From the very beginning, there was division between eastern and western Virginia. Families in western Virginia did not usually own the land on which they lived which excluded those white men from voting, and they generally did not own slaves. This was very different than eastern Virginia where there was a larger degree of land and slave ownership. Western Virginia was largely tied to white wage labor in a rapidly industrializing economy and many of the area’s residents supported abolition because they felt slaves were taking jobs that white laborers should be paid to do. The start of the Civil War brought those tensions to a head. On April 17, 1861, right after the firing on Fort Sumter, a convention of Virginians voted to submit a bill of secession for a vote of the people. Many western delegates marched out of the Secession Convention and vowed to create a state government loyal to the Union.

At the root of any civil war lays loyalty. Internal conflicts, fought over everything from politics to religion, produce deep divisions amongst a nation’s populace. America’s Civil War was no exception, as it witnessed divisions along geographic, social, political, and racial lines. Not only did the war divide former countrymen, but these divisions were something that Americans talked extensively about throughout the war. As historian William Blair recently noted, in the Civil War North it is almost impossible to find a newspaper that did not discuss treason or loyalty in nearly every issue. Along with extensive discussion about loyalty and treason in local newspapers, these conversations carried over into the personal correspondences of contemporary men and women. I, like many other historians, have studied the issue of wartime loyalty, yet my research takes that subject in a different direction.

Blog Posts

Seceeding from the Secessionists: Creating West Virginia

Not Who, But How: Civil War Loyalty

Civil Discourse