Originally aired on April 14, 1995 - In part 33 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson explains why Virginia’s secession from the Union was one of our nation’s most momentous events.
#33 – Secession of Virginia
In mid-April, 1861, a hysterical wave of emotion swept across the country with the news that Confederate artillery had bombarded Fort Sumter, South Carolina. War actually seemed to be welcomed, as if a tension which had grown unendurable had at last been shattered. An unsophisticated people who knew nothing of the grim reality of combat surged out under waving flags with glad shouts and bubbling laughter, as if the thing that had happened called for rejoicing.
The day after Sumter’s surrender, President Abraham Lincoln called on all states for 75,000 militia to enter Federal service for 90 days in order to put down an insurrection “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings”. Yet if Lincoln’s call engendered a harmonious unity in the North, that same call knocked the Commonwealth of Virginia out of the Union.
Without Virginia, the Southern Confederacy could not have hoped to win its war for independence. American history has known few events more momentous than the secession of the Old Dominion. It turned the simple suppression of a rebellion into a four-year cataclysm that shook American to the depth of its being.
People in Richmond were still celebrating the fall of Fort Sumter when news hit of Lincoln’s call for soldiers. Virginia’s quota was only 2,340 men (roughly 2 ½ regiments); but this call on the states for armed men – this stated determination by Lincoln to make war – looked to Virginians like flagrant coercion.
Virginia’s refusal to join the Confederate States in the winter of 1860-1861 had never meant anything more than a desire to wait and see: a thing hope by Virginians that the Deep South might somehow find a solution short of establishing a separate nation and going to war. Having waiting, Virginians had seen. The thin hope was dead.
On April 16, 1861, Governor John Letcher – a Lexington moderate who loved the Union – responded to Lincoln’s call with defiance. “You object,” Letcher stated to the President, “is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me (for troops) for such an object….will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we (in Virginia) will meet it in a spirit as determined as (your) administration had exhibited toward the South”.
The next day (Wednesday, April 17), the Virginia Convention took another vote on secession. Weeks earlier, that body had soundly defeated a move toward disunion. This time the vote was 88 for, 55 against. North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas would soon follow Virginia’s lead, bringing the total number of Confederate states to eleven.
Even before Virginia completed severing its ties with the North, state militia moved swiftly to seize two federal installations of vital significance. The first target was Harpers Ferry, which contained a major arsenal, was a link in important point of the Confederacy. A few days later, Virginia soldiers occupied Norfolk’s Gosport Navy Yard, the largest shipbuilding and repair facility in the South.
Virginia’s withdrawal from the Union, however, was doubly traumatic. The western counties of the state had long been antipathetic to the tidewater people; and when Virginia pulled out of the Union, the westerners pulled out of Virginia.
In due course, they organized their own state of West Virginia, which the Federal government would hasten to add to the Union. Although there might be a good deal to be said about the legal ins and outs of the matter, this action made Virginia the only state to lose territory as a direct consequence of the Civil War.
How sad it is that the Mother State of America, so reluctant to abandon the Union, became the major battlefield of the nation’s worst conflict and suffered the heaviest damage ever inflicted on any part of America.
