Statehood Referendum Oct. 24, 1861
West Virginia statehood is a story everyone knows and no one does. When I say there is no proof that West Virginians wanted their own state I am quite serious. I am not the first to ask this question. It was asked by Daniel Polsley, the Lt. Governor of the Restored Government of Virginia. He asked the question before the assembled delegates of the 2nd Wheeling Convention on Aug. 16, 1861. He had heard that there was a "clamor" for action, and he wanted to know if anyone had any evidence to support this. His answer was that there were three or four petitions with about 700 names. Mr. Polesly was not impressed. A week before Mr. Polesly posed his question, another delegate, Chapman J. Stuart, on Aug. 8 at the same Convention, chided John Carlile for pushing the statehood idea. Mr. Stuart said that he had not been sent to Wheeling to divide the state of Virginia or write a Constitution. "The thing was never mooted before my people, but just the opposite."
Nevertheless, a referendum was offered to voters of thirty-nine counties, plus nine other counties if they chose to participate, by the Wheeling Convention, to be decided on October 24, 1861. If you count just the 41 counties which were credited with votes, the referendum only drew 29% of the voters. If you count all 50 counties of the eventual West Virginia, then the vote consists of only 23%. The poor turnout cannot be explained by men absent in the Union army. The poor turnout cannot be explained by a displaced populace. The poor turnout is explained by the most obvious reason. The people did not support it. (1)
When Ohio troops entered Parkersburg and Wheeling at the end of May, 1861, they entered mostly unopposed. There was no bombardment, no fighting in the streets, no fleeing masses of people. And this was true of all the counties along the B&O railroad lines. The first real skirmish happened at Philippi in Barbour County, and did not seriously affect the populace there. Subsequent battles in West Virginia were mostly in wilderness and few citizens were more than temporarily affected. The counties where most of the votes came from were basically intact. There was no displaced populace in West Virginia.
Contrary to what you might read in standard histories, West Virginians did not rush to the defense of the Union. Even historian Charles Ambler said as much- "Admitted apathy toward the Union in its militant capacity was great." (2) In August of 1861 newspapers in Wheeling and Wellsburg complained about West Virginia's lack of Union volunteers. The Wellsburg Herald on Aug. 3 wrote"...after all
the drumming and all the gas about a separate state she has actually organized in the field four not entire regiments of soldiers and one of these hails almost entirely from the Panhandle." (3) We know that a large percentage of these "four not entire regiments" came from O hio and Pennsylvania. It would be generous to assume that 4,000 native West Virgini ans had entered Federal service by the time the statehood referendum took place in October. In Ohio County, home to Wheeling itself, nearly 3,000 voters went missing on Oct. 24. The poor turnout cannot be explained by men absent in the Union army.
One thing we do know certainly about the vote is that the numbers credited to Hampshire County were cast almost entirely by Ohio soldiers. (4) How much voting abuse affected the numbers we will probably never know, only suspect. John Alexander Williams called the vote in Kanawha County "absurdly large". (5) It was in Charleston, Kanawha County, that Gen. Cox (U.S.), was stationed with thousands of Ohio troops, and the vote from Kanawha County was seriously atypical of the surrounding counties.
One of the more interesting aspects of the statehood vote is the resistance put up by Brooke County, distanced both from the Confederate and Union armies. 30% of the 511 votes were against the new state, the strongest stand against on record. Interesting too is the letter quoted in J.G. Randall's "Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln", pages 447-448. Judge Joseph Applegate of Wellsburg, Brooke County, wrote to Pierpoint on June 22, 1861-"I resign the commission I received of you...to swear the officers of the county of Brooke on account of reasons known already to you." John G. Jacob, the owner-editor of the Wellsburg Herald, believed the Wheeling delegates were more interested in state offices for themselves than the
welfare of western Virginia. (6)
The statehood referendum truly is a serious reflection of West Virginian's wishes, but not in the way historians have viewed it. They see the glass as one-quarter full, but actually it is three-quarters empty.
Of the 18,408 votes in favor of the new state, 70% of the votes (12, 946) came from the counties in yellow, reflecting a voter turnout of 46%.
Of these 16 counties only 8 reflected a vote of 50% or more of the available pool of voters. The 50 counties had 69, 504 voters as of the 1860 Census.The 32 counties in blue gave only 5,187 votes in favor of statehood, reflecting a turnout of only 14%, These counties together also had a majority in favor of secession from the United States in the May 23 vote for the Ordinance of Secession. This division between the A and B sections of West Virginia also lie generally on the route of the B&O Railroad. Two counties of the eastern panhandle, Berkeley and Jefferson, are not shown on the map as they became part of West Virginia after statehood in 1863.
1. Curry, Richard O. A House Divided, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, pg. 175, note 41. On voters boycotting the polls on issues they disliked Curry wrote- "In the election between Ross and Richardson in Ohio County in February, 1863 for Battele's seat in the Constitutional Convention, Ross won it by only a majority of 200 in a total of 2,900 votes cast. Six weeks later only 1,800 votes were cast on the Willey Amendment. Neither guerrilla warfare, which affected Ohio County only indirectly, nor military enlistments can account for so large a differential in so short a period of time."
2. Ambler, Charles. Francis H. Pierpont, Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1937, pg. 99.
3. McGregor, James. The Disruption of Virginia, Macmillan, 1922, pg. 245,
footnote 2.
4. ibid., pg. 270. See December 13, 1861 record from the Constitutional Convention records.
5. Williams, John Alexander. West Virginia, A History, W.W. Norton, 1984, pg. 81.
6. Moore, George E. A Banner in the Hills, Appleton-Century, 1964, pg. 129