As we continue to remember the events as they unfolded during the Civil War sesquicentennial year, I have been doing my best to put up a post marking the milestones of each major day, particularly for those of us in Virginia. Today marks the 150th anniversary of one of the sadder days of the war, the day Virginia’s secession from the union was complete.
Following the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12-13, 1861, the most northern states of the south – Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina – found themselves in a quandry. While these states had withstood the earlier secession of the Deep South cotton states, they were now faced with a decision – to join their fellow slave states in seceding from the Union, or to allow their territory and their militia to be used by the Federal government to put down the insurrection in the South.
Virginia was not as predisposed towards secession as some of its fellow southern states. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, on November 15, 1860, Virginia Governor John Letcher had convened a special session of the General Assembly to take up the issue of secession. The General Assembly then voted to hold a special secession convention, which began on February 13, 1861. In addition to the secession convention, the General Assembly also voted to sponsor a Peace Convention, to be held in Washington in February to try to develop a compromise that could save the Union. The Peace Convention failed. But so did the secession convention in Richmond – at least, for a time. Virginians who favored immediate secession pushed through a resolution that would have removed Virginia from the Union – a resolution which failed by a vote of 88-45. The convention adopted a number of other resolutions, most of them favoring Southern policy positions, but also including a resolution that the eight slave states that remained in the Union at the time meet to discuss a way to compromise and return the 7 Cotton States to the federal fold.
That meeting never happened.
After Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, public opinion began to shift. Those in Virginia who had been staunch unionists blanched at the idea of fighting their colleagues in South Carolina. When President Lincoln telegraphed Governor Letcher, requesting he call out the militia to support Federal efforts to suppress the hostilities in South Carolina, he received the following response:
“?Executive Department, Richmond, Va., April 15, 1861. Hon. Simon Cameron, Secretary of War: Sir: I have received your telegram of the 15th, the genuineness of which I doubted. Since that time I have received your communications mailed the same day, in which I am requested to detach from the militia of the State of Virginia “the quota assigned in a table,” which you append, “to serve as infantry or rifleman for the period of three months, unless sooner discharged.” In reply to this communication, I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object – an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795 – will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and, having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the administration has exhibited toward the South.”
The die was cast. two days later, the secession convention voted to provisionally secede from the Union on an 88-55 vote. Of the delegates who voted against secession, many came from Northern Virginia, including the President of the Convention, John Janney and John Armistead Carter, both of Loudoun, George William Brent of Alexandria, and William H. Dulaney of Fairfax.
The ordinance of secession was provisional pending a referendum of the entire Commonwealth, which was held on May 23rd, 1861. The final vote was 132,201 in favor of secession and 37,451. Virginia became the heart of the new Confederacy of southern states, and seven days after ratification, Richmond began serving as the capital of the new nation.
Half a decade later, the Commonwealth would be in ruins, Richmond nearly destroyed, Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah ravaged, and almost 15,000 Virginia men would have died from combat or disease. 123 battles would be fought on our soil. And countless thousands of civilians would have been displaced, their lives changed forever.
