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It was fiendish, it was brilliant, and it worked. In May 1861 Pierpont was elected governor of what was called “the replacement government of Virginia,” and in June Congress officially seated its representatives to the House and Senate. In August the new “Virginia” legislature passed a resolution enabling the state to hold a referendum on whether or not to allow a new state to be created from Virginia’s western region. The referendum took place in October. As before, voting took place only in western Virginia. Since Virginia’s constitution required voting to be done by voice, not by secret ballot, the referendum was overwhelmingly approved. Consequently, another convention was held, this one to write a constitution for the new state. That constitution was then sent to Congress for final approval.

Here, however, the plan began to unravel. While Congress had played along with the charade of seating representatives from “Virginia,” recognizing “Virginia’s” approval of West Virginia’s creation was another question. Kentucky Senator Lazarus W. Powell put the cards on the table:

I do not believe it was ever contemplated by the Constitution of the country, that less than one-fourth of the people constituting a State should, in revolutionary times like these, form themselves into a legislature and give their consent to themselves to form a new State within the limits of one of the States of this Union. It is inaugurating a principle that, in my judgment, is dangerous.

Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade was unimpressed. In his view, because the South had abandoned the Union, Congress was not playing with a full deck:

If all was calm, if all was peace, if all was just as it should be, then to tear old Virginia asunder might cause a commotion that would induce men to hesitate.… Now is the time for great events, when you can see that a commotion in the land has brought it within the compass of your power to do a great and mighty good, to perform it. To treat the fact of that commotion as a reason why you should not do it is the narrowest statesmanship in the world.

The times were such that paradoxes—and brute force—ruled. The Senate ultimately passed an amended statehood bill by a vote of twenty-three to seventeen; the House passed it ninety-six to fifty-five. The amendment stipulated that the West Virginia Constitutional Convention insert language into the document explicitly ending slavery.

The reason such language was not already in the proposed constitution was that two of the counties that had voted in favor of creating West Virginia were at the northern end of the fertile and slave-holding Shenandoah Valley, where the presence of Union troops had enabled a vote to be taken. Some in Congress questioned the logic of including these counties, separated by mountains from the rest of western Virginia. But it wasn’t just those two Shenandoah Valley counties western Virginians dreamed of possessing. “Virginia” Senator John Carlisle maintained that all the land west of the Blue Ridge mountains should compose the new state.

Top of the Shenandoah Valley

Western Virginians were not alone in urging Congress to include the Shenandoah Valley in the new state’s boundary. The B&O Railroad, another powerful interest (closely connected to Pierpont) urged it as well. The North’s southernmost railroad was a Confederate target no matter what, boundaries being meaningless in wartime. But the B&O, looking ahead to the postwar period, knew that it would be better off having none of its track under Virginia’s jurisdiction.7 Senator Carlisle spoke for both parties when he beseeched the Senate to locate West Virginia’s eastern boundary farther east, “including the counties in the valley, which properly belong, in a commercial aspect, to the same trading community that we do. But we can at least do this: we can secure the counties through which the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passes.” West Virginia, as it turned out, did not get everything it wanted, but the B&O