and still sent half their available men to Confederate service. The ordinance vote was not a pledge of allegiance. It was a snapshot of a moment that the war quickly overtook.

• 3. The Wheeling Convention

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  On the 15th of May, 1861, western Virginia Unionists gathered for the first session of the Wheeling Convention. The 436 delegates were, by the source's account, mostly informally selected or self-appointed. More than a third came from just four counties of the northern panhandle, where Unionist sentiment was strongest and Union troops were already moving in.

  Governor Dennison of Ohio had already made clear what was available: if western Virginians broke from Richmond, Ohio would send military force to protect them. The convention condemned secession but called for a more formal process. That formal process was constrained from the start because most county officials still answered to the Richmond government and county elections for delegates were never held.

  By June 11, a rump government had formed in Wheeling with Francis H. Pierpont as governor. This "Restored Government of Virginia" was recognized by the Lincoln administration. Yet historian Charles H. Ambler bluntly acknowledged what it depended on: the government's reach was limited to the northern panhandle and the counties along the B&O Railroad line, and its authority rested on the Union army garrisoning towns and patrolling roads.

  The question of whether to push for a new state split the convention's own members. John Carlile had been demanding a separate state from the beginning. Daniel Lamb questioned the legitimacy of writing a constitution for counties that could not or would not freely vote. On the 20th of August, the 2nd Wheeling Convention approved a statehood ordinance and scheduled a public vote for the 24th of October, 1861.

• 4. The Slavery Debate

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  Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator, objected to admitting any new slave state into the Union. Benjamin Wade countered that statehood was acceptable provided a gradual emancipation clause was included. Those two positions defined the Senate debate over West Virginia's admission.

  The two senators representing the Wheeling government divided on the same question. John S. Carlile argued that Congress had no constitutional right to impose emancipation on West Virginia. Waitman T. Willey proposed a compromise: a gradual abolition amendment to the state constitution. Sumner tried to attach a stronger emancipation amendment of his own; it was defeated. The statehood bill passed with the Willey Amendment attached.

  As of the 1860 census, the 49 exempted counties held roughly 6,000 slaves over the age of 21, about 40 percent of the total slave population in the region. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on the 1st of January, 1863, specifically exempted West Virginia because the new state was technically not in rebellion. The Willey Amendment, approved by voters on the 26th of March, 1863, freed no slaves during the war at all. It only freed children at birth or as they came of age, and it banned the importation of new slaves.

  Slavery was not fully abolished in West Virginia until the state legislature acted on the 3rd of February, 1865, when it also ratified the 13th Amendment. West Virginia had entered the Union on the 20th of June, 1863, as the 35th state and, by that point, the last slave state admitted to the Union. The Willey Amendment had been the price of admission; actual emancipation required another act of the legislature, eighteen months after statehood.

• 5. Armies and Armies Within

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  George B. McClellan wrote to President Lincoln from Cincinnati on the 30th of May, 1861, that he was "confidently assured that very considerable numbers of volunteers can be raised in Western Virginia." After nearly two months in the field, he was far less certain. He told Governor Pierpont that he had requested arms and clothing for 10,000 Virginia troops and feared his estimate was much too large. A Wellsburg newspaper editorialized on the 3rd of August, 1861, that after all the talk of a separate state, the region had organized barely four incomplete regiments of soldiers.

  Confederate recruiters ran into the same resistance on the other side. Colonel George A. Porterfield arrived in Grafton on the 14th of May, 1861, to sign up volunteers and reported slow enlistment. The Richmond government had not sent enough guns, tents, or supplies, and Porterfield eventually turned away hundreds of willing men for lack of equipment. General Henry A. Wise assembled roughly 4,000 men in the Kanawha valley, a force that became known as Wise's Legion. One regiment from that force was later sent to South Carolina, and it was from Major Thomas Broun of that regiment that Robert E. Lee purchased his famous horse, Traveller.

  Estimating how many West Virginians served on each side became a question historians argued about for generations. An 1864 Confederate Department figure put Confederate service at 18,642 men. A 1989 study by James Carter Linger placed the total closer to 22,000. The official Union count from the Provost Marshal General stood at 31,884, though that figure included re-enlistments and out-of-state soldiers who joined West Virginia regiments. A study begun in 1995 by the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War concluded that the region contributed roughly 20,000-22,000 men to each side, making the military division between Union and Confederate service far more even than the state's Unionist reputation has often suggested.

  Among the Union side's most decorated units was the 1st West Virginia Cavalry, which was awarded 14 Medals of Honor, making it one of the most highly decorated regiments in the Union Army. Overall, 26 Medals of Honor were credited to West Virginians for actions during the war.

• 6. Guerrilla Country

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  One of the Civil War's first trials for sabotage took place on the 28th of May, 1861, in Parkersburg, when Federal authorities arrested men found playing cards under a B&O Railroad bridge. The trial was conducted by Judge William Lowther Jackson, who later became a Confederate general. The men were acquitted because no actual crime had occurred, but the town split over the verdict, and Jackson left to join Confederate forces at Philippi.

  That episode previewed what guerrilla war in western Virginia would look like for the next four years: suspects, divided communities, contested loyalties, and punishment that often fell on the wrong people. Many guerrilla units grew out of pre-war local militias and were designated Virginia State Rangers. Starting in June 1862 these were incorporated into Virginia State Line regiments, and by March 1863 many had been folded into the regular Confederate army. Others operated without sanction from Richmond at all, some claiming Confederate allegiance, others preying on Union and Confederate residents alike.

  The Union response under Colonel George Crook was systematic and brutal. Crook, a veteran of pre-war campaigns against Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, took command of the 36th Ohio Infantry around Summersville in Nicholas County. He trained his men in guerrilla tactics and adopted what the source calls a "no prisoners" policy. On the 1st of January, 1862, he led an expedition north to Sutton in Braxton County; his troops found no Confederate forces but met heavy guerrilla resistance and burned houses and towns along their route of march.

  General Robert H. Milroy went further, issuing a command demanding cash reparations from Tucker County citizens regardless of individual guilt, threatening them with hanging or house-burning. Jefferson Davis and Confederate authorities filed formal complaints with General Henry Wager Halleck in Washington, who censured Milroy. Milroy argued his case and was allowed to continue. As late as January 1865, Governor Arthur I. Boreman reported large-scale guerrilla activity as far north as Harrison and Marion counties. The war in West Virginia effectively ended only when, in a final audacious act, McNeill's Rangers of Hardy County kidnapped Generals George Crook and Benjamin F. Kelley from behind Union lines and delivered them as prisoners to Richmond. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox ended the guerrilla campaign that no purely military operation had been able to stop.

• 7. Notable Figures on Both Sides

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  Albert G. Jenkins, a former U.S. Representative from Cabell County, raised a brigade of cavalry in western Virginia and led it until his death in May 1864. He is one of the clearest examples of the region producing senior officers for the Confederate cause. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was himself born in Clarksburg, in Harrison County, making the Confederacy's most celebrated general a native of the land it was trying to reclaim.

  On the Confederate side, George S. Patton Sr. served as a lieutenant colonel from Charleston and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Opequon. He was the grandfather and namesake of the American general who commanded troops in the Second World War. Belle Boyd, born in the region, provided intelligence to Confederate forces as a spy. Allen T. Caperton served as one of the Confederate senators for Virginia and later became a U.S. senator for West Virginia after the war.

  The Union side produced its own notable figures. Francis H. Pierpont of Monongalia County served as governor of the Restored Government of Virginia from 1861 to 1863 and was later called the "Father of West Virginia." Arthur I. Boreman of Tyler County became the new state's first elected governor on the 28th of May, 1863. Jesse L. Reno, a major general from Wheeling, and Nathan Goff Jr. of Clarksburg, who rose to major and later became Secretary of the Navy and governor, represent the range of careers that emerged from West Virginia's Union officers.

  The Sisters of St. Joseph, who operated Wheeling Hospital, treated soldiers and prisoners at the Athenaeum in downtown Wheeling throughout the war. In 1864 the Union army took over the hospital and placed the sisters on the federal payroll as matrons and nurses. Several of them later received pensions in recognition of that service.