The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

8. House Divided

8 22 HOUSE DIVIDED Map of Virginia Showing the Distribution of Its Slave Population from the Census of 1860 (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) was printed in Philadelphia in 1861. Between the presidential election in November 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, advocates of secession were most numerous in the counties east of the Blue Ridge and south of the Rappahannock River where slavery was of the greatest importance. Virginia’s voting men remained loyal to the United States by a margin of two or three to one until April 1861 when the war began. Men who opposed secession argued that slavery in Virginia would be safer if Virginia remained in the United States than if it left and became one of the Confederate States. The convention that met in Richmond from 14 February through 1 May 1861 is known in the literature of Virginia ’s history as the Secession Convention because on 17 April the delegates voted 88 to 55 to secede from the United States,1 but for its first two months it was a Union convention. The Virginia convention differed in several important ways from the other Southern state conventions that assembled following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States early in November 1860. Most of the other conventions met and almost immediately voted to secede, but the Virginia convention met for two and a half months and until mid-April refused to secede. Moreover, the secession crisis that saw seven slave states secede between 20 December 1860 and 1 February 1861 and four more in the following April, May, and June also led to the secession from Virginia of nearly fifty of its western counties, creating the new state of West Virginia in 1863 and putting Virginia in a unique position. It had two state governments from 1861 to 1865, one that was part of the Confederate States of America and another that was part of the United States of America. The two secession crises, one interstate and the other intrastate, revealed what was most important to the white people who lived in the different regions of Virginia. The war that followed also allowed the nearly half a million black Virginians who lived in slavery to disclose by their actions what they believed and what was most important to them. Many of them freed themselves by running away from their owners even before the outcome of the Civil War freed them all. Following the statewide election of convention delegates on a snowy 4 February 1861, the editor of an Abingdon newspaper in southwestern Virginia announced that to his surprise “the immediate secession candidates have been badly whipped—in fact, have been almost annihilated,—and the gentlemen representing the ‘wait-a-bit’ ticket triumphantly elected.”2 That was a very apt characterization of a large majority of the men elected that day. Another western Virginia journalist of the time later wrote that only about one-fourth of the delegates initially favored secession, another fourth opposed secession no matter what, and fully half strongly opposed secession under the circumstances that then existed and believed that they could settle the sectional crisis and reunite the country.3 When the delegates first assembled in Richmond in mid-February, they spent two days adopting rules, electing a clerk, a sergeant at arms, and doorkeepers , and arranging for their debates to be printed in full and distributed 198 the grandees of government throughout the state. The wait-a-bit men settled in for an extended session, not merely to vote down the small minority that wanted Virginia to secede at once but also to await the outcome of a national peace conference that the General Assembly of the state had called into being and that was even then meeting in Washington, D.C. That conference tried without success to find a means of reconciling the differences between the political leaders in the states without slavery and those in the states with slavery that had already voted to secede. The delegates in Richmond tried repeatedly during the first two months to find a means for the political leaders in Virginia and the other states with slavery that remained in the United States to broker a deal that would achieve the same result. The wait-a-bit delegates needed time. As the secessionists in the convention grew increasingly frustrated and...