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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.
On May 23, the Virginia Secession Convention voted to secede, and, shortly thereafter, the Virginia legislature invited the Confederate Congress to move to Richmond. After the state's voters overwhelmingly ratified the secession decisions a month later, the Congress ordered the next session to convene in Richmond on July 20. [36]
Although providing for a vote on May 23, 1861, the Virginia state convention voted for and effectively accomplished the secession of that state from the Union on April 17, 1861, which was three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter to Confederate forces and two days after President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to reclaim federal property and to suppress the rebellion. [4]
He discouraged secession but actively sustained the ordinance passed by Virginia on April 17, 1861. Despite scheduling a popular vote to determine whether Virginia would declare secession from the United States, ultimately, the actions of the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 and the state government, especially Letcher, effectively led ...
The War for the Union: The Improvised War 1861–1862 (Scribner, 1959). Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (Oxford University Press, 2016). Robinson, Michael D. A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South (University of North Carolina ...
The Restored (or Reorganized) Government of Virginia was the Unionist government of Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865) in opposition to the government which had approved Virginia's seceding from the United States and joining the new Confederate States of America. Each state government regarded the other as illegitimate.