Chris Jackson

165 years ago today the voters of northwestern Virginia went to the polls and chose to tear their own region away from the Confederacy and build a brand new state loyal to the Union. It was the first step in creating West Virginia, the only state ever born directly out of the Civil War. Virginia was deeply divided against itself. When the state seceded and joined the Confederacy in 1861, the mountainous counties of its northwest were furious. These were rugged highlands of small farms, not the slaveholding plantation country of the east, and the people there felt little loyalty to the planter aristocracy in Richmond that had voted to leave the Union. They had long resented being dominated and underrepresented by the eastern part of the state, and now they were being dragged into a rebellion many of them wanted no part of. So they rebelled against the rebellion. Union military victories in the region that summer, at places like Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Corrick's Ford, battles this thread covered back in July, had driven Confederate forces out and given the Unionists of northwestern Virginia the security to act. On October 24, 1861, voters across 39 northwestern counties went to the polls and approved an ordinance to form a separate, Union-loyal state, carved out of Virginia itself. They did not yet have the name West Virginia. Early proposals called the new state Kanawha, after the river and region. But the vote on this day set the process firmly in motion. Over the next months a constitution was drafted, boundaries were debated, and the thorny question of slavery within the new state was worked out, with gradual emancipation eventually written in as a condition. The effort succeeded. On June 20, 1863, in the middle of the war, West Virginia was formally admitted to the Union as the 35th state, the only state ever created by breaking away from a Confederate state during the conflict. Its very existence was a product of the war, a living monument to the divisions that ran not just between North and South, but within the South itself. It was constitutionally awkward, since the national Constitution forbids creating a new state from an existing one without that state's consent, and the consent came from a pro-Union rump government rather than secessionist Richmond. But in the hard logic of the war, it stood. The vote on this day in 1861 was the beginning of a new state, forged in the fire of the Civil War, that endures to this day.