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While reading Sherman's letter to the mayor of Atlanta I was remind of the Confederacy's attempt to disallow the democratic decision of eastern Tennessee and West Virginia's to seceded from the portions of the their respective states that chose to secede from the United States. Even more telling when the Kentucky voted to remain in the Union, the Confederacy recognized the illegitimate government of Kentucky and invade the state in their support despite Kentucky's avowed neutrality in the conflict. It appears that the democratic right to self-determination was only for some states and regions and not for others.
There was a lot of political disputes among the leaders in the CSA. The political basis of states right swung so fully in that direction that it made it impossible for the federal CSA government to function. I fully expect that had they won the war the CSA states would have divided into separate countries and most possibly fought wars against themselves.
I've argued in the past that the issue of states rights was really a tool more than a cause. It is a right which always gets seen through the light of "Does it currently hurt or help my agenda?"
President Jackson, famously the champion of states rights, behaved like a staunch Federalist when it came to the South Carolina Nullification crisis, and reverted to a states righter when he wished to destroy the national bank. And he turned into a nobody's rights but mine despot when it came to the Supreme Court ruling against the native tribe removal act.
The South was the land of states rights, unless the issue was the Fugitive Slave Law. Then they became hard core Federalists, denying that the freedom statutes of states like Ohio or Massachusetts had priority over the national law.
The creation of West Virginia was an example of the Federals supporting secession, the other side of the mirror in the example provided in the OP.
It wasn't just the Civil War era either, it has always been like that and continues to be like that. In the 2000 election controversy the Florida Supreme Court ruled on behalf of Al Gore, so it was the Federalist oriented democrats arguing that the state decision should prevail. The states rights oriented Republican party insisted that it had to be settled on the Federal level and took the case to the US Supreme Court.
Democrats become states righters on issues such as Medical Marijuana, gay marriage and assisted suicide. Republicans become Federalists on those same issues.
States Rights...The Phoney Baloney Issue Which May or May Not Be Useful
The creation of West Virginia was not a "democratic decision". In actuality, West Virginia represents the first, and probably only, successful example of a US Government backed junta. Pierpont himself told Lincoln in Dec. 1862- "The Union men of West Va were not originally for the Union because of the new state." The telegram is in the Library of Congress. The state was created with only a minority support of the residents.
The creation of West Virginia was not a "democratic decision". In actuality, West Virginia represents the first, and probably only, successful example of a US Government backed junta. Pierpont himself told Lincoln in Dec. 1862- "The Union men of West Va were not originally for the Union because of the new state." The telegram is in the Library of Congress. The state was created with only a minority support of the residents.
I think you make them up as you go along and if evil Lord Licorice banishes you back to the Gumdrop Forest when you were oh so close to entering the Promised Land, you flip the board over and send those gingerbread men flying...
I think you make them up as you go along and if evil Lord Licorice banishes you back to the Gumdrop Forest when you were oh so close to entering the Promised Land, you flip the board over and send those gingerbread men flying...
Pretty much this ... and the longer said civil war goes on, the more Draconian the "rules" become.
Hopefully they are not the same rules followed by historians. If historians feel that myths are to be challenged, if they feel it necessary to challenge the issues of "black confederates" and "states rights", then they also have the obligation to challenge the myth of West Virginia. Aside from Russell Weigley's
"A Great Civil War" (pg. 55), no historian has ever come close to telling the true story of West Virginia. I don't attribute it to outright lying, but to indifference and laziness.
How hard it is to actually "look" at Virginia's ordinance of secession and see the names signed to it. If any historian had bothered, he would have counted a majority of West Virginia's delegates signatures on the document. Yet we are told that West Virginia's delegates all ran back to Wheeling to organize Union resistance. Only a baker's dozen of the 49 delegates did that.
We are told that "sectional differances" created the new state, yet we have Pierpont's telegram in the Library of Congress telling Lincoln "The Union men of West Va were not originally for the Union because of the new state". So what does that say about "sectional differences"? There were no serious differences, most West Virginians did not want the new state. This is why the Pierpont government was always a minority government.
Historians tell us that more West Virginians fought for the Union that the Confederacy, but Shepherd University's hand count of soldiers shows that Confederate and Union numbers were about even. (Mark Snell's 'West Virginia and the Civil War' pg. 28). West Virginia was the only border state that did not give the most of its men to the Union.
When the vote for the new state was held, the day after, Oct. 25, 1861, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer headed the Ohio County returns with the following sentence- "We never witnessed an election here in which there was so little interest manifested."
Pierpont was the leader of a junta, nothing more. He was an oppressor of most of the people in West Virginia, to the point where Lincoln's judge-advocate general, Joseph Holt, complainted to Stanton that Pierpont was interferring with the government's prisoner exchange and was basically running his own
prison program. Pierpont was the warden of West Virginia, not the "father".
All these things and more have never been mentioned by historians, though they have had over 100 years to do so. No one has ever read the true history of how West Virginia was created. It was not "democratic".
Aside from Russell Weigley's
"A Great Civil War" (pg. 55), no historian has ever come close to telling the true story of West Virginia.
...................................
. No one has ever read the true history of how West Virginia was created. It was not "democratic".
So....no one has ever read Weigley?
Would you be shattered to learn that you are presenting nothing with which I am not already familiar? That there is no conspiracy to keep this information from the public?
How did you learn about it if the information is being concealed? Did you buy it from a black market street vendor? How did you elude the History Police when they stopped your car and had their Weigley sniffing dogs inspect it?
How would you compare the steps that the Union took to insure that western Virginia remained under Federal control despite the wishes of the majority to the steps that the Confederates took to making sure that eastern Tennessee remained under rebel control against the wishes of the majority of that population?
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