Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War, pg. 55
"There was good reason for the President and Congress to be feel concern about the methods that led West Virginia to statehood, apart from the constitutional niceties. Even less effort toward rational, moderating direction from Washington had gone into West Virginia than into Missouri. Here was yet another instance of the war's running out of control, creating its own momentum, with the predictable unhappy consequences. In much of the new state, the Confederacy in fact dominated throughout the war, all the more firmly supported by a local population resentful of attempts to alter its state allegiance against its will. Except in the Ohio River counties, the new state could enforce its writ only under the bayonets of the Union Army. Not only could there have been no West Virginia without military victories such as McClellan won in the late spring and early summer of 1861; it remained true that except along the Ohio River the Unionist state government and Unionist citizens had no safety but in the immediate vicinity of the army. Confederate sympathies that were intensified by the highhanded dismemberment of Virginia threw up yet another guerrilla conflict, wracking West Virginia much as the similar guerrilla conflict, similarly precipitated, devastated Missouri. Most of West Virginia went through the Civil war not as an asset to the Union but as a troublesome battleground, while the Unionist Ohio River counties struggled to cope with the tide of refugees fleeing to their sanctuary from the interior."