May 23, 1861 Vote on Secession from U.S.

The information for this map came from the reported voting results on Virginia's Ordinance of Secession, which was put to public vote on May 23, 1861, although some of those results had to be reconstructed by Richard O. Curry. Those votes and his reconstruction can be found in his "A House Divided", Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964. In my opinion, though, he was far too lenient towards the Union side and much too conservative on secession and state loyalty in west Virginia. For instance, in choosing conflicting reports of the vote for Berkeley County, one which gave a majority against secession of only 400 votes, and another with reported results of 1,226 to 428 against secession, he chose the latter. His reason was that reported returns rather than reported majorities would be more reliable, a reason I don't think very reasonable. If you look at the number of Confederate soldiers from Berkeley County as opposed to Union soldiers from Berkeley County, it is approximately 800 to 200. This to me seems to support the majority report rather than reported returns.

    He states in his appendix "Yet, throughout this study, in counties for which conflicting reports as to the size of the majority existed, the higher Union figures were chosen, the lower Secessionist."

    In 1985, 9 of the original poll books for Harrison County on the May 23, 1861 secession vote were found in the archives of West Virginia University in Morgantown. While not complete, it contained over 2,000 votes. The missing volumes would have added perhaps another 3-400 votes. A tabulation of the recorded votes was surprising. Instead of confirming what everyone had believed for 124 years, that Harrison County had voted 1,691 to 694 against the secession ordinance, it showed a vote of 1,022 for secession, and 1,031 against. The missing votes would only have confirmed a modest majority for either side. I have posted a link to the original article by Dorothy Davis in the "Links" section.

   The approximate vote on the Ordinance of Secession in the 50 counties of Virginia that became West Virginia was 34,677 against and 19,121 in favor. Stating the vote

in this manner, though, is inherently dishonest and misleading, as it implies the right

of majority to a situation where it did not exist. It further implies that the creation of

a state from 50 western counties was a natural consequence.The results of this vote have been widely misused by historians, again, like sectional differences, in order to justify events rather than understand them. The vote in West Virginia against the ordinance was just that, nothing more. It was not a vote for the Union over Virginia in the event of a war, and it was not a vote on forming a separate state. It was a vote for the status quo.

    In Louisiana, voters elected non-Secession candidates to their Convention by 48%. In Alabama, 39% of the delegates voted against secession. For some southern states it was the firing on Fort Sumter that was the breaking point for secession, for others, like Virginia, it was President Lincoln's call for troops from southern states to put down the rebellion. In West Virginia it was neither of these. The breaking point for West Virginians was the presence of Ohio troops in western Virginia that pushed many who voted against secession to support Virginia over the Union.

    This was observed by Gen. Cox in the Kanawha Valley, he stated that many in Charleston had opposed secession, yet had joined the Confederate army (1). Capt. Andrew Barbee of the Putnam County Border Rifles, said that he and all his men had voted against secession, yet when war came they all joined the Virginia militia. His company later became part of the 22nd Virginia Infantry.

    The erosion of the anti-Secession vote can be seen by comparing the Secession Vote map with the Confederate Recruitment map. Counties like Cabell or Wayne (2), which had voted 3 or 4 to 1 against secession gave at least half of their soldiers to the Confederacy. Recent studies of the soldiers from Cabell and Wayne show that 44-48% were Confederate. (3)

     An article in the New York Daily Tribune from one of Eli Thayer's New Englanders in Ceredo, Wayne County, stated-"We are in a miserably confused condition here. The 'reign of terror' has not yet commenced in this county, but the traitors are trying it, and would, if they dared, begin to arrest and drive off Union men. At the voting on the ordinance of Secession, the county gave 585 majority against the ordinance. But many of the votes against it were obtained by careful and discreet management (altogether different from the mode of managing such matters in your State), and the votes cannot be relied upon. We cannot depend upon more than half the number in an emergency."(4)

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    Another reason that the Secession vote is a poor guide to Unionism in West Virginia is the voter turnout. In the northern panhandle counties voter turnout was about 85%, while in the southern secessionist counties it was only 58% because the passage of the Ordinance was a certainty. Anti-Secessionists were more compelled to vote than Secessionists and this gives a false interpretation to the numbers.

    In the voting initiated by the Reorganized Government of Virginia in Wheeling, on the creation of West Virginia and the ratification of the new state constitution, it is important to remember that the very low turnout was the result of several factors, most importantly West Virginians opposition to the authority of Wheeling and a separation from Virginia. The other important factor, which I have never seen mentioned by historians and which goes a long way to explaining low voter turnout in the northern counties, is the mid-19th Century practice of

boycotting the polls on issues which voters opposed. When John Carlile opposed the ratification of the Willey Amendment he urged his supporters to boycott the polls rather than participate in the vote.

Notes:

(1) Jacob D. Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, Vol. 1, Part 3. "Before the secession of Virginia a very large majority of the inhabitants of the Kanawha valley were Unionists; but the attachment to the state organization had become so exaggerated in all slave-holding communities, that most of the well-to-do people yielded to the plea that they must 'go with their State.' The same state pride led this class of people to oppose the division of Virginia and the forming of the new State on the west of the mountains. The better class of society in Charleston, therefore, as in other towns, was found to be disloyal, and in sympathy with the rebellion. The young men were very generally in the Confederate Army; the young women were full of the most romantic devotion to their absent brothers and friends, and made it a point of honor to avow their sentiments. The older people were less demonstrative, and the men who had a stake in the country generally professed acquiescence in the position of West Virginia within the Union, and a desire to bring their sons from the Confederate Service."

    "Even the leaders of the Unionists found their own 'house divided against itself,' for scarce one of them but had a son in Wise's legion, and the Twenty-second Virginia Regiment was largely composed of the young men of Charleston and the vicinity."

(2) John J. Brown of Preston County, Dec. 7, 1861, Debates and Proceedings of the First Constitutional Convention of West Virginia, Vol. 1, pg. 275. "In addition to that population we may regard as unsound (upon the Union question), practically unsound, the population of the counties of Cabell, Wayne, Logan, Boone, Wyoming, Raleigh, Fayette, Nicholas, Webster, Braxton and Tucker, within the limits of the thirty-nine counties."

    Mr. James H. Brown of Kanawha County, ibid, Vol. 1, pgs. 236-37. "You have included the county of Logan where perhaps a still larger proportion of the people are opposed to the new State. Why? Simply because they favored the doctrine of secession and are resolved if it in is the power of man, to attach and ally themselves to the Southern Confederacy and throw off the galling yoke of the Union. Yet you propose to include them. Go into the county of Boone, and you have the same thing. Go into the county of Wayne-why, sir, you would have to go with an armed force to the Court House now to hold an election, and then follow your polls to the Ohio River to save them from capture."

(3) Candace Wheeler, "Torn Apart, How Cabell Countians Fought the Civil War", Heritage Books

     Jack L. Dickinson, "Wayne County in the Civil War", Salem, MA, 2003 reprint

(4) New York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1861, pg. 5