Did WV get the short end of the stick?

When I was just looking over some stuff I saw that WV actually seceded from Virginia less than a month after Virginia left the Union. WV began holding Union meetings, and the Wheeling Conventions, and other moves proving her loyalty to the Union.

I often wondered why WV didn't fall under the Emancipation Proclamation, I always assumed that it was because she came in 5 months too late. But the truth of the matter is, WV was working toward statehood and one of the things that she was required to do was come up with a gradual emancipation law. That law was approved in July of '62.

If I were a WV slaveholder I would not have been happy to have the Emancipation Proclamation come out 2 months later. If they'd only have waited. I mean, WV technically wasn't even part of the CS for a full month. While portions of Louisiana and Tennessee were permitted to keep their slaves, and should any other county or portion of a state come back to the Union they could keep their slaves. From my point of view, WV got punished for being loyal, while other areas were praised for coming back to the fold. Course that's just my view, maybe they were just greatful to finally have their chance to get away from VA? Course it would all be moot anyway, what with the 13th Amendment, but still...

The Emancipation Proclamation was a tool used to combat the rebellion. It did not apply to areas, like West Virginia, who were not warring against the government.

True, but that means that WV should have been allowed to keep her slaves, but alas she wanted statehood and was required to have a gradual emancipation clause put in there, and that was approved by Congress before the EP went into effect, so it had nothing to do with the state anyway. I'm just looking at it from the view of the slaveholder who has no idea how long slavery would be maintained in the Union.
I've been doing a little local historical work and found that two counties bordering my Ohio county had over 1000 slaves combined, so that's not too shabby for hill country -- though admittedly it's also river country.

It's also interesting to note that the EP excluded the Virginia counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth.

What about the slaveholders in Maryland and Missouri, both of whom amended their state Constitutions to outlaw slavery prior to the adoption of the 13th Amendment?

The Emancipation Proclamation excluded parts of Louisiana as well. It excluded areas that had been returned to U.S. control because since those areas were no longer supporting the rebellion their slaves could not legally be freed by presidential order.

I didn't know that. Thanks!

That I did know.

Excellent point. I knew that Lincoln only had authority as Commander-in-chief over the area in rebellion, but I didn't think of the areas no longer in rebellion that way. I just thought of it as a reward for those who would come back to the Union, but you make a valid point. Thanks!

Are you sure? WV wasnt created until 1863

I think WV slaveholders had other things not to be happy about. I am not sure why they would care about the EP since it didnt apply to them.

Slaveholders do not equal WV as a whole.

You dont think the West Virginians were praised?

Funny thing about WV, for instance, Mercer County, where we own our second home, to this day is petitioning Virginia for re-admittance into the Commonwealth, as they did not ratify secession from Virginia, nor were they above the line at the end of the war. The real puzzling thing in the southern half WV, everyone believes they are Rebels. I guess they never got the memo in HS that WV was loyal to the Union.

Every state in the Union and province in the world have their share of malcontents wanting to a part of someother state or province. Business as usual in the real world.

Yup, May 13, 1861 the First Wheeling Convention began, May 15 the WC voted the secession null and void... it just takes time to hammer out all the ins and outs of creating a new state.

Yes, but I didn't realize why it didn't apply to them which is because they already had agreed to a gradual emancipation, which had already been approved. Otherwise they would have been part of a state that had seceded, but they were loyal so they would have been able to keep their slaves, since Lincoln had no power to take slaves in areas that were not in rebellion.

Yeah, I'm well aware of that, they don't make up any state as a whole.

Of course they were. I'm not saying that. I always wondered why the Emancipation Proclamation didn't apply to WV and I just learned something new. Of course the EP applies to any state or part thereof that had been in rebellion, or was still in rebellion. If a section came back they got to keep their slaves, if they didn't they lost them. So I was curious where WV sat in all this, and they didn't --they already took care of the issue. I'm saying if WV had not seceded and remained loyal, then she would have had a right to be covered by the EP and her institution saved.

However, even if the EP did apply, one difference is that WV was seeking statehood, and Sumner said no more slave states, which is why she had to come up with the Willey amendment before she would be admitted.

Many mistakenly believe that secession was widely popular in the south. Look up Southern Unionist, Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Northern Alabama were strong holds of Pro Unionist.

They were just yankee tourists who didn't go home! **** Yankees!

Smile when you say that!
There were also many Southerners who called themselves Jackson Democrats.

The modern so called state of West Virginia is much larger than the part that voted for statehood, part of the punishment of Virginia.

So called?

The most important thing to say is that West Virginians never wanted to separate from Virginia. The statehood movement is highly distorted, one newspaper editor in the northern panhandle in 1861 said "recent troubles" had "awakened a spirit of independence in Western Virginia that did not previously exist." (emphasis mine) In other words, the statehood movement was of wartime origin. That same newspaper editor, John G. Jacobs, "suspected that they were more interested in place and office for themselves than in the welfare of the western people."(Moore, A Banner in the Hills, pg. 129) The vote for statehood was less than 19,000, a vote which Mark A. Snell recently called a "fiasco".

This is the popular vote on secession from the US in WV and Tennessee, you can see how much of the state is composed of secessionist counties, though they were less populated. The important thing to remember is that once the war began many of those counties in gray threw their support to Richmond and not Wheeling, particularly in the southwest.

As you can see from the map, those people in southern WV are correct.

As far as slavery goes, Waitman T. Willey, who wrote the Willey Amendment for gradual emancipation, which was required by Congress for statehood, wrote it in such a way that not a single slave was freed when West Virginia became a state on June 20, 1863. He himself owned two slaves in 1860, one of whom would have had to wait til 1869 to achieve freedom, and the other would not have been freed at all, since she would have been 21 in 1863 and therefore a slave for life. No slave 21 or older was to be freed. The WV General Assembly ended slavery in Feb. 1865. As far as Willey's slaves go, it is possible he emancipated them, this is something I don't know, but I used them as an expample of how the Amendment worked.

Based on one editorial you come to the conclusion that "West Virginians never wanted to separate from Virginia"?
You may want to read up on the Battle of Cheat Mountain and the reason that Lee's first assignment was to suppress the uprising against the secession. There were many pro union news papers that were burned to the ground in the South.
The maps you posted are very interesting, I wonder how they break down by population?

No, not based on one editorial, I've studied the subject for years. West Virginia was engineered into the Union, this view is becoming more widely accepted, as in Mark Snell's new book. To quote one of the Wheeling Unionist legislators, Mr. Chapman J. Stuart, Dec. 10, 1861, concerning the statehood vote-

Charles Ambler, Debates and Proceedings of the First Consitutional Convention of West Virginia, Vol. 1, pg. 376

That is only for some 40 counties, the total number of voters for the 50 counties was about 70,000. I am not saying that West Virginians, taken as a whole, were in favor of secession, just that when the war started, many of the non-secessionists supported Richmond over Wheeling, otherwise the soldier totals would not be about equal for both sides, it would favor the Union. The current estimate is about 20-22,000 for each side. The same effect can be seen in the Richmond secession convention. Most West Virginia delegates voted against the Ordinance of Secession on April 17, but once it had passed, most of them signed the Ordinance, 29 of 49. West Virginia's attachment to Virginia has been underestimated.

And there were just as many West Virginians in Lee's forces at Cheat as in the Federal, and far more West Virginians under Lee at Gettysburg than in the Federal forces.

I've been wondering about things like that, obviously WV means more to me than many states because she's right on the other side of the River and I'm in a river county so I've tried to do a lot of reading up on her.

I mean select groups of men are pretty much what caused secession, right? Governments are who decide things and then the people are either expected to vote or just accept their decision. Kind of like Ohio and the smoking ban. Our legislature came up with the law, but Ohioans had to approve it, which we did. So did people of each state that seceded have a vote on the issue? Again, I don't want to get in a fight over anything, I just honestly don't know how it worked. It may have also worked differently in different states. I'll admit that much of my info comes from two sources, WV Culture and History site which has original documents, and the Wheeling Intelligencer of the time, so... there you have it, a very slanted view.
TIA.

Most states in the Union including the original 13, were 'engineered' into the Union W. Va. was not the first nor the last.