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The Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 was called in the state capital of Richmond to determine whether Virginia would secede from the United States, govern the state during a state of emergency, and write a new Constitution for Virginia, which was subsequently voted down in a referendum under the Confederate Government.
As a Southern slave-holding state, Virginia held the state convention to deal with the secession crisis and voted against secession on April 4, 1861. Opinion shifted after the Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, and April 15, when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union to put down the rebellion.
Virginia's second Convention of 1861 was a Unionist response to the secessionist movement in Virginia. The First Wheeling Convention meeting at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), sat on May 13–15. It called for elections to another meeting if Virginia's Ordinance of Secession were to pass referendum.
The Union regiments were designated "Virginia" until West Virginia statehood and the designation changed to "West Virginia".On Nov. 20, 1861, the adjutant-general of the Restored Government, Henry J. Samuels, sent a roster of regiments and recruits to the adjutant-general of the U.S. Army. The western Virginia militia system fell apart on ...
Despite Virginia's secession from the Union, along with newly created West Virginia, it also supplied 22,000 troops to the Union Army, the third-most troops from a southern state after Tennessee and North Carolina totaling at 22,000. This list includes Virginia Civil War units to both the Confederate States and Union armies.
Collection of the records began in 1864; no special attention was paid to Confederate records until just after the capture of Richmond, Virginia, in 1865, when with the help of Confederate Gen. Samuel Cooper, Union Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck began the task of collecting and preserving such archives of the Confederacy as had survived the war.
The Virginia State Convention passed "an ordinance of secession" and ordered a May 23 referendum to decide whether or not the state should secede from the Union. The U.S. Army responded by creating the Department of Washington, which united all Union troops in the District of Columbia and Maryland under one command. [4]
English: United States map of 1861, showing affiliation of states and territories regarding secession from the Union at the start of the American Civil War. Legend: States that seceded before April 15, 1861