The Birth of a State

Disunion

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

As the Union governor of Virginia, Francis H. Pierpont was in a unique position. Virginia was, of course, a Confederate state, but the mountainous western counties had broken away to remain part of the United States. By May 1862 his constituents were ready to make things official: on his desk on the second floor of the Customs House in Wheeling, an Ohio River city of 14,000 residents, was a bill calling for the creation of a new state, carved primarily from the western counties of Virginia.

The creation of West Virginia was made possible by Secession, but it was also a long time coming. Freeing the western counties from the political domination of the Tidewater and Piedmont slaveholders had been a goal of Pierpont, an abolitionist lawyer from Fairmont, for years. With the bulk of the state’s wealth along the coast, the slaveholding elite and their defenders had kept tight-fisted control of state spending, largely ignoring western pleas for turnpikes and railroads. The only “internal improvements” they would support was the wildly impractical James River and Kanawha Canal, a waterway longer than the Erie Canal and one that was to cross mountains.

The statue of Francis H. Pierpont in Statuary Hall, the United States Capitol Architect of the CapitolThe statue of Francis H. Pierpont in Statuary Hall, the United States Capitol

Once Pierpont was elected unanimously by the Wheeling convention that rejected Virginia’s secession in May 1861, he and his colleagues set their sights on statehood. As a convention, they dared Gov. John Letcher to bring them forcibly back under Richmond’s control. Instead, they declared all the state offices – from Letcher’s on down – vacant. Pierpont also had to plead with the Lincoln administration to be recognized as the state’s legitimate government and have its representatives and senators seated in Congress. There were no guarantees — indeed, it was already clear that Washington would not intercede to support the would-be breakaway pro-union counties of eastern Tennessee.

The western Virginians also needed protection. The few thousand muskets that the governor of Massachusetts sent their way were a nice symbol of Union-state solidarity but not enough to hold their own against the bushwhackers authorized by Letcher’s government, its militia companies that had captured the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, and the Confederate armies rolling into Virginia.

Their prayers for federal troops were finally answered when Gen. George B. McClellan crossed into Virginia with regiments of Ohio volunteers in the fall of 1861. Now, led by Pierpont, loyal Virginians were raising their own volunteers to hold their ground. They had already put to flight a cluster of Confederate sympathizers, if not true soldiers, at Philippi in June 1861.

Securing the western counties was the first order of business for Pierpont and McClellan over the fall and winter. They failed. While there were a few battles at Rich Mountain and Romney – large skirmishes, actually – in the mountains and in southwestern Virginia, McClellan, headquartered in Grafton, wrote: “To my great regret I find that the enemies of the United States continue to carry on a system of hostilities prohibited by the laws of war. … Individuals and marauding parties are pursuing a guerrilla warfare, firing upon sentinels and pickets, burning bridges, insulting, injuring and even killing citizens, because of their Union sentiments, and committing many kindred acts.”

Left unsaid was the guerrillas’ success in disrupting passenger rail service from Baltimore to Wheeling for six months. The Union government tapped a leading legal scholar, Francis Lieber, to define what these bands were – freebooters, marauders, brigands, partisans, spies, rebel, highway robbers – and how they should be treated when captured. After much hemming and hawing, Lieber concluded that bushwhackers “unite the four-fold characteristics of the spy, the brigand, the assassin, and the rebel and cannot … be treated as a fair enemy.”

With that as guidance, McClellan and other military leaders vigorously applied the “hard hand of war” to civilian secessionists. At the start, those suspected guerrillas and disloyalists who were not executed were held at Camp Carlile near Wheeling. As their numbers grew, they were taken to Camp Chase, close to Columbus, Ohio, and others even farther away to places like Delaware.

The get-tough policy of Union commanders and Pierpont’s restored government had minimal effect in curbing the insurgency. Following a street-by-street gun battle in Wytheville, Union troops found themselves in a “no quarter” fight “as the soldiers, citizens, and even women fired from their houses, both public and private.” In retaliation, the colonel commanding reported, “We burned the town to ashes.”

McClellan was hailed as a hero for saving northwestern Virginia from “destruction and spoliation.” By spring 1862 federal and state troops loyal to the Union controlled the lines of communication, especially the railroad, the strategic mountain passes and the principal population centers near the Ohio. At no point during the Civil War did the restored government of Virginia control much of what is now West Virginia.

That limited success raised an important question: if things were stable, and Union victory possible, why go through the difficulties of creating a new state? Wouldn’t the two be reunited after the war?

In speaking to the special session of the legislature on May 6, 1862, Pierpont, who was both directing the Virginia government-in-exile and pushing for western Virginia statehood, recalled the reasons a new state was nevertheless necessary. “The barrier is so great that no artificial means of intercourse have ever been made beyond a mud turnpike road,” he said. “All the trade and commerce of the West is with other States, and not with eastern Virginia. The two sections are entirely dissimilar in their social relations and institutions. While the east is largely interested in slaves, the west has none, and all the labor is performed by freemen. …The subject of the division of the state has been agitated at one time and another ever since I can remember.”

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Even before the legislature began its debate, he was being begged to leave his Virginia office to govern the new state. Pierpont said: “I can’t go. I have to look after Virginia.”

As brave as these words were, Pierpont’s government was struggling “to organize and arm for its defense against the conspirators and usurpers at Richmond and their aiders and abettors” a year into the war. From an office with “a bare table, a half quire of paper and a pen and ink,” Pierpont scrambled to do as much as he could with what he had. He quickly enlisted another Unionist, John List, to lead a cavalry detachment to the region’s banks and ensure that the hard currency held in their vaults did not travel across the mountains to Richmond.

Most of Pierpont’s job, though, involved managing the flood of minutiae of a state government at war. Certificates of qualification and election, invoices, bonds, oaths of allegiance to the restored government and the Union, commissions for Army officers – especially being pressed by field commanders, election returns, proceedings, reports, resignations, proclamations, maps and special orders to state banks, railroads, turnpike operators and county officials.

Controlling the local level politically was bedeviling – even without a war. Pierpont, who had never held elective office, looked upon the “courthouse cliques” – the sheriff and the county court that combined all three branches of government in its magistrates – as “mere toadies and time-servers,” who rewarded themselves with “fat jobs and contracts.” Now many of them were out of office because they refused to swear allegiance to Pierpont’s government and the Union, a precondition to holding on to their old positions. Some joined the night riders.

It was quite a feat: no other Union governor, with the possible exception of Hamilton Rowan Gamble of Missouri, in the first year of the war had to work as closely with military commanders as Pierpont. No other Union governor had to establish civil government behind the advance of Union armies, as Pierpont was often asked to do in northern Virginia and from the Atlantic Ocean to Williamsburg. Even in the mountainous west, his emissary to Pocahontas County, the Rev. Samuel Hall Young, had to wait for the troops of the Ohio 23d “to settle the horse thieves and bushwhackers there” before moving in to set up civilian control.

All the while, the Lincoln administration was scrutinizing events in Wheeling. Although the heavy fighting in Virginia had moved far to the east, the idea of “reorganizing governments” and even creating new states in pro-Union or Union-held sections of Confederate states had political appeal in an election year. There were possibilities in eastern Tennessee, western Arkansas, northern Alabama and Mississippi, and perhaps even Louisiana close to New Orleans. The president had already appointed military governors in those states and wanted to hold elections in them to restore civil authority.

Still, as 1862 progressed, despite holding two elections in the sections of Virginia held by the Union Army, the work of re-establishing civil governments at the local level showed little progress. In faraway Fairfax, close to Washington, a “meeting of loyal citizens” petitioned him to open the polls to end “their present condition of anarchy.” Ultimately, the Wheeling government selected 50 counties, all of them west of the Shenandoah Valley (and thus safe from immediate Confederate control) to form a new state. The United States Senate voted to admit West Virginia on July 14, 1862, and the House concurred that December. On June 20, 1863, West Virginia became the newest state in the Union.

Pierpont, meanwhile, continued on as head of the pro-Union Virginia government, and after the war Andrew Johnson appointed him provisional governor. He was pushed out in 1868, however, after which he returned to private law practice in West Virginia. Today a statue of “the father of West Virginia” stands in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall as a hero of the Mountain State.

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John Grady

John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.