Rogue State Read Online Free PDF Page B

panhandle region.
    Following and precipitated by ratification of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession, delegates from western counties gathered at Washington Hall [now called Independence Hall] in Wheeling on June 11, 1861, to determine a course of action for northwestern Virginia. 25 It was about as far from Richmond and the Tidewater area as one could get within the boundaries of the Old Dominion.
    Committees on Organization, Rules, and Credentials were immediately established. The Committee on Credentials ruled that eighty eight delegates, representing thirty two counties [not fifty!], were entitled to seats in the convention. Other delegates were later admitted as members during the course of the Wheeling convention. 26 The Committee on Permanent Organization selected Arthur I. Boreman to serve as president of the convention. 27
    Boreman acknowledged that “in this Convention we have no ordinary political gathering. We have no ordinary task before us. We come here to carry out and execute, and it may be, to institute a government for ourselves. We are determined to live under a State Government in the United States of America and under the Constitution of the United States. It requires stout hearts to execute this purpose; it requires men of courage, of unfaltering determination; and I believe, in the gentlemen who compose this Convention, we have the stout hearts and the men who are determined in this purpose.” 28 The fact that Virginia was still and always remained a state and a part of the federal Union in the eyes of the government of the United States despite passage of an ordinance of secession by a portion of Virginia’s population mattered naught.
    On June 13, John Carlile, representing the Committee on Business, presented “A Declaration of the People of Virginia.” The document called for reorganization of the government of Virginia on the grounds that, due to Virginia’s decision to secede from the United States, all state government offices had been vacated. On the following day, Carlile’s committee reported a draft ordinance for this purpose, and the debate began. This was the seed from which the eventual “Reconstituted Government of Virginia” grew. 29
    Several members of the convention, including Dennis Dorsey of Monongalia County, initially opposed the reorganization plan. Opponents of “Reorganization” called instead for immediate and permanent separation from eastern Virginia. Carlile, who had advocated the same approach in the First Wheeling Convention, now persuaded delegates that constitutional restrictions made it first necessary to form a loyal government of Virginia in lieu of the Richmond government. He proposed that new state legislature could then give permission for creation of a new state from the territory of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in other words, from itself. 30
    Carlile stated: “I find that even I, who first started the little stone down the mountain, have now to apply the rubbers to other gentlemen who have outrun me in the race, to check their impetuosity.” 31 In reality, the separatists were creating a fiction from the start in order to secure their goals. And, in truth, both groups [reorganizers and immediate separatists] wanted a new, separate state for the west. The differences were procedural, not substantive.
    Despite disagreement regarding how actually to create a legal and permanent division of the state [they failed in the first and realized the second], nearly all the delegates noted that differences between Virginia’s eastern and western counties were irreconcilable and argued for that separation. This notion of “irreconcilable” differences with the east fit well with the other extreme words, ideas, and actions of the separatists. In addition to “irreconcilable,” the vocabulary included: “nullification,” “separation,” “secession” [from a state, but not from