 After Congress approved the bill for West Virginia statehood, it sat on Lincoln's desk until the very last minute. When the movement for West Virginia statehood first started in 1861, President Lincoln was ready and willing to compromise on the issue of slavery, and even talked about his decision to overturn General Framont's Emancipation Proclamation in Missouri. Over the course of 1862, while Congress was debating the matter of West Virginia statehood, President Lincoln was beginning to consider the matter of emancipation for reasons we will explore in future episodes. When the bill for West Virginia statehood landed on the president's desk, he was indecisive. On the one hand, it would be more likely for Virginia to rejoin the Union if the secessionist and unionist regions were not separated. On the other hand, the war had been waging for a year and a half and recognizing the loyal government in Wheeling, Virginia seemed to be a practical necessity. But the deadline to either sign or veto the bill was December 31st, 1862. And in September, Lincoln had issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which was essentially an ultimatum to the Confederate states that if they did not rejoin the Union, he would issue a proclamation emancipating their slaves. That ultimatum was to expire on January 1st, 1863. So the day before Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation, he faced the decision to fix his signature allowing a new slave state into the Union. Slavery was still a matter of controversy in West Virginia, but a compromise had been reached known as the Willy Compromise that allowed for gradual emancipation. After a great deal of deliberation and at the very last minute of the deadline, President Lincoln agreed to sign the bill on the condition that the gradual emancipation clause remain in the new state's constitution. I don't present this to either defend or condemn Lincoln, but simply to highlight a complicated aspect of the history of Lincoln that is left out from both sides of the debate. On the one hand, as the modern opponents of Lincoln like to point out, the great emancipator did admit a new slave state into the Union. Slavery even then was not his top priority. On the other hand, Lincoln did require a provision for gradual emancipation which demonstrated a shift in his personal policy on the slavery question from his attempts at compromise in 1861. Derived from that what you will, I'm just trying to present an accurate account of a controversial aspect of history. I'm Chris Calton and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. As we've moved through the beginnings of the Civil War in 1861, I hope you've noticed an important theme that I think is often underappreciated in histories of the Civil War, and that's the focus on the border states at the outset of the war. The actions of the Lincoln administration were largely decided upon according to how they expected the remaining Unionist slave states to react, and to make sure that they could not succeed. We've looked at Maryland and Missouri, which are particularly interesting cases, but I also want to talk about West Virginia and Kentucky. This secession of Western Virginia will be the topic of today's episode. When the Virginia legislature voted to approve an ordinance of secession on April 17th, the Unionist leaders in the state were outraged. The delegates from the northwestern portion of the state led the movement against the secessionists. Although the ordinance had been approved, secession was scheduled to face a popular vote on May 23rd, so the Unionist delegates vowed to return to their districts and campaign against this eastern tyranny, as they saw the matter. At this time, the unofficial leader of the anti-secessionists was a man named John Carlisle. All over northwestern Virginia, special meetings took place to decide on how to respond to the state's ordinance of secession, but Carlisle's meeting in Clarksburg was probably the most important. At the Clarksburg meeting, the attendees adopted a set of resolutions that Carlisle drafted that called for a special election to be held in each of the northwestern counties to elect delegates for a May 13th convention to decide on the future of their portion of the state. This was the beginnings of the West Virginia secession movement. Up to this point, the anti-secession political activities amounted to denunciations of the ordinance with no real counter-revolutionary behavior. The Clarksburg revolutions energized the Unionists and the state, but the secessionists made a somewhat ironic counter-move. After the resolutions were published, the Virginia secessionists held their own state's rights convention in Clarksburg, which they held on April 26th. At this point, by the way, the news of the state's secession was only just now reaching some areas of Virginia. So this was all taking place while some people in the state still didn't even know that Virginia had joined the Confederacy. And the state's rights convention, which was led by former Governor Joseph Johnson, the secessionists condemned any proposal that sought to sever the state of Virginia. Now I've been trying to offer less commentary as I progress in this podcast, but there are certain events that really call for it, and this is one of them I think. So forgive me as I offer a bit of an aside. But I think this secessionist convention in Clarksburg is telling. On the one hand, the secessionists in Virginia, who did not approve secession until after Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops, which they saw as an unconstitutional usurpation of executive power, the Virginia secessionists were claiming that it was a state's right to secede from the Union, that the Constitution did not form a binding government. Now there are to this day different constitutional theories about this, but the only one that is truly a matter of history is the perspective of the founders and framers of the Constitution upon drafting and ratification. And from this perspective, the Virginia secessionists were following the clearly stated original belief of their own ratifiers who reluctantly ratified a Constitution according to the assumption that Virginia could leave the Union whenever it pleased. There are other legal philosophies that are inserted into this debate, but any genuine historical interpretation of intent has to acknowledge that the Virginia ratifiers in particular believed that secession was a constitutionally valid failsafe against encroaching federal authority. However, in modern parlance, the idea of state's rights is typically used as little more than constitutional vocabulary for decentralization and localism. It alludes to the Tenth Amendment of course, but when modern commentators are talking about state's rights, it almost universally refers to the general idea of smaller government and the reduction of federal authority in favor of state authority as simply an easy step in this direction. That's all fine, but when we look at the use of state's rights in antebellum and civil war rhetoric, this was not necessarily the context of the phrase, the idea of localism and decentralization, and we should be aware of this potential for historical equivocation. When the Virginia legislature called for their state's rights convention, they were referring the legal authority concentrated in the hands of the state of Virginia. This was not a localist or a decentralized doctrine. When we equate historical state's rights talk with decentralization, we can easily fall guilty of presentism because that is what we think of in modern connotation, so we should be aware of these distinctions. To be sure, there were some Southerners who did genuinely believe in localism as a philosophy of government, but these people were the exception, not the rule. In a previous episode in the season on the antebellum period, I think the one on the California Gold Rush, if I remember correctly, I pointed out John C. Calhoun's rejection of California statehood because it had to go through the territorial government phase first, which was a right of the national government. He evoked state's rights in that debate to reject California on the grounds that territories did not have rights because they weren't states. This is very similar to the state's rights logic of the secessionist state's rights convention in Clarksburg, Virginia. They believed it was a state's right to secede from the union, but they did not believe it was a district or a county or a city's right to secede from the state. So this is important to understand, especially if you want to defend the idea of secession as a legally or ethically legitimate action, because you can certainly defend secession on principled grounds, but you should be wary when invoking the philosophy of the 1860 and 61 secessionists, which I find to have some philosophical contradictions, though whether or not local secession from a state was constitutional would depend on the state's constitution, and I haven't studied that area of legal history enough to even take a position. So take this for what it is, but regardless of your views on the constitutionality of secession, states' rights, or the Civil War, I think it's worth being aware of the nuanced differences with which people then view the idea of states' rights in the sense that they were Virginia nationalists rather than United States nationalists, and the way a lot of people view states' rights today, which is usually just a way of arguing for decentralization in smaller national government within the context of the Tenth Amendment. Anyway, let's get back to the story of the secessionist movement in Northwestern Virginia. So in response to the Clarksburg Resolutions against secession from the Union and suggesting a response of secession from Virginia, the Clarksburg State's Rights Convention reaffirmed secession from the Union, rejected the legitimacy of secession from Virginia, and it urged citizens to show their loyalty to Virginia by obeying the state's laws and volunteering to join Virginia militia companies. In Carlyle's May 13th meeting to decide on the Northwestern response to Virginia's secession was to be held in Wheeling, Virginia. George Caldwell, another Unionist leader in the state, wrote a letter to President Lincoln asking for his support for the Unionist plan. Support from the national government was considered crucial to the Unionist activities in the state. Other Western delegates followed his lead in reaching out to the president for support. The biggest challenge the Virginia Unionist faced though was figuring out how to hold elections. Since they were still technically part of the state of Virginia, the elections that were proposed in the Carlyle Resolutions were not exactly legal. They were extra legal rather than illegal, but this meant that there was no formal mode of elections in the Northwestern areas. Each district had its own manner of holding local elections and everything else was organized by the state. So instead of holding formal elections, each county held public meetings where delegates were named by the county seats, but this sounded better in theory than it worked in practice. In one such meeting, the one held in Fairmont, a brawl erupted between two factions, each side having at least 80 participants involved in the chaos. In areas in which there was still a respectable secessionist presence, meetings couldn't even be held at all. Instead, smaller groups had to hold secret meetings in the dead of the night to select a delegate due to threats of action by secessionists if a public meeting was held. In Philippi, a small number of participants chose a delegate by candlelight and a midnight meeting held at a local shoe shop. But whatever problems they faced, 436 delegates representing 27 western counties were chosen and they met in Wheeling as scheduled on May 13th to decide how to respond to their state's secession. The first question the delegates faced, though, was the matter of what exactly was the character of their convention. Although secession from the state seemed to have been suggested by the Carlisle resolutions, this was still far from formally decided upon. If the delegates were there to merely pass advisory resolutions for the future of Virginia, then the nature of the convention was the only matter that concerned them. But if they were there to do more than just offer advice to the state's legislature, if they were going to consider breaking away from Virginia, then they faced a second question. Who exactly did they represent? Many of the counties represented in the convention were split on the matter of secession, which is why some places had to appoint delegates in secret. The delegates had to figure out who exactly constituted their constituents. Some proposals for how to launch the convention in light of these questions were offered, but Carlisle once again set the stage for secession by insisting on forming a committee to decide on constituent representation, an issue that only mattered in the event that real political actions were taken. By establishing the constituent character of the assembly, Carlisle was paving the way for the secession of the represented counties. But this made it easier to open the debate up to more radical options of how Northwestern Virginia could effectively combat secession, which was the matter for which the convention was formed. This wasn't a secession convention yet, but the idea was already in the minds of many of the delegates present. But the federal officials, who had responded to requests from support, added another complicating element. They did support the wheeling convention, but they seemed to suggest that the purpose of the convention was to establish a provisional state government representing all of Virginia, rather than a separate state government representing the Northwestern counties. This would be similar to what would be established in Missouri, where the secessionist government in Missouri actually sent representatives to the Confederate Congress while the Union government was formed and maintained presence in the U.S. Congress. But both Missouri governments claimed representation for all of Missouri. In Wheeling, Virginia, the idea that many people had was to form a new state with a new government, but the federal support for a provisional Virginia government made a lot of the delegates believe that this was the route they should take, essentially maintaining the facade that Virginia was still part of the Union. Carlisle led the call for immediately forming a new state, and several people got behind him, but other important figures, including Francis Pierpont, who will soon play a much more significant role in the story, believed that Carlisle was being hasty. Carlisle's opponents believed that if the Unionists openly resisted the authorities of Virginia, they would bring about a violent response that would crush their plans before they could get off the ground. The immediate goal, they argued, should be to try to make sure that the referendum on secession that was going to take place later in the month should demonstrate a strong outpouring of Union sentiment, so the Virginia legislature might see how unpopular their decision to secede actually was. The assembly ended up agreeing to a compromise. They adopted resolutions denouncing Virginia's alliance with the Confederate States, calling for the citizens of the Northwestern counties to vote against secession in the upcoming referendum and to participate in federal U.S. elections as normal, and most significantly, if popular vote did end up approving a Virginia secession, a new convention should be held to decide on further action, but the delegates unwilling all pretty much agreed that the secession ordinance would be popularly approved. So these resolutions were designed largely as a delay tactic so that they could try to consolidate support for the new government, they were already envisioning. On May 23rd, the Unionist fears were confirmed when the people of Virginia voted to popularly ratify their ordinance for secession, and in response, John Carlisle drafted a document titled An Address to the People of Northwestern Virginia, in which he called for citizens of western Virginia to resist the tyranny enrichment that wanted to rip them from their beloved Union and thrust their state into a bloody and fratricidal war. The road to West Virginia's secession had now been paved. The new convention had already been called to be held and willing, and what the Virginia Unionists now needed was support from the Union government. On May 3rd, the War Department established the Department of Ohio, which had military jurisdiction over Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and placed General George B. McClellan as departmental commander. McClellan was headquartered in Cincinnati, and like most Ohioans, he was very interested in the resistance movement in western Virginia. To support them, he assigned troops to various points along the border of Ohio and Virginia, but it wasn't just that McClellan was interested in protecting loyal Virginians, he was eyeballing a route to Richmond for a potential invasion of the Confederate capital. If Virginia citizens could help secure areas between him and Richmond, it would make his invasion that much easier. But McClellan didn't want to appear aggressive, so he wanted his Ohio troops to be moved according to requests made by western Virginians, so McClellan sent one of his subordinates, Lieutenant Orlando Poe, to gather information along the border and organize a network of spies to deliver occasional reports about the goings on in Virginia's border counties. For long, spy reports started landing on McClellan's desk in Cincinnati, informing him of secessionist activities in several of the western counties. He was given warning that moving Ohio troops across the border might encourage more people to support Virginia's secession, so he backed away from his plan to invade Richmond for the time, but western Virginia became his primary concern. On May 24, the day after Virginia's referendum for secession, General Winfield Scott sent word to McClellan about two companies of Confederate troops that had moved into Grafton, one of the northwestern Virginia cities. Scott told McClellan to offer a prompt response, but McClellan hesitated. This kind of indecision would cost him his reputation in 1862 and in fact even the end of 1861. While McClellan wavered, the Confederate-Virginian colonel George Porterfield took the initiative. Porterfield occupied Grafton and he ordered the burning of the Baltimore and Ohio bridges to hinder union movement. This was enough to spur McClellan into action. The Union General ordered an advance toward Grafton from two directions, one moving south from Wheeling and the other moving east from Parkersburg. The two union companies moved slowly following orders to protect the railroads as their top priority. As they approached, Porterfield became anxious. As being still late May, a month before the first battle of Bull Run, Joseph Johnston was still at Harper's Ferry, but he refused Porterfield's pleas for reinforcements as he was busy worrying about the Union's army of Pennsylvania. So on May 28th, Porterfield decided to withdraw to Philippi, which was home to more Confederate supporters. There, he hoped to gain some additional troops and reorganize before moving back to Grafton, which was home to an important rail junction. But now that he was out of Grafton, the Union forces were able to occupy Grafton on May 30th, facing no resistance. Brigadier General Thomas Morris arrived in Grafton on June 1st and he was the highest ranking officer there. He was given instructions to scout the Confederates in Philippi and, if possible, move the Union troops even further into Virginia. But by the time he got to Grafton, Colonel Benjamin Kelly had already been there for two days and he had been working on a plan to immediately attack the forces in Philippi. When Morris took over as commanding officer, he delayed the attack and spread false information about Union troop movement to filter out and hopefully mislead the Confederates into thinking they were going to attack Harper's Ferry. Then he revised the plan so that 1,900 men under the command of Colonel Kelly would travel by rail toward Harper's Ferry. But instead of going all the way there, they would secretly debark in Thornton, Virginia, only six miles from Grafton, and start moving south to Philippi, where they would conduct a surprise attack at 4 a.m. on June 3rd. Another body of 1,500 Union soldiers was to take the train to Webster and then march toward Philippi under the command of Colonel Ebenezer Dumont. They were also supposed to arrive at 4 a.m. where they could make a demonstration that would divert attention away from Kelly's attack. Thus, the plan was to wage a two-pronged assault on Philippi. But coordinating the two marches was easier said than done. The soldiers had to move in the dark of night and a recent rain had left the ground muddy and hard to move through. Dumont was able to make it to his location at 4 a.m. But his men arrived exhausted, having covered the last five miles of the march in only an hour and 15 minutes to make it on time. But when they arrived to make their diversion to allow Kelly's company to attack, Kelly was nowhere to be found. During their march, Colonel Kelly led his men down the wrong fork of an overgrown country road. They ended up arriving in Philippi from the wrong direction, and by the time they finally made it, Dumont's demonstration was already taking place. They were running behind schedule. The Confederates in Philippi only amounted to around 800 men, so the Union attack should have devastated them. But because Kelly got lost and delayed, the Union assault was not as coordinated as intended, and the Confederates had the opportunity to make an escape. In fact, the Confederates were even aware of the Union forces moving toward them in time to make a retreat, and all the officers under Porterfield agreed that they would have to evacuate Philippi, but nobody bothered giving any actual orders to do so. Apparently, they figured they'd just move out once the skies were clear and the weather had improved. But they underestimated the timing of the Union attack, and they were jolted into action once the two small cannons that Dumont had with him started lobbing cannonballs their way. So the Confederates had more than enough opportunity to make a clean escape, but they squandered it, and were left to deal with chaos instead. Dumont's men charged in from one side of Philippi, driving the scrambling Confederates the opposite direction, only to have Kelly's men jump into the fight and drive them away again. It was pandemonium for both sides, and Colonel Kelly received a relatively serious wound, but nobody was killed. And the Confederates were able to make the retreat down the road that Kelly was originally supposed to have been occupying before he took a wrong turn. Although the casualties would be light, the Battle of Philippi would actually see the first battlefield amputations of the Civil War. It was an insignificant Union victory, but since this was still nearly two months before Bull Run, the Union victory was heavily publicized throughout the North, greatly exaggerating its significance and reaffirming the pre-Bull Run idea that the war would be quick and decisive. It also allowed General McClellan to receive a great deal of praise that he really didn't deserve, but would play into a significant promotion that would come right after Bull Run. But in Western Virginia, the Battle of Philippi did have a greater degree of significance. It temporarily quelled the secessionists in these areas, but when they came back, they did so with a vengeance. Animosity between the Virginia Unionists and secessionists exploded, and as secessionists in certain districts threatened the lives and property of the disloyal Virginians as they saw them, the Union Army was increasingly seen as the safeguard of persons and property who wished to remain in the Union, and this made it easier for the Union forces to consolidate in Northwestern Virginia. When General McClellan arrived in Grafton on June 22nd, he received a warm welcome from the Virginians he passed and wrote an optimistic letter to Simon Cameron saying, quote, the Union men are daily gaining strength. I anticipate a happy solution to our difficulties in Western Virginia. End quote. Just over a week after the Battle of Philippi on June 11th, the second wheeling convention was held to decide on how to respond to Virginia's secession. The delegates met for several days. On June 17th, the assembly unanimously adopted a declaration of the people of Virginia, which was drafted to remind people of the Declaration of Independence. The declaration did not contest the right of revolution, but it did object to the way it was carried out as illegitimate. By calling for a secession convention without the consent of the people, the Virginia legislature had violated the rights of the citizenry, and thus the May 23rd referendum that ratified the ordinance could not be accepted as legitimate. It also accused the state's governor of conspiring with secessionists to terrorize Unionists and to wage war with the United States. The document called for the reorganization of the Virginia government. Two days later, in order to carry out this declaration, the wheeling assembly passed an ordinance to form a loyal government of Virginia, loyal to the United States, of course. They would select a governor and lieutenant governor, as well as a five-member advisory council, and they would serve for six months until elections could be held. Members of the General Assembly were also required to swear a loyalty oath to the United States in order to serve, and one person was expelled for refusing to take his loyalty oath. On the surface, this was all done to obtain recognition from President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress that they were the legitimate loyal government of Virginia. But the delegates in wheeling were already set on forming a separate state. Worried that immediately revealing their intentions to form a new state, John Carlisle said, quote, the truth should always be spoken when we speak at all. But the whole truth should not always be spoken. There are times when men should keep their mouths closed. What if we do contemplate a division of the state? End quote. What the Lincoln administration wanted was not a new state, but the whole state of Virginia restored to the Union. So this is the facade that the convention decided to maintain for the time being, and they referred to their new government as the restored government. Francis H. Pierpont, who I mentioned earlier is one of the voices advocating the strategy of appeasing the federal authorities, was selected as the governor. Immediately after his appointment, Governor Pierpont sent a wire to Washington to inform President Lincoln about the convention's decision, and he asked for support in suppressing the rebellion and protecting the loyal citizens of Virginia. War Secretary Cameron sent the reply confirming the president's recognition of the new government in Pierpont's title and promised to send military support. The new government also needed money, and they obtained some by borrowing, and even more from the federal government under an 1841 law called the Distribution Act, which entitled every state to a share of the funds, but Virginia had refused to apply for it because of its leader's desire to avoid federal dependency. Now, Francis Pierpont applied on behalf of the restored government and obtained $41,000 in federal funds. Another $27,000 in specie was seized from the exchange bank of Weston, which had been deposited there to fund the building of a state hospital. But Pierpont wanted to make sure he took the money before Governor Letcher could have it moved to Richmond, where it would be safer. On July 22, the first bill was proposed in the General Assembly to authorize the formation of a new state. The Assembly shot it down, but only because they thought the bill to be premature. Lincoln's rhetoric on the matter had made it clear that he saw the Wheeling Assembly as representing all of Virginia. Instead, they adopted a series of resolutions that advocated separation from Virginia when the timing was more practical. For the time being, the Wheeling Assembly would content itself with the pretense that it represented all of Virginia, and it filled the vacated Virginia Senate seats in Congress with two of their own, one of whom was John Carlisle. On July 26, the restored assembly adjourned, scheduled to meet again in December. While the Assembly was meeting to decide the political fate of Western Virginia, General McClellan was still working to decide its military fate. His forces met again with Confederate troops under the command of General Robert Garnet at Rich Mountain on July 11. McClellan subordinate General William Rosecrans led a force of 2,000 troops up the mountain under a heavy rain to attack the Confederate force of 1300. They first came upon a group of 300 Confederates in the early afternoon who quickly dispersed. The celebratory cries from the Union soldiers were mistaken by the other 1,000 Confederate soldiers on the mountain as their victory celebrations by their own Confederate comrades. But while Rosecrans was leading his men to battle against a smaller force, cutting a path through the forest to make their artillery useful against the enemy, McClellan was once again holding back his own attack against the Confederate front. But eventually Rosecrans got within artillery range and he started pelting the Confederates from the rear with his infantry adding volleys of musket fire. The Confederates scattered, leaving two filled cannons behind for the Union. Rosecrans continued pushing and met the Confederates again at Cheat River. The Confederates were rushing to make it across a pair of fords, both called Corksford, that stood between them in safer territories. But as they were crossing the second ford, their supply wagons got stuck. The Union army was moving past the first Corksford while the Confederate soldiers were working to release their supply wagons and Confederate General Garnett stopped to personally direct his men during the crossing. Just as the stuck wagon was coming free, he was killed by a Union bullet. The Confederate retreat at this point had no organization. Several of the men never returned to their regiments and a handful were left behind, killed, or wounded. McClellan's rich mountain campaign allowed him to claim credit for minor victories for which he probably deserves far less credit than his subordinates. But even if they were minor, they were victories the Union greatly wanted to duplicate after the disaster at Bull Run that would take place less than two weeks after McClellan's campaign in Western Virginia. And after Irvin McDowell's embarrassing defeat, McClellan, who is now being called the Napoleon of the West, would be promoted as McDowell's replacement. McClellan would rename the Army of Northeastern Virginia the Army of the Potomac, not to be confused with Beauregard's Confederate Army of the Potomac. General Rose Kranz would take over the operations in Western Virginia. Even though it requires me to move far ahead in the chronology from everything else I've talked about so far in this season, I do want to quickly conclude the story of West Virginia statehood, only because there isn't enough interesting material here to justify making this a multi-part episode, I don't think. I'm not going to go into significant detail about all this, but I want to highlight some of the bullet points. In November of 1861, the restoration government called for a constitutional convention to be held in Wheeling. The time had finally come to start formally talking about the plans to create a new state. One of the first issues to come up was what to name the state. In August, an ordinance had been agreed upon to name the state Canawa, but too many people were unhappy with this name, so new names were being discussed while Judge James Brown from Canawa County thought to retain the name. Other suggested names were Western Virginia, Augusta, and Allegheny. But most of the delegates wanted to retain the name Virginia in some form, so the name West Virginia was ultimately decided upon. The boundary of the new state was also an obvious matter of discussion. Most of the questions revolving around whether or not to include a handful of border counties in Southwestern Virginia. A boundary committee was formed to draft a report on which counties should be annexed. This led to interesting debate points. In the report, the committee showed that some of the counties in question were predominantly secessionists, and opponents of inclusion used this to argue that they should be excluded from the new state. But other delegates wanted their new state to be as large as possible, and they argued that because these counties had union men at all, it would be wrong to leave them out. Other arguments in favor of including some of these counties were concerned with geographical symmetry of the state's boundaries. In the end, the counties in question were organized into two districts, and the matter of the inclusion of each district was left to the popular vote of the people within them. The complications over the boundary led to complications of legislative apportionment. The county geography that West Virginia was inheriting would not provide for equal representation in proportion to the new state. This would mean either combining some counties into a single representative district, or to have such a small representation quotient as to have an enormous legislature. Ultimately, the matter was settled by drawing new senatorial districts, and then deciding on delegate representation by taking the new districts, calculating how many delegates were to be apportioned to each district, and then assigning delegates to each original county without combining any counties together. But the two most difficult issues were that of internal improvements and slavery. The matter of internal improvements saw a heated debate. This mostly came from the people of Kanawa Valley who had been trying to get a railroad through their territory for years. They wanted to make it legal for the legislature to take on debt in order to fund such projects. Many of the delegates from elsewhere resisted such provision. A compromise was finally reached to allow the legislature to purchase stock in internal improvement corporations, but only if it could pay for the stock outright or with newly levy taxes to be collected within one year of the purchase. Slavery, by contrast, was avoided for much of the convention. It was a topic the delegates wanted to dance around. Many of the people in Western Virginia did hold anti-slavery views, even though almost none of them were outright abolitionists. But the matter of separate statehood took precedence over any slavery issues, and many people were worried that resurrecting the bitter slavery debate that had been plaguing the country for more than a decade would only serve to endanger the plans for a new state. Some of the delegates present were themselves slaveholders, and several more represented slaveholding constituents. The delegates also decided to avoid the slavery question for as long as possible because they wanted the citizens of the Panhandle to join them. The Panhandle held the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which the new state wanted to maintain control of, but it was also home to one of the larger populations of slaveholders. If an anti-slavery clause were added to the new constitution, it would be unlikely that they would join West Virginia. It was also the matter of exactly how the federal government viewed slavery. To obtain approval for statehood, their proposal had to be passed by Congress and signed by the president. This meant dealing with radical Republicans and Unionist Democrats, as well as an executive branch that had been compromising on the matter of slavery. It was hard to tell which way the winds were blowing on the slavery question, so the issue was easier to just avoid. But eventually, the silence on slavery was broken by Robert Hagar, a Methodist minister and delegate from Boone County. He presented resolutions that called slavery, quote, the origin and foundation of our national troubles, incompatible with the word of God, detrimental to a free people, as well as wrong to the slaves themselves, end quote. In mid-December, Gordon Battelle, another Methodist minister and delegate from Ohio County, offered another resolution for gradual emancipation. The resolutions were tabled without debate. In January, Battelle offered two more resolutions that sought to prevent the importation of new slaves into the state and to declare children born to slaves after July 4th, 1865 to be free. Again, the resolutions were tabled. Battelle's next move was to propose a popular referendum to let the people vote on gradual emancipation. This was tabled as well. However, this was enough to get other delegates to start discussing the issue. A compromise was proposed that would reject gradual emancipation, but prohibit the importation of any new slaves as permanent residents. This compromise was approved 48 to one. Although the process of becoming a state would be drawn out for another year and a half, on June 20th, 1863, West Virginia would be admitted into the Union as a slave state, though the compromise measure did clearly pave the way for gradual emancipation, which was a condition that President Lincoln required before agreeing to sign the bill the day before he issued his emancipation proclamation. With the secession of Western Virginia from the rest of Virginia, the story of the Upper South controversies is almost complete. We will finish with the state that Lincoln allegedly believed more crucial to have on the Union side than God himself. The story of Kentucky in 1861 will be the topic of the next episode. Historical controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 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