Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. Parkersburg, Va., Jan. 1, 1861
The small Southern courthouse was packed to bursting. On this first afternoon of the new year, the Commonwealth of Virginia was preparing to chart her path forward – with the Union or apart from it – and the people of Wood County had gathered to make their voices heard.
Presiding over the meeting was a local squire named B.H. Foley, a conservative Democrat described by one attendee as “a large slave owner.” Seated near him were the two John J. Jacksons – grave, bearded worthies, father and son – whose cousin, not yet known as Stonewall, would soon link their family name indelibly with the Confederate cause.
But these Virginian patriarchs had not come to lend their support to the rebellion. They intended, rather, to denounce it as folly, as criminality – perhaps even as treason.
Wood County lay across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the plantations of Tidewater Virginia, far from the Chesapeake shores where black children were considered a cash crop. Slaves here – despite the holdings of a few men like Foley – totaled less than 2 percent of the population. Fortunes were made instead from the steamboats and barges that plied the nearby Ohio River, carrying Pennsylvania iron and coal through Parkersburg on their way down to Cincinnati, Louisville and beyond. A few farsighted entrepreneurs were beginning to see potential in the local “rock oil” – also known as petroleum – that had long been a nuisance to people drilling wells for drinking water.
If the Old Dominion seceded, the far side of the river – the state of Ohio – would, overnight, become a foreign country, perhaps even enemy territory. And in that event, one politician warned, places like Wood County would bear the brunt of “sacrifices in battle, and raids, and reprisals, and destruction … of every kind.” Others pointed out that slaveholders would pay an especially heavy price: their human “property” could escape across an international border, beyond the reach of legal restitution. Slavery would be far more secure within the Union than without it, many Virginians argued.
And so the hills of western Virginia echoed with the thunder of cannons during that first week of 1861 – but not the din of battle. Instead, it was the local “Union Men” firing “one hundred guns in honor of Major Anderson for the gallant stand he is taking in defence of Fort Sumpter.”
At the Parkersburg meeting, citizens quickly found a common voice. The elder of Stonewall Jackson’s cousins – a grizzled general in the Virginia state militia – was chosen to draft a series of resolutions. “In the judgment of this meeting, ‘secession is revolution,’ ” declared the document’s first paragraph, quoting Daniel Webster. It continued:
We are deeply impressed with the conviction that our national prosperity, our hopes of happiness and future security, depend on preserving the Union as it is, and we see nothing in the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States – as much as we may have desired the election of another – as affording any just or reasonable cause for the abandonment of what we regard as the best Government ever yet devised by the wisdom and patriotism of men.
By acclamation, the assemblage endorsed these resolutions, among others, with near-perfect unanimity. (Just one or two shouts of nay were heard in the hall, witnesses would remember.)
Similar calls for resistance to secession were being heard throughout much of Virginia as a special session of the state legislature prepared to confront the national crisis. Even in Richmond, the slaveholder and former congressman John Minor Botts was decrying South Carolina’s “headlong impetuosity” and “disloyalty and treachery” that had pitched the nation toward catastrophe.
But nowhere did such cries resound louder than among the Appalachians. In Wheeling, 80 miles up the Ohio River from Parkersburg, a large gathering of “workingmen” condemned the “fanatics who with unholy zeal would plunge their country, their brothers, and kindred into the dark and fearful abyss of disunion and civil war. … Patriots of Virginia, resist it unto the bitter end!” And when a band struck up “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the sturdy laborers “stood up, swinging their hats and cheering with the wildest enthusiasm,” according to a report in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer.
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The Intelligencer’s editors were among the Virginians who had begun advocating disunion of a different kind. A front-page headline on Jan. 1 proclaimed: “A WARNING TO THE SECESSION TRAITORS IN OUR MIDST. Western Virginia will Secede from Eastern Virginia, if she Secedes from the Union.”
Perhaps in deference to the occasion, however, the editorial page struck a gentler, more hopeful note that New Year’s Day. Gazing a year ahead, into the uncertain future, the editors wrote: “We hope that if 1862 comes to us all, it may come amidst different scenes from those which we are now beholding throughout the country. – That it may … see no miserable rattlesnake flag substituted in any section of the Union for the glorious stars and stripes.”
But this New Year’s wish was destined to be unfulfilled. The year 1862 would open upon a divided nation and a divided commonwealth.
Before long, one of the orators at the Parkersburg meeting – a promising young Wood County attorney – would be sworn in as governor of a brand-new state. And Stonewall Jackson’s cousin would become West Virginia’s first federal judge, appointed to the bench by Abraham Lincoln.
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Sources: Wheeling (Va.) Daily Intelligencer, Jan 1, 4 and 7, 1861; Richmond Daily Dispatch, Jan. 5, 1861; Otis K. Rice and Stephen W. Brown, “West Virginia: A History”; Betty Leavengood, “Wood County: West Virginia”; Charles Austin Whiteshot, “The Oil-Well Driller”; William A. Link, “Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia”; Daniel W. Crofts, “Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis.”
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
