This is an excellent series of videos.
Check out the site West Virginia – The Other History too.
We have this false image of West Virginia as being a bastion of loyal Unionist mountaineers who created an independent state during the War Between the States. The truth is that there was a putsch similar to the one in Missouri where Gen. George McClellan invaded western Virginia from Ohio and helped set up the puppet “restored” government in Wheeling.
Here’s an excerpt from John Alexander Williams’ book on southern West Virginia’s support for secession, Appalachia: A History:
“It was also a fact, however, that the mountain region had plenty of secessionists. Thomas Clingman and William Waightstill Avery, Democratic rivals of Vance for leadership in western North Carolina, were “fire-eaters” even before the secession crisis. The representatives of southwest Virginia, including present southern West Virignia, voted as heavily in favor of secession in the Richmond convention as representatives from the northwest voted against it. ..”
Half of West Virginians fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States most famously Stonewall Jackson who was born in Clarksburg. Southern West Virginia and eastern West Virginia were pro-Confederate. The state of West Virginia was essentially created by the yellow counties in the northern part of the state around Wheeling. The eastern panhandle of West Virginia was thrown in to keep the Baltimore & Ohio railroad within the boundaries of the new state.
Richard Henry Owen has a book called Rogue State: The Unconstitutional Process of Establishing West Virginia Statehood which describes the illegal process by which West Virginia was created. I plan to order the book and review it on this website. It was essentially same process by which Missouri was restored to the Union which was through violence, illegal test oaths to disenfranchise Confederate sympathizers, illegal seizures of property, intimidating Confederate sympathizers at the polls, etc.
The 14th Amendment which we pretend today is legal and which disenfranchised ex-Confederates was passed at gunpoint by the Black Republicans during Reconstruction against the consent of the Southern states. None of this happened with the “consent of the governed.” The Lincoln administration was a military dictatorship that violated virtually every amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Former Confederates seized power in West Virginia during Reconstruction, forced Francis Pierpont and his gang out of power and called a constitutional convention which replaced the Constitution of 1863 with the Constitution of 1872 which event today is still its constitution.
Note: West Virginians fought for Virginia in every major battle of the War Between the States.
Virginia sued the Federal Government twice, between 1866-71, to get their lost counties back.
The Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and even a Texas Union cavalry regiment, were all Yankee regiments that had been redesignated.
For example,
Captain Joseph Boyce of Company ‘D’, 1st Missouri Infantry C.S.A. recorded in his reminiscence of the surrender of the “Hornet’s Nest” at Shiloh:
“..We Captured a great many prisoners and then became aware of the fact that they were Missouri troops and a part of Prentiss’ Division. The regiments some of the prisoners belonged to were the queerest Missourians we ever saw. They were nearly all Germans, spoke English very poorly, but informed us they were nearly all from Belleville, Ill…”
This subject of fake Southern Union regiments is in need of some serious research and a book written about it.
I appreciate your further historical input on HW’s articles, James. It broadens my understanding. I was raised in Minnesota, which is a place where leftist propaganda made it into public education long before it was the national default position. In high school in the late 1970’s-early 1980’s, my social studies instruction was even filled with the feminist garbage about the patriarchy, and how all men are naturally rapists.
@Rich L.
I didn’t know what Political Correctness was, until 1993.
In school, they taught us the Southern Sweep of History, as Professor Clyde Wilson calls it. We learned about Virginia, the Carolinas and the Dixie Frontier. We also had Texas Social Studies and Texas History. None of which, needless to say, was politically correct.
Rich- I never heard any of that, but I was the decade before you in the Public Schools in the ‘Land of 10,000 Liberals.’ But my wife regales me constantly with the bigotry of her fellow teachers as hard-core Leftist ideologues, since the day we were married, over a quarter-century ago…..
Ja, come the Restoration, every last Swede and Norski will have to undergo ‘re-education’ in the camps. But the Finns, i fear, are beyond redemption, especially those in the Arrowhead. LOL They actually let a “Mr. Zimmerman” out of Duluth, thinking he could sing….. if you nomeimsayin….
Zimmy stole from Guthrie, who also couldn’t sing. I love the Arrowhead, and hope to relocate there, to a smaller town not yet unhinged by Scandinavian utopianism. I’ll keep my distance from the Finns, and anyone trying to get me to eat lutefisk. Lutefisk, or “cod jello” as I call it, was invented by the devil.
Francis Pierpont, like most of the Southern turncoats, had to live out the remainder of his life in the North.
West Virginia would be a nice place to live. There are some ugly areas and of course there’s the opioid problem … but it’s mostly white and I don’t believe it’s a blue state without looking it up. We consider it part of the “enlarged” Confederate States. It’s weird about “Virginia,” mostly white, lots of people like us yet they vote in scumbag governors like the demoncrat in now ???!!
Doing research on the legislative history of the 13th Amendment, I was surprised to read it was ratified by the State of Virginia in February 1865. This was two months BEFORE the surrender at Appomattox.
Do you know anything about this? About how Virginia ratified the 13th Amendment while it was still the seat of the capital city of the Confederate States of America? Was it a rump, occupation government or something. Thanks for any information you may have.
It was West Virginia that ratified the 13th Amendment, not Virginia. It was the 3rd legislature, 40% of this body were not native West Virginians, almost all were born in the north, as was the governor, Boreman, who was a Pennsylvania native.