How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [119]
The people stood and listened dumbfounded.… They gathered in knots on the streets and corners in the towns and villages, at the country stores and crossroads, and with bated breaths whispered to each other, “What does it mean?” … [But then] they began to ask … why should they be menaced, devastated, destroyed, because the seashore planters will it so? … Their anger rose to fever heat.… They would protest. They would have another convention.… They would secede from the seceding Virginia.5
Within a month, western Virginians did indeed convene in Wheeling to decide upon a course of action. Leading the effort to secede from Virginia was John S. Carlisle. Pierpont opposed Carlisle’s proposal. He pointed out that, because the federal government maintained that states could not secede from the Union, it could not then recognize a state that had seceded from its parent state. Moreover, he cited the clause in the U.S. Constitution that declares, “no new States shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” Since Carlisle’s proposal would erect a new state within the jurisdiction of Virginia, Virginia would have to consent, and that was not going to happen.
Pierpont’s insights shattered the unity at the Wheeling convention. Anger and recriminations replaced determination during subsequent sessions, until Pierpont himself discovered a way to thread a legal needle that would repair the damage and create the state. His scheme was later recounted by Dayton:
Virginia was still in the Union; only her officers had abandoned their trust.… Virginia was entitled to her representatives in Congress, to elect her legislative agents.… If a legislature thus elected under the law saw fit to grant permission to the counties west of the Alleghenies to form a new State, then the requirement of the federal Constitution would be fully and legally met. If the counties east of the Alleghenies did not want this permission given, let them … elect their accredited membership to the legislature and vote the proposition down.… It was plain sailing after Pierpont had found the way.
Whether the delegates to the convention reacted with stunned silence or with chortles is not recorded. Pierpont was proposing a four-step legal maneuver. Step one entailed declaring that, since Virginia’s elected officials had (from the federal government’s perspective) abandoned their offices, a new election would be held in Virginia to replace them. Voters throughout the state could, as in any election, choose to vote or not. Unspoken, but obvious to all, was that those voters who supported secession would not invalidate their claim by voting in an election for a Virginia that claimed to be part of the United States. In addition, the Confederate army, present throughout nearly all of the slave-holding regions of Virginia, would never permit such an election. In effect, only western Virginia (where the Union army had already established itself) would vote. Step two would be to get the U.S. Congress to recognize and seat those elected as the duly authorized replacement representatives of Virginia. Once thus recognized, step three consisted of creating the new state by complying with the U.S. Constitution. To do so, the replacement legislature of “Virginia” would pass a resolution calling for a statewide referendum on whether or not to allow western Virginia to form itself into a separate state. As with the election of replacement officials, the referendum would be, theoretically, statewide—though here too it was obvious that only voters in western Virginia would participate. Once statehood was approved by those who voted, step four consisted of completing the constitutional