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of West Virginia.
    Many delegates who abandoned Virginia’s secessionist convention gathered in Clarksburg on April 22. Like Carlile, they called for a pro-Union convention, which met subsequently in Wheeling from May 13-15, 1861. That conclave occurred even before the official vote for secession throughout the Old Dominion.
    Just as Virginia essentially had decided to desert the Union well in advance of the statewide vote on secession, western dissidents already had determined to fulfill their desire to separate from the Old Dominion. However, and contrary to West Virginia mythology, the principal forces at work to lead the separation of western counties from the rest of Virginia were more anti-Tidewater than pro-Union, just as they were more anti-black than emancipationist.
    On May 23, a majority of Virginia voters approved the Commonwealth’s Ordinance of Secession. It was not possible to determine accurately the vote total from present-day West Virginia. Vote tampering and destruction of records in western counties precluded an accurate tally of the vote for or against secession in western Virginia, although historians presume it was against. But by how much remains unknown. 22
    In other words, there is no way to tell from that May 1861 vote how deeply the anti-secession [from the U.S.] feelings of the region ran, or how strongly at that moment the pro-secessionist counties were considering the possibility of subsequently leaving the state of Virginia. Specifically, one of the points at issue was whether the strength of the forces advocating separation from Virginia was ebbing or running stronger at that point.
    Twenty counties within present West Virginia supported the Confederacy and opposed separation from the Old Dominion. Thirty western counties apparently were opposed to national disunion an d Virginia’s act of secession. The pro-Confederate minority ran as high as forty per cent in a few pro-Union counties, but in some the reverse also was true. 23
    Because the northwestern Union counties contained about sixty percent of the total population of those western counties and the Confederate-leaning counties only about forty per cent, a 60-40% ratio existed overall, with a majority of apparent Unionists within the future state of West Virginia. Nevertheless, the May 23, 1861 vote in the constitutionally re cognized Commonwealth of Virginia clearly was for secession. 24 Meanwhile, the western counties remained divided on both Virginia’s secession from the Union on the one hand and the proposed separation of the west from the rest of Virginia on the other.
    Some analysts argue that anti-Union, pro-Confederate secessionists were in the majority in western Virginia. Others feel the Unionists had greater support. That is a separate issue from the later plan for western Virginia to secede from the state of Virginia. But it is relevant to the strength of support for western Virginia’s secession from the rest of the state.
    Was that state-splitting constituency a small, vocal, influential, and ultimately decisive minority, as opposed to a majority? Which western counties should be considered: the pro-separation northwestern ones, the counties less inclined to separation and more closely tied to the eastern region, or all the fifty or so counties west of the Blue Ridge? Finally, at what time, if ever, were the numbers of western separatists either more or less than half of the total population of the western counties? Secession had proponents and opposition throughout the South. The same was true both for the state of Virginia as a whole and also within its western counties.
    Through all these deliberations and processes of 1862-1863, while all of the officials and delegates considering separation from the rest of Virginia were from the western counties in question [although not the other areas of Virginia] the majority, including those with the most significant roles and influence, were from the northern