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West Virginia was officially admitted as a U.S. state on June 20, 1863. The area that comprises West Virginia was originally part of the British Virginia Colony (1607–1776) and the western part of the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia (1776–1788), and state of Virginia (1788–1863). Western Virginia became sharply divided over the issue of ...
Origins. On October 16, 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown led a group of 22 men in a raid on the Federal Arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. U.S. troops, led by Robert E. Lee, responded and quelled the raid. Subsequently, Brown was tried and executed by hanging in Charles Town on December 2, 1859.
The vote was in favor of a new state—West Virginia—which was distinct from the Pierpont government, which persisted until the end of the war. [122] Congress and Lincoln approved, and, after providing for gradual emancipation of slaves in the new state constitution, West Virginia became the 35th state on June 20, 1863.
1855 J. H. Colton Company map of Virginia that predates the West Virginia partition by seven years.. Numerous state partition proposals have been put forward since the 1776 establishment of the United States that would partition an existing U.S. state or states so that a particular region might either join another state or create a new state.
Views in and Around Martinsburg, Virginia by A. R. Waud (Harper's Weekly, December 3, 1864). The U.S. state of West Virginia was formed out of western Virginia and added to the Union as a direct result of the American Civil War (see History of West Virginia), in which it became the only modern state to have declared its independence from the Confederacy.
In January 1861, the Virginia Assembly called a special convention for the sole purpose of considering secession from the United States. Following an election on February 4, 1861, the counties and cities returned a convention of delegates amounting to about one-third for secession and two-thirds Unionist.
The divisions which would lead to West Virginia's split were evident. Regardless of the various ideologies represented or delegate political affiliation, the final vote 55 for the proposed Constitution to 40 against was along an east-west divide. Only one delegate voted yes from west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. [9]
In the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states or the Border South were four, later five, slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia. To their north they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware ...